Thanks for uploading this Dan, as a lifelong Amiga fan it is great to see people still developing hardware and software for it. The Vampire 2 chip looks amazing and really pushes the hardware way above it's original design. Unfortunately I don't have an Amiga A600 but I do have 2 x A1200 so I look forward to a A1200 Vampire being released some time in the future.
Superb review ! Once I finish tinkering with my A1200 setup, I'm after a vampire and a 600 for my self. AGA support has me sold. The 600 was the machine I had as a boy. My Dad got one for the kids to keep our sticky fingers off his 1200 :)
My first computer was a TI99/4a My second was a Commodore 64. I've always wanted a Amiga but was just to poor to get one but I always followed there progress. Now we're in the 21st century and I still love Amiga! I never got to own one but now times has changed. I have the fastest gaming processor today (8700k) and the best graphics card. (1080 ti). Loved the video, took me back to the days when I longed for one. Thanks for sharing this video!
Mac running on Amiga **mind blown**... I've actually sold my A1200 in anticipation of getting one of these instead. I always thought Gloom and Alien Breed 3D II were AGA only.
I had ARs for my C64s and Amigas. I actually blew my SID chip on the C64 as i plugged the AR in while it was running as i didn't wanna start loading the game again lol.
i see it .. dont need to go back .. i was a original amiga nerd back in the big days of the amiga .. demoscene and everything. ;) AND I DO SEE IT! its unbelieveable .. and did he mention that he has a 4gb card? wtf? what type of card is it? and how much does it cost? must be something arround 20k or even more. who needs that much space anyway? this has to be a fake or he mispoken or so. if not .. this has to be magic or something supernatural (maybe he sould his soul to the devil!?) and need this dude needs to call me too. he really must be from the future ;)
They wouldn't have been able to replicate it. The technology was not there. Yeah, they would poop thier pants to see running on an any ECS hardware. But OS was only 3.0. SD memory? Etc. There's a reason we didn't have a PlayStation 4 back in 1995.
Also for perspective, my $300 cell phone hustle is a quad-core running 1.5 gigahertz... It's not much bigger than two 3.5 inch floppies stack on top of each other.... It's more powerful than any Amiga out there and it fits in my hand. I love my Amigas but I like the new technology too.
I have to say, I was blown away by this video!!!! I can honestly say this - I have an A1200 with the ACA1233 accelerator, and the Indiv Mk2 Scandoubler, and there is no way I can run Gloom like you can with the Vampire 2! And to be able to run the Demos which I simply cannot run, due to the 030 on my accel card is just amazing! Same for the game and other apps too. Maybe I should just sell my ACA1233 and Scandoubler now, and put that money aside for when they release the Vampire for the A1200!! The specs you mentioned sound INSANE!! Very good video and well done! Would be nice to learn some more from you about the applications I saw on your WB 3.9 setup. I didnt even know WB 3.9 would install on a A600 as I know you need the 3.1 Rom in the A1200 for that!
I have that same Logitech speaker system with the big knob! What a different world we could be living in if Amigas had been this powerful back in the 90s. Those FPS games are silky smooth, very nice indeed. That Payback intro was pretty damn exciting too.
I always thought the 600 was a beautiful design, very compact and reminiscent of the C64 or even the Apple IIc. The 500 and 1200 were more like the C128, which was also beautiful but not as compact.
Vampire 2 seems a great piece of kit .. as you said switching from scart to hdmi would do my nut in ..just need a modem tv for the high res .... Gloom, AB2KG, Payback runs perfect on the Vampire wow !! couldn't believe the frame rates and the demos scene a lot of these now needs the 060 to run should be a doddle now I got the mickey taken out of me buying the A600 when I was at school than buying A500 glad I did now Cheers Dan cracking review .
Well, FPGA seems to be the next step for our classic Amigas. I am no friend of the "NextGen" machines and i am still struggeling to accept the FPGA cards...but... I guess the days of "true" 68K cards will be counted soon. Time to re-think for me ^^ Great video, thanks!!
way cool! seems perhaps a wee bit disingenuous to call it just an accelerator ... more like a replacement in realistic terms ... but yeah, impressive engineering never-the-less and I do have an old Amiga 600 collecting dust essentially ... this gizmo is tempting!
