I appreciate the massive work put into the Vampire project and know this path will be the way to preserve Amiga, but being FPGA or not, but besides powering and controlling joystick/mouse inputs this board does not need an Amiga at all. I have been trying to improve my A500s by adding ram, some acceleration and replacing OCS with ECS chips, but in doing so I am trying to still use the Amiga chipset. Also, I still use CRT monitors, for upscaled to progressive scan is not what Amiga graphic designers were designing graphics to run on ..it was interlaced CRT monitirs. Ithink the hardest job of Vampire designers is integrating this board in the Amiga. Instead, perhaps they should simply release it with its own case, for it can run quite well independently. Thank you for the video guys.
Excellent comment, thank you. I totally agree about the CRT. I feel like connecting my Amiga to a modern flat panel is 1/2 way to emulation anyway. Whenever I exhibit at a computer show I always connect my Amiga to a classic CRT like a 1084s. That brings back the experience for me and looks the best. But I do think the Vampire is a great project and has its place as well - weather you want to put it in a real Amiga or just get the stand alone when it comes out.
@@TheGuruMeditation I purchased a new old stock Amiga 2000 a few years ago and used it with my 60 inch Panasonic plasma TV via RGB SCART, it looked glorious. I understand there was no RGB analog input on US Televisions so your experience today on modern plasma/LCD/DLP TVs is not going to be as nice. RGBa via SCART from any Amiga is not far off the quality of PC VGA input as far as low resolution screenmodes are concerned (non interlaced modes).
@@thorham1346 You need to stop being so literal. A modern TV upscales the original image, which was might only be around 320x256 or 640x256 pixels, to match the monitor's native resolution. Otherwise you would have a tiny little picture in the middle of the screen. So by definition, the TV is taking the original signal and modifying it by inserting data that wasn't originally there. The TV is (automatically) emulating a low resolution display.
you need to inform all the insane hardcore amiga fans, like me, when you have something which i can buy for my A1200.... and please don´t listen to the "....naah i use UAE an a PC...blah..blah guys" they don´t have a working machine anyways anymore and just weep that they can´t use this great thing of art. :) #AmigaRulez!!
It's polarising due to comments like this; 27:00 That's just... yeah, no, that machine isn't an Amiga 500 "running Doom AGA" anymore than running WinUAE on an ITX board inside a Amiga 500 shell, is.
Nice! I wonder what the standalone will come with? I have a hunch it will just be the board, but you never know. There are some great options for it now with the A1200, A500, and Checkmate 1500 cases
in this video ua-cam.com/video/6HZXM6cLVUg/v-deo.html it's said the best and fastest Amiga runs on a Raspberry Pi3 (U$45 with plastic case) using the emulator Amibien, tailored specifically for the Pie platform
always loved the way the windows worked on the Amiga, you could control weather a window came forward or stayed at the back. never took to the PC system and i have used pc's since the 33mhz pc 3.1 till windows 10 and i miss the Amiga.
Re the cunky pixels vs planr comments. I have been corrected by a team member, The chunky mode was faster for 256 or more colors due to the way memory was used in displaying the gfx. Pixel aspect ratio and speed are really unrelated in this context. AGA was a low cost stop gap measure to bring 256 colors to Amiga.
True, while planar is slower then chunky, it not so easy to do some effects like transparency, and multi layered scrolling (parallax). At least you don't get that for free, if Amiga had gone with chunky.
No worries. It is very difficult to explain technical concepts spontaneously on the fly live in front of a group of people. I say things live on stream that I kick myself for. I really know better but it doesn't come out right
Well, it's about compromise and staying compatible. WHEN the Vampire goes ASIC, and it's operating at 2.7 GHz, and 1080p output, would chunky vs. staying with bitplanes (16 or 24 bits) STILL be a problem???
Regarding the expansion port... back in the day I had an Amiga 500 with first a Mega Midget Racer 030 board with RAM, and later a PP&S 040 board, both with an attached 8MB SupraRAM With a Bodega Bay plugged into that. In the Bodega Bay I had an A2091 SCSI, Retina GFX board, A2065 Ethernet, and an Emplant. All worked fine. So yes. 68000 socket devices should still respond to expansion bus devices, if properly implemented.
Many of those ECS games that look like AGA actually did use more than 32 (or even 64 colors in EHB mode). They applied a technique where the palette changed as the cathode swept over the screen. One such example is Eye of the Beholder where the upper half (with the 3D viewport) used one palette and the lower half (with the compass and controls) used another. I also think they used different palettes for different levels. The HAM mode is an extreme form of using this alternating palette technique which also involves a form of compression to save memory.
While it might be limited use anyways, you can definitely use the side expansion port on an A500 when you have a 68k accelerator board plugged in. I've used that exact configuration with a dataflyer ide controller on the side with a VXL30 accelerator. The side port is mainly just the CPU pins +/- so as long as you don't have two devices responding to the same range of memory addresses you should be fine.
It's interesting to see fellow North Americans discussing the Amiga. It came from here but we barely seemed to realize what it was back in the day. I wish I had grown up with an Amiga instead of that damned Turbo XT with no sound card and EGA graphics. Much more fun would have been had!
