04.Dec.2022
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Advent Calendar: Door 4 - The Apollo team
For the fourth door and thus for the second Advent, the Apollo team contributes an anecdote. Their approach of FPGA-based turbo cards for Amigas represented a new alternative in terms of upgrading aged hardware besides the accelerator boards carrying a real 680x0 processor. The history started with a presentation of a NatAmi developer board in 2008. Announced in 2011, there was a first stable running version of the Vampire 600 for the Amiga of the same name in 2013. In 2016, Vampire variants for the Amiga 500 and 2000 followed, all of which used the V2 Apollo core.
In 2017, development work was already underway on the Apollo V4 FPGA accelerator board, including a standalone variant. The following versions are currently available:
Yesterday, Gunnar von Boehm announced an update of the Apollo core that provides 16 DMA Amiga audio channels instead of the four available on the standard Amiga. Each of the 16 channels provides stereo sound. In addition, one can position the sound from each individual channel to the left or right.
The anecdote for the fourth door written by the Apollo team:
"Back in the days of Silver core for V2, we used to put an Amiga video game character in the boot image. At that time, the war between the team TuKo "Simon the sorcerer is better than Monkey Island" and the team guibrush "Monkey Island is of course superior to Simon the sorcerer" already existed.
A discussion in the team took place to decide which character between Simon and guibrush should be used for, I believe the Silver 5 release (I'm not sure anymore if it was the 5 of the 6). In the end, as it was TuKo who was doing the releases, he decided to put Simon, against any democratic decision.
He was well punished, since this core was replaced in a few days by the next one because of a bug that made it unusable on several machines, which made it the core with the shortest lifespan in the history of the Vampire." (dr)
[News message: 04. Dec. 2022, 08:13] [Comments: 0]
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