Intel have bought out Altera (the FPGA chip manufacturer) and the price of a FPGA chip alone has risen to $150. So for a new vampire board the price is now 250 Euros for 11x speed and 289 Euros for 13x speed. The boards are going to be manufactured at 100 units per batch instead of being home made and there is a waiting list so to order a board go to: www.apollo-accelerators.com/orders/index.php
What's funny at the end of the video was he pointed out that emulation would achieve the same results. Well.... This IS emulation. What people normally call emulation is really software simulation. Emulation is when you use a FPGA (or usually a set of FPGAs) to actually run the original hardware design.
Great video thanks a lot for all the goodies, could you please make a demo with 3D software from the old days Calgary, sculpt 3D and tests with pagestream? Loved the gloom and fusion emulation
super great video, and heck yes if one has this Amiga hardware to be able to run it on flat panels so easily the way to go for sure. best of luck great channel sorry to comment on old video for you new for me lol.
Thats one great package. Will there be A3000/4000 Versions of the Vampire? And how about pairing this with a mediator board and a PCI graphics board. Is the built in rtg any hardware accelerated? Good tidings, Daniel
They are going to be written in the history of the Amiga with golden letters, next to Jay Miner, also, they are going to be richHhHhh when they release the Vampire500 and the Vampire1200...
I've heard about PC/DOS emulators on Amiga and some people being able to run windows 3.1 or windows 95 but they were very slow and unusable almost. As far as I know nobody has done it with a Vampire. Would be so cool to see a fast Windows machine on Amiga haha
I did have PC Task set up and running Windows 3.1, but I accidentally deleted the hardfile just before recording this and didn't get time to set it up again haha. But yes, it does work at a usable speed!
There were even hardware solutions out there that included an 8088 compatible chip. I've got one in my A500's trapdoor, but all it's doing at the moment is providing a RAM boost. I need to source the disk for it so I can boot DOS
I was more than happy with my A1200 with a blizzard phase 5 accelerator. My wife is going to kill me after I spend more money on it when the 1200 version gets released.
I just listened to the retro hour podcast episode regarding this; didn't they say about 300 Euros? I can understand that with it being a small operation.
I'm curious if you tried out any of the old rendering software such as sculpt or imagine and what kind of speed you are getting out of those using the highest rendering settings?
This is incredible does this turn the A600 into an AGA 1200 or do they do a Vampire for the A1200 too? I want one I wouldn't mind souping up a CD32 as well tbh
not sure i agree about the a600 being unwanted, its the best amiga after the a1200, funny how we all wanted the a500 back in the day, whdload changed everything
oh and wait till you see my a600 laptop, im making, been making it over a year now. has volume on screen buttons, brightness controls etc. all done from a converted pc laptop which maintains its original size, has external port for compact flash, external vga, used original laptop speakers and has headphone port with volume control. it will also have a vampire 2. watch out for me on amibay, user name cbm600p.
McGyver is cool......... Red Green is cool....... The Amiga and c64 is a McGyver computer. I am going to get a McGyver VW bug. See Jay Leno's garage henkle engine with turbo.... personally in Iowa I want that All wheel drive Subaru transmission...
A600HD the least popular Amiga? Hardly. Try and find one decently priced on eBay. Australia is a bit rare for them I think ... >.< Damn, loved Zool back in the day.
i just looked up the vamp2 and i see the whacked the price up - beyond my range for now :( understandable though. gosh, maybe one day, esp if that 1200 one comes out.
Amiga was my first computer in 1988 I was so impressed with performance and software can do. Shame that lost behind competitors. But still have the lovers. VIVA AMIGA
Damn. Would love to see how the Vampire does in 3D rendering. I used to do 3D animations on my 600HD back in the day, this card would have made things a lot easier.
doesn't it defeat the purpose of running an older computer?. if you want that speed, ram and display run a pc, the "fun" part of using older hardware is running it as it is and seeing the stuff as it was, on crt monitors. this is like an overclocked emulator.