For me chunky pixels is when a single byte, word or long word contains the pixel/palette information. Bitmap graphics is more scalable and more dense with memory aspects in mind (if you not using a byte (8 bit palette, word (16 bit palette) or long (24 bit palette with 8 bit translucency value). So for a 1-7 bit palette bitmapped images is better memory wise.
congratulation for this Amazing progress for a A500, my CD32 is jealous now !! when did we could have accelerator for her :/. . great vidéo, lot of passion inside ! keep the good work and Amiga Forever guys :)
You are welcome! Just note that as you heard in the video there are no Amiga interlaced modes available through the Vampire HDMI output yet, but that is something they will address.
My pleasure. I mentioned it but there is a lot of stuff in this video so it is easy to miss. It is just a point that stood out to me because I need my hi-res modes with all the work I do in DPaint and ADPro
That is a remarkable piece of hardware that spawned out of the the remains of Natami project. I am eager to see the A1200 implementation of the Vampire. Nice video!
Don't get me wrong, I love this direction, but I'm more interested in the stand alone stuff. I mean, this device "looks" like an expansion of an Amiga 500 but it's really more like a new computer in with an Amiga 500 (tiny by comparison) on it's backside for compatibility. Once all the custom chips are in the FPGA, what do you even need the Amiga for? I look forward to the day when I can keep all my Amigas stock and working, and have a stand alone solution sitting on my desk for actual day to day use.
My opinion is what we need is an affordable new Amiga with an Open Source OS (like AROS). I own already an A1200 equipped with a Blizzard 030 and an SD to IDE adapter and I'm happy with that. I can run most of the old stuff. Ofcourse some people would need more than that but most would be fine.
Yep, that would be cool. I also have a 1200 with 030. It is pretty much the sweet spot, except that I would love to be able to run more of the demoscene stuff
Great to see your smiling faces again with an interesting new product :) I would love to see an SBC Amiga from Apollo on Kickstarter, I'd definitely get one. 'Old man fingers,' haha. I hear vodka helps with that :)
I think the stand alone Vampire will basically be a SBC Amiga. Ha ha! Yeah I suppose Vodka would help, or at least make me not care that my fingers don't work well anymore!
The Vampire 4 will have a model that is a standalone. They have made them already but are still fine tuning the code blueprint that recreates the AGA circuitry, and all the other features that the Apollo Core makes possible. This is THE AMIGA that we have been waiting for since 1995!!!! It is the LAST *personal* computer.
This comment is coming from "enemy territory" but a hypothetical Vampire board for the Atari Jaguar would finally allow that console to play Atari Games' arcade CoJag based titles like "Area 51" and "Maximum Force" [they used a 68020, more RAM, and a hard drive]. The original Jag case would probably be impossible to fit such a board inside but it would be possible inside a JaguarDuo - which was unreleased - case which there's a project in the initial planning stages to make such cases [and motherboards] available. Hell, a Vampire board could probably run Jaguar2 specs easily. If one were so inclined. :) For the record, the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-Bit computers can read multiple fire buttons from their DB9 ports. And that's without "cheating" by using the 2 Paddle Lines which is what Atari Inc's own engineers did for their custom 3-fire button Trak-Ball Controllers they used on an in-house version of Missile Command. Sega later used resisters to squeeze in their endless buffet of buttons for the Genesis/MegaDrive controllers off their DB9s [not to mention their 4-player Team Tap Adapters].
Don't currently own an Amiga but if they ever follow their work to it's logical conclusion and basically release a 68080 clone Amiga then I would love to buy one!
Flink is indeed Henk Nieborg's handiwork. Also check out Lomax on PS1, that's a great game, and gorgeous graphics. But Flink is easily one of the best CD32 titles.
Oh cool. Glad I was on target with that comment. Thanks for clarifying Vicky! Great point about Lomax. I have it ready to play on my RaspberryPi but haven't gotten to it yet. That is high up on my to-do list! Henk Nieborg is an amazing talent.
Being a huge fan of Final Writer on my old & stored Amigas, I am interested in this upgrade path in order to glean my many Final Writer documents so I can print them once again on paper. So I am confused about how to print them on new Hp laser printers - will I need new printer drivers to do so? And where will I get them? Email me. Templar2b1ask1@mei.net
If the Apollo Vampire accelerator boards design team has re-implemented that much of the functionality of an Amiga computer on their board then why not go all the way and offer a complete Amiga computer board, designed to just use modern peripheral standards of USB for keyboard/mouse, SSD for primary storage and compact flash card for removable media - the only thing left to the user would be to download and flash Amiga ROM images, which could be a utility built into ROM
@@TheGuruMeditation even support of PS/2 ports for keyboard/mouse would be good enough and much easier to implement than USB. Most USB devices still have a backward compatibility to PS/2 where only need use a low cost adapter
I understand the Amiga doesn't benefit from SATA drives, but in the age we live in SATA drives (SSDs and now NVMe ) are cheaper and more reliable than IDE drives. Not to mention a huge space saver too. So it would be nice to see some developer go out of their way to incorporate this.
