JagEunChingu / 2018-10-04 14:29:52

The Amiga 600 is the smallest member of the Amiga family by its size but also, at the time, by its features. Although it has a chassis similar to that of the A1200 (form factor as the younger generation would say ), it is actually closer to a A500 in terms of processor, graphic chipset, etc. It does have a IDE internal port and a PCMCIA external port though but no numeric keypad! Now, such a small computer could have disappeared from memory, in particular after the arrival of its big brother, the A1200... but a vampire gave it a second life, and what a life!

Vampire

The Vampire is a series of FPGA-based accelerator (and more!) cards for the A600 (and others).

FPGA

FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) is a integrated circuits that can be programmed after being soldered on their boards and used by their customers. They can be used to design specialised integrated circuits, before their "hard-wired" productions or to change the behaviour of the circuits after deployment in the field.

FPGAs are composed essentially of two types of components: logic blocks and routing channels. Logic blocks are components made of a set of more basic components, e.g., a flip-flop. They can be reconfigured in the field to provide different logic gates, e.g., NAND. Routing channels allow the interconnections of logic blocks to realise complex functions.

Apollo/68080 Core

Therefore, FPGAs alone cannot do anything. They must be programmed or, in FPGA-speak, they must implement a soft-processor core. The Apollo/68080 Core is such a soft processor, i.e., a processor implemented as a piece of software to program the FPGAs. It is 100% compatible with the Motorola 680x0 family of processors, fixes many of their bugs, and is faster than a 68060 at 100Mhz because running on a Intel/Altera Cyclone III FPGA.

The core can be updated by the customers of the FPGAs. One popular core is the GOLD2.10 version. It is developed using VHDL. It cover all (or almost all) instructions of the 680x0 processors. It also brings architectural improvements to make the processor even faster, e.g., conditional rewrite, and to add new features, e.g., multimedia extension.

The core comes with the SAGA core, which provides a improved reimplementation of the Commodore AGA Chipset. This SAGA core can be used for retargetable graphics with the appropriate drivers to obtain 24-bit graphics through the HDMI port of the Vampire card.