A retro purist would only use original hardware. it's only a few games that benefit from a card that costs a lot of money, so a retro enthusiast with more money than sence might be interested.
@Pelger, You pose a good question. It doesn't defeat the purpose of running an older (Amiga) computer. The custom chips on the amiga can still be used depending on the accelertor used. In the situtaion of the Vampire though, like getting an RTG upgrade of graphics in the past, it does largely stop you using the graphics chipset (and I think a network stream for graphics over PCI-e like firewire or thunderbolt or ethernet would get around that, but I digress). The video timing still works on the amiga when upgraded (and that is one of the original reasons to have an amiga). The sound chips of the amiga still work. So for demoscene and homebrew, and accelerator like the vampire would be cool. You also get a FPU. You also still get to use your floppy drive for reading/writing floppies. Also you get to use your peripherals (e.g. an external floppy drive or a null modem cabled connect to anothe amiga which may or may not also have the vampire). It depends on your workflow. Youcan also connect a parallel port vampire amiga to a PC for transfer or serial for MIDI music. That means you have an amiga as a "go between" for less painful hooking up to a PC. Even though the vampire puts aside the original chipset of the graphics, you can till use the vampire for development whereby the same coding styles apply, such as the coding challenge of chunky-to-planar conversions. For demo coding you still have a lot of those redundant registers and you can still code those cache-friendly routines.
I wonder if this will lead to a small industry of software and games designed to run only on amiga upgraded with these cards. Amigas might become usable modern machines for browsing etc.!
I'm sure it is possible. Anywhere there is money to be made, there will be time and effort applied. I don't see any large software houses dedicating resources to it but I'm quite certain the "home brew" scene could end up developing some thing.
I've only followed the Vampire at a cursory level (no A600 here), and damn. I'm seriously impressed with the performance. Certainly so when seeing Alien Breed 3D II ('cause even under *UAE, I never got it feeling solid). Roll on the A500/A1200 versions. I'd certainly be tempted to rip the accelerator out of my A1200 for one of those. ^_^
Awesome video, as a sidenote and updating the news a little bit, the A600 is now not the fastest... The A500 is now the fastest due to the new IDE implementation. The Vampire 500 is achieving IDE (CF card) reads of up to 11.5MB/sec which is 4 times faster than a standard a600/a1200. As we progress we are trying to improve so hopefully the specs will improve accordingly.. (i really don't understand the thumbs down you received, was it something you said ??... Kipper2k
I remember when the 68060 accellerator card was released for the Amiga 4000, it was the worlds fastest Macintosh for a while :) Would have been nice to see some rendering in Real 3D or Imagine.
I think FPGA chips are a great deal for the future of retro imitation/recreation. Imagine a all in one System for the living room with original and up to date features at the same time...
V. Sigma, the 1200 version is being worked on, and it's way more powerful. Also... doesn't the 1200 _come_ with an 020 on board? Oh wait, sorry, it's an EC020, which is even worse. So, I don't quite understand what you're getting at with that... What does it matter? Or do you mean an accelerator using an 020 or 030?
Nice try but overclocked 68060 is still the king. ;) But nevertheless, it's awesome upgrade with HD screenmodes, HDMI-output and microSD card slot. EDIT: not to forget possibility to run AGA software on A600! It's insane!
Great video, really well presented. The Vampire 2 is quite amazing. This is how the Amiga should ALWAYS have been. If this chip had come as standard back in 1992, the Amiga would surely have reigned supreme, and everyone on the internet would probably be using Amigas today!
I PM'd and 're-sold' a palette of 20 A500's, one was dead, one had no voltage to RF. The other 18 sold on for £200 a pop. When you go to work one working as a field service Engineer and find they are selling everything one Monday morning, you think on your feet. My bro was working for a company in East Anglia that feel on it's sword. I took RF'less 500 + Philips CM8833, got an A590 +2Mb +20MB Connor drive + 1/4 tape drive on SCSI box [ KNOWS TAR very well ;0) ] and started writing 100% portable UNIX code. I ended up a coder because of this machine. The g/f used to call it 'the wife'. Great work Konrad :0D
WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT!!!!! does it run most demos? please say yes! edit: ok .. wow .. nice .. i just sold my 1200 4 years ago .. but it seems i might get me a A500 or even a ugly but reasonable smaller A600! omg .. best new tech info 2015/2017 thnx sir!