Last upgrade I did on my A500 was the 512KB RAM mem :] back in the days because you know you needed it to play some of the newer games :P I could never imagine that I would do an upgrade in late 2019 I'm so Hyped for he Vampire 4 and the weird thing is that almost nobody understands me AHAHAH Thx for the Video highly enlightened! Kudos from the BBS
16:51 it's less chip RAM limitations than actual audio channel restrictions. Sound effects would consume at least one (maybe two if you want stereo) of four channels. You can hear it in games that actually do mix sound and music, they'll often dedicate one audio channel for sound effects, so playing a new sound effect will cancel the old one. In some cases they'll play music on that channel as long as no sound effects are playing, so playing a sound causes a channel of music to drop out temporarily. I mean with modern software mixing and audio codecs you could play back all your music on two channels stereo easy. but it wasn't really an option back in the glory days. **edited for clarity
Yes Manny is a great speaker and product demonstrator. I believe he did it professionally for a while if my memory serves me right, but at this age my memory may be incorrect, LOL!
You can still use the side expansion no problem at all Manny with the old v2 vampire because I use an Ariadne network and in the A2000 I used more boards :-)
@Will Williams, I'm glad you mentioned the a570 because I was just about to search for information about the vampire using that. Considering the a500 uses a 68000 CPU normally, the a570 has problems with CPU upgrades (accelerators or chips) except the 68010 CPU on account of timing issues. So basically it is fine with the 68010, which runs at about 8MHz approximately. Well, this is interesting when it comes to the Vampire (or any "full on" FPGA accelerator) because I *think* the a570 would in theory thereby also work with the 68012 without any timing issues. In the video you can see the GuruMeditation guys observing that options menu such as _"force it to behave like a 68040"_ (words pretty much to that effect). It would really cool if it also had the option to say _"force it to behave like a 68010 instruction set and also a 68012"._ That would mean you'd get that a570 kickstart compatability and CDTV software (such as homebrew) software going on it. However the interesting thing about the 68012 is that it was made to allow for usage with an MMU so that you could build computers (like say a freescale server, running its own OS or even BSD now) with multiple CPUs in it (man 68012, like maybe up to twelve but hey two would do fine). That way, if the intruction set was adhered to in such a vampire options menu, software could be written that would use it. Yeah I know that is niche but it is still cool. I would also help move over to the custom _"future amiga mockups"_ that might have the dual CPU in them. So you could switch between a single CPU or dual CPU, even if you were merely "emulating" the latter or using the "array architecture" instead. The reason this is important is because both the a570 and CD32 have special kickstart ROMs. The CD32 has a modified a1200 kickstart that allows for CDROM booting. Leading the way into buying those kickstarts would be awesome for amigas with ROM switchers and customised boards. Games could run on CDTV (or a570) and therefore obviously also work on the CD32 by CD-booting without being forced to use the vampire. This would actually help the vampire because people can write software that uses the vampire but also use vanilla (purist) amigas (maybe with the settings turned down) all booting from CD (without needing to use say the CDBoot floppy disk you could once purchase for the a1200). There are so many thing a person could do with a vampire and I reckon subtle ideas like that for homebrew will be some of those cool little ideas that percolate down and get the purists onboard. The vanilla a1200 is a bit like that as well, in the way it has those subtle _"you know it is an amiga"_ aspects to it. So for example, take "blitter choking" in software (especially in games, like say Elite2Frontier). It is a "limitation" which means that coders with fast a CPUs in their amigas might abandon the usage of the blitter in the game (or software) they write. However, the fact that the a1200 does not allow you to change the clock speed of the FPU if you solder one on the mother board, means that your a1200 will still get some usage out of that blitter even though your cpu and FPU are chugging along at about 14MHz (ish). So either side of the CPU a small amount of help comes from the blitter and the FPU, just about taking the edge of and helping with some pre-calc maybe. With no on-cpu-cache in that, it helps against being stuck if you thereby cannot rely on cache-friendly routines in your code. Then if you want to flick a switch and activate a mega powerful trapdoor expansion containing a PPC and 68040/060 once the computer has been turned on and off again, you still can do. The 14MHz vanilla mode though means that the blitter being there makes sense and therefore the 2meg chip RAM limit is all part of that coding challenge. I mean you really know it is an amiga when these hard and fast standard expectations are there as the default. For example, see the new a1200 motherboards with the FPU instructions in the first minute of this video by chucky and mjnurney: ua-cam.com/video/KQLDi7Pm9D8/v-deo.html To my mind, even though the FPU wasn't supplied wit the a1200, I think it being on the motherboard is a De Facto a1200 standard and it just needs a breakout containing a lever so you can literally disconnect the entire thing (pull-up resistors, caps and all) when you power off the machine on those days you wish it to not get in the way of trapdoor expansions' FPU accelerators. Just to extend this enthusiastic comment a tiny bit more _(because I'm sure you're loving wearing matchsticks in your eyes right now - They're all the rage),_ it means that when low MHz (say 33MHz, 68030 like the MC68EC0300) CPUs intended for embedded solutions get used in homebrew handheld amigas, the software written to expect a modest amiga will run on that. I think "atari lynx" style handheld for the amiga (say called the "amiga Rock Lobster Shrimp") with specs like that could (should?) be made, and could use 8cm CDROM disk that hold about 200meg (or 180meg). These days a big fat lithium battery could handle it, totally. The lynx had such a batery addon but for D batteries. Definitely needs to happen. Hoik a vampire up that! Reference to the MC68EC0300 notion is here: www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/68030/
Awesome video....now I have a working A500 this would be my dream Amiga.....might have to sell both legs to be able to buy a vampire....but I'll be happy still lol
For all the hate - surely it comes down to personal taste? I've got a recapped A1200, that I bought way back when the Vampire V4 was suppose to come out a few years back now. I'm not knocking the time frame, I personally don't have a clue where to start creating such a device, never mind programming one up. So it takes as long, as it takes. I just wish the team would at least hint more about if they're going to come out with new back plates that fit the A500/+, A600, A1200, so that all the different ports, drives, LEDs, PCMCIA can be used, with a standalone? Also, what are the benefits of sticking one in as a hat or expansion board, or not. I understand they're making different versions to fit different machines, but surely it would be more cost effective to get people to just pull their motherboards, and replace it with a vampire board, rather than different hats or expansion boards? If I'm completely missing something where say, using an A1200 version would have benefits over an A500 version, or over a standalone - then please educate me? If people are really wanting to hold on to a chance of using a CRT, then why not build that into the standalone board or just have them use converters down from HDMI. Since I've got a new case and keys coming, I'd kind of like to know the answer to some of those questions, so I know if I should sell off my A1200 or not, while I still can.
