[johnklos]

The Vampire people really turned me, and likely many others, off when they tried to argue that FPU emulation isn't important and that hardly anything uses the FPU, rather than simply saying they weren't going to work on it then.

When you try to use bullshit to make excuses, people notice.

After that, they said the MMU isn't important, and that being fully m680x0 compatible isn't really as important as other things.

[zozbot234]

Didn't the original Amiga MC68000 use soft-FP anyway? Not sure why this would matter.

[vidarh]

The issue, I guess, is that the Vampire sits in this weird space where they've picked a pretty arbitrary cutoff in which classic hardware they care about - most users who stuck with the Amiga for a long time would have had an accelerator with an M68k with an FPU, and MMU.

At the same time the Vampire extends the 68k instruction set and chipset in various ways. So it reflects this very opinionated "alternate history" version of what the Amiga could've been that involves ignoring a lot of what was.

I find the Vampire fascinating, and would quite like one (but maybe not enough to fork out what they're asking for it) but I realise I probably wouldn't use it much - it's mostly interesting because it's a fun oddity.

I'd have loved a Vampire-like machine that actually tried to take things forward across the board. I'm happy to see them experiment with 68k extensions, but I'd have loved to see them match the "full" classic experience with FPU and MMU first.

But it's their project - they're of course free to do what they want.

[danby]

I think this the best analysis of the Vampire. To my mind it is more of an Amiga-compatible computer (with some odd graphics and CPU incompatibilities) than it is an actual extension of any Amiga platform ideas or plans.

Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.

I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing I think.

Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit your whole platform would just be better off being a PC