Best computer of its time, I still have my Amiga 040 and an A500. I loved the programming environment, programming for the Amiga was always more fun than for a PC. I must add though that seeing the Vampire2 run a MAC emulator faster than a MAC is zero surprise, The 68k MACs left a lot of the graphics manipulation to be handled in SW which seriously took the performance edge off. Seeing a 68k processor that has access to the Amiga's graphics acceleration HW and so lightening the load on the CPU, of course it's going to do well. When you emulate an Amiga on a PC all of the machine code has to be interpreted and converted to Pentium machine code which is an enormous performance hit. Add to that the image bit mapping between PC and Amiga are very different that adds additional challenges.
Thanks for uploading this Dan, as a lifelong Amiga fan it is great to see people still developing hardware and software for it. The Vampire 2 chip looks amazing and really pushes the hardware way above it's original design. Unfortunately I don't have an Amiga A600 but I do have 2 x A1200 so I look forward to a A1200 Vampire being released some time in the future.
Superb review !
Once I finish tinkering with my A1200 setup, I'm after a vampire and a 600 for my self. AGA support has me sold.
The 600 was the machine I had as a boy. My Dad got one for the kids to keep our sticky fingers off his 1200 :)
Anyone who can program an FPGA gets's my respect.
My first computer was a TI99/4a My second was a Commodore 64. I've always wanted a Amiga but was just to poor to get one but I always followed there progress. Now we're in the 21st century and I still love Amiga! I never got to own one but now times has changed. I have the fastest gaming processor today (8700k) and the best graphics card. (1080 ti). Loved the video, took me back to the days when I longed for one. Thanks for sharing this video!
Mac running on Amiga **mind blown**... I've actually sold my A1200 in anticipation of getting one of these instead. I always thought Gloom and Alien Breed 3D II were AGA only.
they are
Exactly what I have been waiting for, what a video, perfect! Cheers mate!
Awesome hardware. Amiga was a big part of my past as I was the Action Replay developer
You must have God-like powers. You developed the Action Replay?
Olaf Boehm I have an action replay card for the commodore 64. Very cool.
I had ARs for my C64s and Amigas. I actually blew my SID chip on the C64 as i plugged the AR in while it was running as i didn't wanna start loading the game again lol.
Was the Action replay developed on the Amiga?
@@chocobillysranch9205 AR Amiga was developed on Amiga
This is awesome. Wouldn't it be cool if you could take this back in time about 25 years and show them....?
Amiga would win and the world would be a better place! ;-)
New time travel life goal.
i see it .. dont need to go back .. i was a original amiga nerd back in the big days of the amiga .. demoscene and everything. ;) AND I DO SEE IT! its unbelieveable .. and did he mention that he has a 4gb card? wtf? what type of card is it? and how much does it cost? must be something arround 20k or even more. who needs that much space anyway? this has to be a fake or he mispoken or so. if not .. this has to be magic or something supernatural (maybe he sould his soul to the devil!?) and need this dude needs to call me too. he really must be from the future ;)
They wouldn't have been able to replicate it. The technology was not there. Yeah, they would poop thier pants to see running on an any ECS hardware. But OS was only 3.0. SD memory? Etc.
There's a reason we didn't have a PlayStation 4 back in 1995.
Also for perspective, my $300 cell phone hustle is a quad-core running 1.5 gigahertz... It's not much bigger than two 3.5 inch floppies stack on top of each other.... It's more powerful than any Amiga out there and it fits in my hand. I love my Amigas but I like the new technology too.