I think the new cases from A1200net and Stephen Jones are more the answer. I would hate to see people rip apart their original machines just to put a stand alone Vampire in them. I am all for the stand alone Vamp, but I wouldn't kill a perfectly good Amiga just to make a case for the Vampire. Great point about the CRT as well. Personally, I think LCD screens are 1/2 way to emulation for me anyway. When I exhibit my Amigas at shows it is CRT all the way.
I am surprised by how many questions are still raised, people still in essence asking "What is a Vampire"? Vampire 2 has 128 Megabytes of RAM. Vampire 4 has 512 Megabytes of RAM. The Vampire 4 will be an accelerator for the A500, A600, A1000, A2000 and A1200 and a standalone model is coming out too. I think it will work in a CD32. More a question of will it fit in there. (A3000, A4000, not sure.) Vampire 4 is about 20 to 27% faster than a Vampire 2. Vampire 4 standalone is the "real deal" when it comes to AMIGA *as it should have been* from 1995 to ~2001. 1) What you get is 512 Megabytes that can be configured to *at least* the 3 options of 2 MB chip/510 fast, 256 Chip/256 FastRAM and 512 MB ChipRAM. (To change these options, it's most likely one would have to reboot the system.) 2) 16 instruction/data and 16 address registers, instead of 8 each on the old CPUs. 3) Full FPU. 68040 and 68060 had some of the FPU instructions in libraries that had to be loaded to do computations. 4) 32K instruction and 32K data caches (okay, it might be 16K, depending on how much extra functions they put into the FPGA as they may run out of room, but it still would be double that of the 68060 that has 8 K of each.) 5) Just about ALL of the instructions that the 68000, 68020, 68030, 68040 and 68060 CPUs have. 6) Some assembler commands are 64 bit. 7) AMMX. That is SIMD. The equivalent is SSE that was first introduced in 80586's (pentiums) by intel. 8) 720p resolution, and I think even 1080p. 9) 16 bit audio, through upgraded Paula custom chip. It is called Pamela. 10) Ethernet port and SD card slot. Ethernet speed, unknown. SD transfer rate of *at least* 20 MB per second should be possible. 11) Don't need a flicker fixer or scan doubler. 12) Standalone reliability. Doesn't have to rely on being connected to old, possibly dodgy hardware. 13) Boot up time of under 10 seconds!!!!!!!!! (No one knows yet what's possible.) 14) There are other subtle enhancements. 15) The DOOZY of them all is, IF you SUPPORT THIS EFFORT by buying any Vampires, it INCREASES the VERY GOOD CHANCE that they will EVENTUALLY make an ASIC of this CPU core!!!!!! What does THAT mean? Well, *imagine* a Vampire (AMIGA) that runs at 800MHz, or 1.2GH, 1.8GHz..... *or even* 2.5 GHZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Also, Hyperion is willing to entertain the thought of making AOS3.1.x that SUPPORTS 68080 instructions!!!!!!! HOW AWESOME WOULD THAT BE???? AND IF THAT ISN'T ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Imagine if you will, the custom ASIC that is the Vampire, having 2 or 4 or 8 megabytes of L2 cache in it...... This is "impossible", and I mean IMPOSSIBLE by the "competition"............ The WHOLE operating system running INSIDE the CPU! !!! W O W !!! VAMPIRE (Amiga/AOS) F. T. W. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Some questions: Firstly, can the standalone version of the Vampire support ATX cases? Secondly, what about the newer CD/DVD drives that do not support analog CDDA decoding anymore? Can the Vampire emulate analog CDDA support on drives that do not support it? Thirdly, AGA supposedly no longer supports Chunky Graphics mode. Will Vampire re-add Chunky Graphics support to AGA? Lastly, can PowerPC 603/604 co-processor emulation (ie BlizzardPPC/CyberPPC) be added in the near future?
No ATX cases but no doubt an adapter can be developed for 3d printing on thingiverse. I used a classic CDROM drive for this demo and modern day DVD drives didn't work. That is not to say modern day DVD Drives won't work if you have the right driver. The IDE 97fix software controls the CD-ROM access in this demo, you can use whatever cd driver you like. AGA in this demo is an alpha demo, in the final release AGA, Pamlea 16 bit audio, S-AGA (think RTG graphics with chunky modes) and FPUand 68080 with AMMX will all live in the FPGA. No plans for 603/604. The intent here is to use FPGA tech to eventually surpass PPC in every way as the designers of this project believe the 68K architecture to be a better design than PPC. So no PPC support planed or implied ever.
