10 Apr 2019

Vampire1200 Apollo Team Activity Report (March 2019)

March Activity Report
  
Nearly 4 months -- it’s what it took to hang over December’s parties and go back to writing this activity report. Water hadn’t time to freeze under the bridge and quite a lot of things happened during that time. Not all of them are gigantic and impressive steps on the user side but their complexity got as high as their requirement. Let’s try to get them now under the scope of a rising sun and welcomed spring.
  
Vampire V1200


Majsta, with the help of Claude (aka the NSFW shaolin monk), are working on bringing up the Vampire V1200. Things are coming along and Igor has already shown very positive results some weeks ago. Card is booting nicely at the moment at x6 speed (hint: base clock of A1200 is twice the A500 ;-P).
  
Amiga 1200 is a special beast and all its revision have very different behavior which we need to go through each of them methodically. We should not assume because we have it working on some very common and widespread revision like the 1D4 that it will be the same with others. Some other A1200 accelerators even needed fixes on motherboard to make them work correctly. Our goal is to avoid modifying A1200 boards **at all**.
  
We also want to think smart about mechanical part of the Vampire 1200 and we hope to bring a way for users to swap out devices from the Vampire without having to open their case. By the way, we will also make sure that Vampire 1200 is compatible with the original Commodore case and A1200.net remastered version.
  
If not already done, it might be time to get your A1200 ready by having it recapped by a professional (we have several in the community).
  
GOLD2.12
  
Team is gathering some various fixes and little improvements which happened during the V4 Standalone development. These changes can easily be back-ported to Vampire V2 GOLD2 core branch :
  - Mouse hotspot and editable hardware sprite support (requires driver update)
  - Auto-turtle mode when game is running in ChipRAM (improves game compatibility)
  - 15-bit PC / 16-bit PC / 32-bit ARG and 32-bit BGR modes support (driver improvement)
  - morelibspace command not required anymore for AfAOS users (saves a reboot)
  - Core revision in a register

Read the related article on The Apollo Team Forum

No comments:

Post a Comment