I have to say, I was blown away by this video!!!! I can honestly say this - I have an A1200 with the ACA1233 accelerator, and the Indiv Mk2 Scandoubler, and there is no way I can run Gloom like you can with the Vampire 2! And to be able to run the Demos which I simply cannot run, due to the 030 on my accel card is just amazing! Same for the game and other apps too. Maybe I should just sell my ACA1233 and Scandoubler now, and put that money aside for when they release the Vampire for the A1200!! The specs you mentioned sound INSANE!! Very good video and well done!
Would be nice to learn some more from you about the applications I saw on your WB 3.9 setup. I didnt even know WB 3.9 would install on a A600 as I know you need the 3.1 Rom in the A1200 for that!
I think my Amiga A600 is great. Had it since April 1994 and still have it set up and use it.
You could even fit an entire Amiga on an FPGA. I haven't tried it (yet) but I tried to fit an sparcstation 5 on an FPGA couple of years ago.
I have that same Logitech speaker system with the big knob! What a different world we could be living in if Amigas had been this powerful back in the 90s. Those FPS games are silky smooth, very nice indeed. That Payback intro was pretty damn exciting too.
I'm currently not a vampire fan but this video contents is very interesting and well presented. Thanks Dan!
Cheers for the video. Takes me back a few years seeing some of the games.
YOU... WANT... ONE!!!!!!
Watched the whole video despite never owning an A600. Really impressive stuff! I'd be interested in the A1200 version.
Will you do a Vampire V4 board/Vampire V4 standalone video?
I always thought the 600 was a beautiful design, very compact and reminiscent of the C64 or even the Apple IIc. The 500 and 1200 were more like the C128, which was also beautiful but not as compact.
Thanks for pointing out that an FPGA is NOT emulation! Excellent video.
Wonderful job, Dan! Sorry that it took me over a year to re-take an interest in the Amiga.
The Amiga 600 is NOT a blacksheep, I love mine
Vampire 2 seems a great piece of kit .. as you said switching from scart to hdmi would do my nut in ..just need a modem tv for the high res .... Gloom, AB2KG, Payback runs perfect on the Vampire wow !! couldn't believe the frame rates and the demos scene a lot of these now needs the 060 to run should be a doddle now
I got the mickey taken out of me buying the A600 when I was at school than buying A500 glad I did now
Cheers Dan cracking review .
Well, FPGA seems to be the next step for our classic Amigas. I am no friend of the "NextGen" machines and i am still struggeling to accept the FPGA cards...but... I guess the days of "true" 68K cards will be counted soon. Time to re-think for me ^^ Great video, thanks!!
I loved my A600. Best Christmas ever. So ner!
Great video mate, thanks
Suuuuperb! Finally after two decades something useful on amiga.
I loved my A600HD, with 40mb HDD, and ram upgrade!
Love your videos Dan.
way cool! seems perhaps a wee bit disingenuous to call it just an accelerator ... more like a replacement in realistic terms ... but yeah, impressive engineering never-the-less
and I do have an old Amiga 600 collecting dust essentially ... this gizmo is tempting!
Absolutely amazing Dan, this would be very cool if the A500 version worked in my A1000 :-)
This is friggin Amazing !! I can't find an Amiga 600 on ebay now. lol Will it work on other Amiga Models ??
Intel have bought out Altera (the FPGA chip manufacturer) and the price of a FPGA chip alone has risen to $150.
So for a new vampire board the price is now 250 Euros for 11x speed and 289 Euros for 13x speed. The boards are going to be manufactured at 100 units per batch instead of being home made and there is a waiting list so to order a board go to:
www.apollo-accelerators.com/orders/index.php
Wow!!! I want this! Should get a tiny Linux distro to run on it as well.
I can here the excitement in your voice. you probably had a semi too. jealous!
What's funny at the end of the video was he pointed out that emulation would achieve the same results.
Well.... This IS emulation. What people normally call emulation is really software simulation. Emulation is when you use a FPGA (or usually a set of FPGAs) to actually run the original hardware design.
Got to get this for my A500!
If it wasn't for the A600 I wouldn't have HAD an Amiga, so far from a waste of time. It was a HUGE upgrade coming from the Atari ST.