Well, it looks like the proper Amiga hardware here is just used as a simple keyboard ^^ I guess that's make the Vampire standalone more appealing (but still very expensive thou) ^^
Yeah, that is why they call it the "Vampire" It is cool to have a powerful A500 and run it in a real machine, but I totally understand why someone may prefer the standalone.
I would have loved to attend this. Not much in terms of user groups that I have seen in NJ (where I am located). How do I find out when the next event takes place?
@@bamdadkhan Yeah, it is coming, but like a lot of this stuff it is a labor of love and not coming from a large company so we just have to be patient. I am sure the standalone will be the next release from them, then the Vamp 1200. But those are just my guesses. That isn't info from them.
I was hoping you were going for a Monty Python joke with the lapel mic on a stick. Know what I mean, nudge nudge? Crazy to see an old A500 with a transplanted new FPGA brain!
I dunno Karl is someone would have offered me an AGA and FAST cpu upgrade for the A500 back in the day I would have loved it. The A500 casework is a nostalgic touch! The blood still runs through the veins of the old hardware in some crazy way. At the end of the day this is complete insanity as a PC with emulation trounces many FPGA solutions.
Some people will like the experiences of pimping their Amiga. It is a different experience sitting at an actual Amiga with floppies, original mouse, controllers, etc... vs. a standalone board with a new keyboard, mouse, and so on. But keeping your Amiga original and going with a standalone V4 when it comes out is a very viable option as well. I will likely get a standalone and put it in one of the new cases.
[At the end of the day this is complete insanity as a PC with emulation trounces many FPGA solutions.] Manuel Jesus, I respectfully DISAGREE!!!! The emulators run the CPU, then the FPU, then one custom chip, then another, then another then back to the CPU. It "sort of" works. There are hiccups, as well, as win-dohs does vile and corrupt activities in the background too. I'm not talking, spying on your activities, but some OS junk that *personal computer users* aren't interested in. And to top it off, NO emulator does AMMX, 64 bit assembler commands, increased sized data/instruction caches, extra registers, OoO (who knows what else I'm missing) and our QUEEN enhancement Super-AGA! Vampire, short of going ASIC at 1.8, 2.2 or 2.7 GHz is EVERYTHING that I've been waiting for since 1995!!!!!!! (Oh, it's VERY sad to not have a full 2GB of RAM!!!!)
Karl Hamilton Exactly. At the end, you better use only the case, to avoid relying on an aging motherboard just for the inputs. And by the way, what's the point of using a ball mouse in 2018? And what's the point of using a yellowed case too when there are brand new cases out there? This model business is based on the frustration of Amiga fans due to the lack of competitivity and reactivity that killed C= Why don't you just sell complete systems in brand new cases, along with a brand new fpga motherboards with all the modern inputs, Eth, USB, SD and the old external floppy one, joystick et voilà. Wait. I know why. Because it will cost twice the price of a modern PC without the capabilities. Crap.
Guys. I ha w an Amiga 500 board rev6 with bad RAM and roken Kickstart chip. I could get this vampire and it would work? As the vampire has just taken over
WOW I am impressed. It is a Pioneer SA-7800. Amazing eye. You can see photos of the room here: facebook.com/pg/thegurumeditation/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2696914840348433
@@TheGuruMeditation wasn't too sure as It's far and blurred. I've got a new old stock boxed sa-9800. Bloody amazing amplifier Thanks for the reply much appreciated
@@abc-ni9uw cheers. I am blown away that you could recognize it there. Sadly my dad had to retire this semester so we are trying to find homes for all this stuff. This pioneer amp went to our great friend Thierry who now has it up an running in his home!
Would be cool if it had built into it the CD32 FMV module but with mpeg2 support for DVD playback over that optical drive they have plugged into the IDE there. As for the sidecar expansions, the ActionReplay would perhaps be a thing people would like to use. For that matter, FPGA accelerators can do cool things (sometimes) like having insane amounts of chip-RAM (way above 2meg, be it 128meg or higher one day). Rumour has it, even 512meg. With any such large amount of FPGA chipRAM tricks, having game savestates as per action replay could be really cool since they can not only be loaded in all at once fore multiple instances but you could actually have many instances of multiplier-tree instances (and custom chipsets) popping into existence in the array architecture. So you don't just switch between savestates (even though that too would be awesome) but you can switch between instances of (almost entire) amigas. This would be great for development testing but also would be great for a whole new genre of games and software could take advantage of it. So you might switch from one game "level" to another but actually it is a whole new savestate already waiting, and you may possibly also have a different chipset and/or microarchitecture in that "game level" too. Normal non-games "boring" software (lol) could use it too. If a video-toaster render farm could use it, that'd be neat. Not sure if a dual cpu amiga could be done? Can it? the Mac did that with two 040 chips. As an aside, when new CD32 boards are made, it would be cool to see mounting holes around the 68020 CPU so you could "vampire on" an accelerator like the a600 did. It just kinda sets a precendent. On any amiga (using aboot floppy or boot CDROM to piggy bck), booting games-cartridges from the parallel port would be a nice default standard so that all amigas could use it as long as they had a good enough ieee on the CPU (say for example minimum 68030 and maybe with FPU). I now there are faster ways beyond parallel, but it'd still be cool.
@Atheist7, Indeed. It would be cool of the FMV cartridge could be made for a1200 (with the akiko gate array dumped into FPGA for good luck too) although with the FMV cartridge supporting mpeg2 also. That way, when such a cartridge is used in a CD32 or a1200, some games or software (just some of them, mind you) could use the mp3 playback capabilities of the FMV cartridge (which obviously can play mpeg2) and also those games or software could use the FMV cartridge to handle jpeg. So a game like Myst could use that but perhaps even some 3D games could use jpeg compression on textures, although it might really be a proof of concept for those depending on how practical it is. But then again, if a vampire is running of the CPU on an a1200 or cd32, the trapdoor and/or sx32-pro bay can be free for that (mpeg2 compatible) "futuristic FMV" cartridge. You made a good 3D model a1200 case btw.
Someone named Marko Hirv made that "Amiga Fantasy" case. I don't know who he might be on Amiga.Org or AmigeWorld.net. Seems that he isn't around anymore, and that would be, if even he ever was.
Similar to FPGA concept, is anyone exploring the use of video cards to accelerate Amiga emulation? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_graphics_processing_units
Anthony! You're back buddy. Missed you. Hope you're well. Great video V4 seems good. Like AmigaONE I am still not sure what the goal is? Are the systems going to be pushed retail to compete in a modern market or is it just a rich guys hobby?
Anthony is like the Loch Ness Monster. You never know when he will appear! I doubt if they plan on these being a big commercial hit. More of a niche product for the retro community, but who knows what will happen.
The Guru Meditation ... If you're going mainstream, maybe it could use a product like Siri / Alexa. So, what would we call our amiga? Surely not Eva because when it crashed, instead of a guru meditation it might sing "Don't Cry for me Argentina". 🤩
Hi I am an Amiga user in CT. I have a 1000, and 500. I want one of these Vampire cards!!! I want to wait for ver4 however. Do you know how much and when this will be available? Or do I go for the v2 now? Love your channel and love the Amiga! Regards Flash.
Thanks Flash! The v4 exists, but I have no idea when it will be available for the public. I think it should be on the sooner side, but I don't know. We may have a V4 standalone demo soon in Westchester County NY if you are interested
I know this is a silly question, but any chance of A1000 support? I know there's not a lot of difference between A500 and A1000, but I admit the extra space inside the A1000 case would be welcome, plus the whole being able to pull the A1000 back out of storage. I have a Phoenix accelerator in it at present with a whopping fast 14Mhz 68010 processor (and a math co as I recall) and 1.5M of fast RAM, but yeah, it doesn't get much use. :P So an A1000 version would GREATLY encourage me to use it again.
Installation in the A1000 requires CPU risers. AGA core is the best thing for an A1000 as it replaces the 512 Agnus with a 2MB AGA Alice. It makes your beloved A1000 come full circle and become the Alpha and the Omega of the Amiga universe.
The funny thing is, that this video demonstrates the main problem of The Vampire's AGA skills perfectly: There is no single AGA game worth playing. Yes, some of the later games, making use of the PPC and AGA or retargable graphics are kinda technically impressive for the Amiga, but you always can play the better and original games in dosbox or ePSXe. I'm saying this from the enthusiast perspective of owning an A4000T with PPC 604e/68060 128MB RAM, Cybervision PPC, 4GB Harddisk, soundcard and all that stuff back then... So I know what is was worth. The only use was for applications, I could do video digitizing, burn CDs, digitze sounds, and listen to an mp3 all at once, when carefully choosing tools. But gamewise it didn't have an advantage vs any other Amiga (maybe equipped with a hard disk, for the few later AmigaDOS compatible games with many disks). I had Wipeout 2097 and some other of the rare games that could actually make decent use of the hardware, but none of these was at least same quality as the PC or Playstation original counterpart.
I think there are some really cool AGA games, but if OCS games are all you want then an Amiga 600 with CF to IDE adapter or a 500 with ACA500+ is a great option. CD32 with a CF card would be great too, and possibly the best Amiga gaming setup, but if you don't like AGA games then probably not worth it. Man, I would love to have your A4000T setup. That is a beast!
I agree 98% were stinkers & shovelware, but Banshee was decent, made good use of the color depth, and had lovely fog effects. A touch too unforgiving today, though. Civ AGA, SlamTilt and UFO were fun. And I would easily play the AGA versions of EotB I and II over the VGA versions, with better music and an automap facility. But on the whole yeah, AGA wasn't the boon to gaming that we wanted it to be.
Granted there is no performance gain to use SATA, someone should still come out with a SATA option, IDE drives aren't manufactured anymore nor are IDE CD/DVD ROM drives. So it would be more a compatible issue thing I guess. :)
The thing is all the people saying this is not an Amiga do you think Commodore would still be running the same Hardware they made back in the early 90s if they were still around they would evolve eventually all the original Amigas will be harder and harder to maintain so Omega in whatever form needs to move forward . Who’s to say there won’t be a vampire 567or 8 And I don’t see anybody else stepping up to make a 68k Great again
Mr. Dave Haynie gave a nod of approval in an Amiten TV video interview a couple of years ago. That is good enough for me in terms of an endorsement. The vibe was #1 If Commodore would have had this tech back then they would have ruled. and #2 USING the FPGA is the right way to make a modern day classic Amiga implementation with 68k.