Can't wait for the A1200 one! Great video, thanks for sharing.
love all your Commodore videos. Brings back alot of good memories. Did you present the Gem Am show this morning?
Great video, I hope they will make some kind upgrade for the A500.
Great video thanks a lot for all the goodies, could you please make a demo with 3D software from the old days Calgary, sculpt 3D and tests with pagestream? Loved the gloom and fusion emulation
Hey, I loved and love my Amiga 600! :-P
The vampire is wow!
super great video, and heck yes if one has this Amiga hardware to be able to run it on flat panels so easily the way to go for sure.
best of luck great channel sorry to comment on old video for you new for me lol.
Amiga was amazing when it came to multitasking. But sadly it was soon surpassed in the gfx area. :(
Defo watching this after the footy been waiting for this video cheers Dan ;)
Haa no way I didn't realise you were the retro hour guy. Time for me to get an aul Vampire!
Thats one great package. Will there be A3000/4000 Versions of the Vampire? And how about pairing this with a mediator board and a PCI graphics board. Is the built in rtg any hardware accelerated? Good tidings, Daniel
I would love to Breathe new life into my two Amiga a 1200
They are going to be written in the history of the Amiga with golden letters, next to Jay Miner, also, they are going to be richHhHhh when they release the Vampire500 and the Vampire1200...
I've heard about PC/DOS emulators on Amiga and some people being able to run windows 3.1 or windows 95 but they were very slow and unusable almost. As far as I know nobody has done it with a Vampire. Would be so cool to see a fast Windows machine on Amiga haha
I did have PC Task set up and running Windows 3.1, but I accidentally deleted the hardfile just before recording this and didn't get time to set it up again haha. But yes, it does work at a usable speed!
There were even hardware solutions out there that included an 8088 compatible chip. I've got one in my A500's trapdoor, but all it's doing at the moment is providing a RAM boost. I need to source the disk for it so I can boot DOS
Would be a great future video for you if you can get it back again!
I thought the black sheep of the Amiga family was the CD32.
I was more than happy with my A1200 with a blizzard phase 5 accelerator. My wife is going to kill me after I spend more money on it when the 1200 version gets released.
Just tell her your car broke down, it's amazing how many times that can work in a year to free up some money
The 600 is not the worst they are great machines :)
So, it's basically equivalent of a Raspbery Pi 3 attached to the Amiga! :) but hey, it's running on an Amiga - i'll get the 1200 version :)
a600 was popular in Poland back in the days
I have a A600 and see this video 2 years too late. I guess it's time to revive it.
I always thought the A600 was an adorable little computer, mine was shiny white but it was rusted inside :(
Now, when 060 has been left in dust after Vampire core updates, how Netsurf works with Vampire?
Can't wait to pick this up
FPGAs are not cheap, probably it will be a bit costly.
I just listened to the retro hour podcast episode regarding this; didn't they say about 300 Euros? I can understand that with it being a small operation.
I'm not even an Amiga person but I watched this whole damn video!?
I need one of these now
PRINCE OF PER the block /walls look the same as tom thumb on the c16 but blue,wish i never sold all my amiga gear i had it for 30years
Hi Dan, can you tell me if you can run AGA games with the V2? Thanks.
I would also like to play Monkey Island 3, no matter on what hardware.... if you know what I mean....
Was there aga versions of alien breed 3d and gloom ?
Use a IDE to SSD converter! Should work. What is the max size drive that the Amiga 600 can see?
Still got the CD Rom drive for the Amiga 500
I'm curious if you tried out any of the old rendering software such as sculpt or imagine and what kind of speed you are getting out of those using the highest rendering settings?
The amiga 600 is not the black sheep. Many people like myself love it for its size
damn never saw alien bred 3d 2 running so well, and I saw many attempts! cool gadget
An HDMI 90 degree adapter would also come in handy.
Amiga pr0n right there, can't wait for the A1200 version!!!