So good I watched it twice! :-) I am fortunate enough to be able to have backed Stephen Jones Checkmate 1500 kickstarter (I loved the live stream you hosted for that BTW, really enjoyed it), so I'll have a case coming next year in classic white... which is super sweet! The problem I have is, what do I put in it? I change my mind almost by the day LOL. After watching this, I am tempted to get a V4 for it. The issue is I have an A1200, and I haven't heard much about availability of the 1200 version other that it will probably be later than the 500 / 600 version? So i'm not sure it'll be ready in time?
If you get the standalone Vampire 4, you will have the FASTEST bootup Amiga in existence.... also, no interference of old, slow, possibly flaky hardware making it look like the Vampire is not working right, maybe.
18:56 - I feel like there's some issues with that HD setup he has going on there.... It's not just CRT magic that stretches the video, you can hook that sucker up to a VCR and it's going to be recorded in 4:3, the video going out should not be that wide in either PAL or NTSC. Plenty of people have newer monitors showing old stuff in the correct aspect ratios (not enough though), there's just something wrong somewhere in that setup, for sure, and I really hope there's a way to fix it and that he's not just going to claim magic from a CRT.
the screen is being stretched to 16:9 from 4:3 and being upscaled to hd. Aside from that nothing else is going on. It looks better when run on a 4:3 aspect ratio monitor using hdmi.There are better scalers for sure. But anytime I take an Amiga NTSC or Pal scree and scale it to a HD screen that runs at say 1920X1080 naïve res there is a hit in quality due to scaling, This is a known artifact of using HD era LCD screens with NTSC / PAL SD gfx. ECS and AGA screens look better on a CRT PVM and 1084. Lots of folks confirm this. There is also a bit of lag when using the LCD but its not a deal breaker. When using the RRG core that runs at higher resolutions closer to the NATIVE resolution of the LCD screen the display quality improves as there is less scaling.
DOOM AGA on a 500 with 16-bit jams = LEGIT! Great content. Vampire tech makes the original hardware a dream machine IMO. I love it when Manny name-drops Neo Geo
Awesome stuff! Just one question which is kinda important to audio users (and people that need hardcore-microseconds-fast game-reaction-speeds): Is there more latency in audio output due to the fact it outputs thru HDMI?
I use a scart to hdmi scaler to run the RTG core and Amiga RGB core. There IS a slight lag when using the scaler. This has not been a deal breaker for me. I have never heard a team member complain about latency using HDMI.
Sadly one does not exist. I use a RaspberryPi, but you can also use something called a MiSTer which is a FPGA board and supposedly the closest thing to a real Amiga from what I have heard. You can also use other, more powerful than the Pi, ARM devices.
In terms of the Amiga 500, I'm wondering if this could be made into an expansion device like the GVP or A590? From what I read you can completely override the internal 68000
This goes on the inside int the 68k socket so it wont run as a slap on the side accelerator unless someone made a 68k CPU holder for the slap on the side expansion port. But I don't know if that would work.
Where can I get info on WAUG? The website seems to be a work in progress. I live in Lancaster, PA and would love to come to meetings in Westchester if you're having them.
That is a great question. I simply haven't had time to make a WAUG website but it is on my to do list. The best way is to get into our Google group where we discuss if we will meet that month or not. Would you like to join the group?
That is an excellent question. I was thinking the same when I was editing it. I didn't notice them at the meeting, but I was mostly looking through my camera so I wouldn't have noticed. Manny supplied me with the screen recordings from the Vampire so I will ask him. I THINK it may be the recording software he used because there was also a red flashing "REC" light in the upper left corner of the recording outside the picture area that I cropped out, but I am not 100% sure. I will ask him.
Looks good, but what about the production? Will it be possible to get your hands on one, or will it be like the other iterations - a severely slow and limited production?
No one knows when they will become available. It is *anywhere* from November of this year (2019), though that's unlikely, to summer 2019. :-(((( They have ONE overriding obstacle. Money. But, if one were to invest, there really wouldn't be a substantial profit to be gleaned from it, unless the buyers are prepared to pay premium prices. Small production runs, high prices, desperate customers...... Amiga is stuck in the mud (and lots of FUD, by the looks of it too.)
@@cherrystarscollide too bad about your wait. I suggest contact Majsta direct if you are still interested. It took 4 months to get my v600 and a year to get my V4 and I am a team member.
@@Atheist7 money isn't an obstacle as they are made in small batches. Can't give a date in release. I think your timelines are realistic. There was a one year delay as the migration from C3 to C5 took longer due to a pesky bug. One plus here is that core updates are free. So those that purchased a v500/v600 can now download latest core and aga alpha 3 for free. You don't have to pay for a driver update or core update. Vampire core updates are hardware upgrades in a software download. In my case Amiga is my hobby so I am willing to wait. Core dev is time consuming and it's literally guys doing core dev and testing on spare time. That being said progress is surprisingly good given the constraints.