This is incredible does this turn the A600 into an AGA 1200 or do they do a Vampire for the A1200 too? I want one I wouldn't mind souping up a CD32 as well tbh
I loved my A600, I like compact computers.
not sure i agree about the a600 being unwanted, its the best amiga after the a1200, funny how we all wanted the a500 back in the day, whdload changed everything
oh and wait till you see my a600 laptop, im making, been making it over a year now. has volume on screen buttons, brightness controls etc. all done from a converted pc laptop which maintains its original size, has external port for compact flash, external vga, used original laptop speakers and has headphone port with volume control. it will also have a vampire 2. watch out for me on amibay, user name cbm600p.
McGyver is cool......... Red Green is cool....... The Amiga and c64 is a McGyver computer. I am going to get a McGyver VW bug. See Jay Leno's garage henkle engine with turbo.... personally in Iowa I want that All wheel drive Subaru transmission...
A600HD the least popular Amiga? Hardly. Try and find one decently priced on eBay. Australia is a bit rare for them I think ... >.<
Damn, loved Zool back in the day.
Will there be a new COMMODORE AMIGA A600 motherboard with the Vampire II built in?
I was so proud of my aca accelerated 1200... i never thought I'd see it wiped by a 600!! omgosh.
i just looked up the vamp2 and i see the whacked the price up - beyond my range for now :( understandable though. gosh, maybe one day, esp if that 1200 one comes out.
Now the amiga port of outrun will finally be playable.
The EAB thread of the cannonball engine brought me here! =P
Amiga was my first computer in 1988 I was so impressed with performance and software can do. Shame that lost behind competitors. But still have the lovers. VIVA AMIGA
Damn. Would love to see how the Vampire does in 3D rendering. I used to do 3D animations on my 600HD back in the day, this card would have made things a lot easier.
doesn't it defeat the purpose of running an older computer?. if you want that speed, ram and display run a pc, the "fun" part of using older hardware is running it as it is and seeing the stuff as it was, on crt monitors. this is like an overclocked emulator.
The "fun" part is that it costs more than a ps4 and the waiting list is massive.
It most certainly does for me.
A retro purist would only use original hardware. it's only a few games that benefit from a card that costs a lot of money, so a retro enthusiast with more money than sence might be interested.
@Pelger, You pose a good question. It doesn't defeat the purpose of running an older (Amiga) computer. The custom chips on the amiga can still be used depending on the accelertor used. In the situtaion of the Vampire though, like getting an RTG upgrade of graphics in the past, it does largely stop you using the graphics chipset (and I think a network stream for graphics over PCI-e like firewire or thunderbolt or ethernet would get around that, but I digress). The video timing still works on the amiga when upgraded (and that is one of the original reasons to have an amiga). The sound chips of the amiga still work. So for demoscene and homebrew, and accelerator like the vampire would be cool. You also get a FPU. You also still get to use your floppy drive for reading/writing floppies. Also you get to use your peripherals (e.g. an external floppy drive or a null modem cabled connect to anothe amiga which may or may not also have the vampire). It depends on your workflow. Youcan also connect a parallel port vampire amiga to a PC for transfer or serial for MIDI music. That means you have an amiga as a "go between" for less painful hooking up to a PC.
Even though the vampire puts aside the original chipset of the graphics, you can till use the vampire for development whereby the same coding styles apply, such as the coding challenge of chunky-to-planar conversions. For demo coding you still have a lot of those redundant registers and you can still code those cache-friendly routines.
I wonder if this will lead to a small industry of software and games designed to run only on amiga upgraded with these cards. Amigas might become usable modern machines for browsing etc.!
I'm sure it is possible. Anywhere there is money to be made, there will be time and effort applied. I don't see any large software houses dedicating resources to it but I'm quite certain the "home brew" scene could end up developing some thing.
the best bet would be some kind of emulator to tap into more games like the Mac one. Depending on how fast they end up going in the future.
you seen the ARMIGA project?
I guess not =)
www.armigaproject.com/
how do you tag someone in YT? @a survivor
I've only followed the Vampire at a cursory level (no A600 here), and damn. I'm seriously impressed with the performance. Certainly so when seeing Alien Breed 3D II ('cause even under *UAE, I never got it feeling solid).
Roll on the A500/A1200 versions. I'd certainly be tempted to rip the accelerator out of my A1200 for one of those. ^_^
Awesome video, as a sidenote and updating the news a little bit, the A600 is now not the fastest... The A500 is now the fastest due to the new IDE implementation. The Vampire 500 is achieving IDE (CF card) reads of up to 11.5MB/sec which is 4 times faster than a standard a600/a1200. As we progress we are trying to improve so hopefully the specs will improve accordingly.. (i really don't understand the thumbs down you received, was it something you said ??... Kipper2k
Wow, this is great! I'd be very interested in the A1200 version. Exciting!
I remember when the 68060 accellerator card was released for the Amiga 4000, it was the worlds fastest Macintosh for a while :)
Would have been nice to see some rendering in Real 3D or Imagine.
OMFG at the DHRYSTONES speed test result in SYSINFO. I almost fell out of my chair when i seen it! Wow
I love the pure joy in your voice, Dan.
I think FPGA chips are a great deal for the future of retro imitation/recreation. Imagine a all in one System for the living room with original and up to date features at the same time...
Gobsmacked. I've always been happy with my 1200 tower with 060 board, but... blimey!
This trounces the 060. wait until the next core comes out ;)
I would not mind one of those in my A1200
I'm not a fan of the 060. Too many compatibility issues.
I definitely would rather have a 1200 version of this than paying out for something using an old 020 or 030 processor.
V. Sigma, the 1200 version is being worked on, and it's way more powerful. Also... doesn't the 1200 _come_ with an 020 on board? Oh wait, sorry, it's an EC020, which is even worse. So, I don't quite understand what you're getting at with that... What does it matter? Or do you mean an accelerator using an 020 or 030?
From monts:
"Now Available subject to availability"
Nice try but overclocked 68060 is still the king. ;) But nevertheless, it's awesome upgrade with HD screenmodes, HDMI-output and microSD card slot. EDIT: not to forget possibility to run AGA software on A600! It's insane!
I remember you talking on your podcast about a version could be coming out for the A500, Do you know if this is still happening?
Got the answer at 24:00 :)
Great video, really well presented. The Vampire 2 is quite amazing. This is how the Amiga should ALWAYS have been. If this chip had come as standard back in 1992, the Amiga would surely have reigned supreme, and everyone on the internet would probably be using Amigas today!
I PM'd and 're-sold' a palette of 20 A500's, one was dead, one had no voltage to RF. The other 18 sold on for £200 a pop. When you go to work one working as a field service Engineer and find they are selling everything one Monday morning, you think on your feet. My bro was working for a company in East Anglia that feel on it's sword.
I took RF'less 500 + Philips CM8833, got an A590 +2Mb +20MB Connor drive + 1/4 tape drive on SCSI box [ KNOWS TAR very well ;0) ] and started writing 100% portable UNIX code. I ended up a coder because of this machine. The g/f used to call it 'the wife'.
Great work Konrad :0D
WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT!!!!! does it run most demos? please say yes!
edit: ok .. wow .. nice .. i just sold my 1200 4 years ago .. but it seems i might get me a A500 or even a ugly but reasonable smaller A600! omg .. best new tech info 2015/2017 thnx sir!
Wish I haddent seen this, the vampire 1200 might make me dust off my old power tower Amiga, will keep an eye on this project. Good vid as always.
Best computer of its time, I still have my Amiga 040 and an A500. I loved the programming environment, programming for the Amiga was always more fun than for a PC.
I must add though that seeing the Vampire2 run a MAC emulator faster than a MAC is zero surprise, The 68k MACs left a lot of the graphics manipulation to be handled in SW which seriously took the performance edge off. Seeing a 68k processor that has access to the Amiga's graphics acceleration HW and so lightening the load on the CPU, of course it's going to do well.
When you emulate an Amiga on a PC all of the machine code has to be interpreted and converted to Pentium machine code which is an enormous performance hit. Add to that the image bit mapping between PC and Amiga are very different that adds additional challenges.