To the Apollo team and other REALLY adorable smart guys, who Love -d(b)oing- great stuff. I was wondering whether it would be an idea, to replace Denice with a part (of) expander board that can provide high res 3D graphics through the video output of the main-board and create an adapter (like the old school Amiga expansion adapters) to change 25 pins to DVI and HDMI? Also to put a SATA controller there and the necessary powermanagement for SATA, by which now slim drive DVD writers and SSD's can be connected. Where this board can connect to expansion headers of the Vampire board? This would make Amiga like the most awesome PC ever created, don't u tink? :D (in fact; it might even be possible to place a thin board on top of all chip sockets and (re)place them so, that original or new tech can be switched between, Like a full size daughter-board )
Great video and hardware. Will there be a way to force 4:3 aspect ratio? A lot of Tv's have 'aspect ratio' settings, but it seems rare on PC monitors. I would like to play in original aspect and not 16:9 or 16:10. Work bench in widescreen will be useful though.
@@manueljesus3147 yes, but can't the team implement something for monitors? I don't think I am alone in having my AMIGA setup next to my PC. My PC monitor has VGA/DVI/HDMI but no 4:3 mode/switch. So I would have to use/buy a dedicated HDMI TV :( One thing to test is the Vampire's HDMI output, is it 576p 50Hz? (PAL) I have an FPGA device (crowdfunded - FleaOhm) running a Minimig Core. It's ouput is 576p @ 50Hz and the 3 Samsung LCD TV's in my house will not recognize the HDMI signal (Our Panasonic TV is ok). I don't know if the Vampire is outputting a native Amiga resolution over HDMI or it is scaled/upscaled. Is it possible for the testers to check it works on Samsung TV's? I am happy to assist if required. I guess not an issue with RTG resolutions as you can run at screen sizes which are compatible with our new digital age! Thanks P.S. I like your presentations and I think you are a good speaker/ambassador for Vampire.
What about a Vampire card with a 16 or 32 core PowerPC processor will maybe need a good quality heatsink and fan but will make games run smoother and video editing complementing the Video Toaster hardware as some AMIGA users will want it as it will also speed up raytracing.
The core developer doesn't really believe in PowerPC. They are more interested in continuing with the 68 range and updating that platform with modern development techniques.
That is unfortunate as I don't think that the 680XX will be around for much longer and that is why Apple Corp initially moved to the PowerPC before moving to the INTEL range of chips.
The 68K range has been gone for a while now. New old stock or recycled (rescued) CPU's are used for accelerators as far as I know. The 68080 used in the V2 and V4 is a recreation of the original 68000-68080 range with some extras thrown in. It's goal is full compatibility and is continuously updated by the team. The 68080 already offers a great range of compatibility. The ultimate goal is to get the 68080 on an ASIC and run it at faster speeds one day.
Amiga is my favorite computer. They did a great job.
Greetings all Amiga enthusiasts, from Turkey.
Great work from Apollo team, good luck guyz, somebody on this planet is very excited about your work. Can't wait upcoming projects...
I can't wait to put my hands on this awesome piece of hardware, a true next gen Amiga. Cheers!
It is a sweet piece of gear!
Amazing work! Keeping hobby retro computing relevant in the 21st Century!
It is. I love all these new projects in the retro community
Thanks Bill for the hard work putting all this video together. Thanks WAUG, Anthony and Manny for this great demo. You rock guys. Keep Amiga alive.
Happy do what little I can.
Thanks for all the support over the years Santi! Great folks like you are what keep us motivated to do this stuff
I appreciate the massive work put into the Vampire project and know this path will be the way to preserve Amiga, but being FPGA or not, but besides powering and controlling joystick/mouse inputs this board does not need an Amiga at all. I have been trying to improve my A500s by adding ram, some acceleration and replacing OCS with ECS chips, but in doing so I am trying to still use the Amiga chipset. Also, I still use CRT monitors, for upscaled to progressive scan is not what Amiga graphic designers were designing graphics to run on ..it was interlaced CRT monitirs. Ithink the hardest job of Vampire designers is integrating this board in the Amiga. Instead, perhaps they should simply release it with its own case, for it can run quite well independently. Thank you for the video guys.
Excellent comment, thank you. I totally agree about the CRT. I feel like connecting my Amiga to a modern flat panel is 1/2 way to emulation anyway. Whenever I exhibit at a computer show I always connect my Amiga to a classic CRT like a 1084s. That brings back the experience for me and looks the best. But I do think the Vampire is a great project and has its place as well - weather you want to put it in a real Amiga or just get the stand alone when it comes out.
@@TheGuruMeditation I purchased a new old stock Amiga 2000 a few years ago and used it with my 60 inch Panasonic plasma TV via RGB SCART, it looked glorious. I understand there was no RGB analog input on US Televisions so your experience today on modern plasma/LCD/DLP TVs is not going to be as nice. RGBa via SCART from any Amiga is not far off the quality of PC VGA input as far as low resolution screenmodes are concerned (non interlaced modes).
@@TheGuruMeditation A flat panel has absolutely nothing to do with emulation at all. It's just a display device.
@@thorham1346 You need to stop being so literal. A modern TV upscales the original image, which was might only be around 320x256 or 640x256 pixels, to match the monitor's native resolution. Otherwise you would have a tiny little picture in the middle of the screen. So by definition, the TV is taking the original signal and modifying it by inserting data that wasn't originally there. The TV is (automatically) emulating a low resolution display.
@@another3997 Upscaling isn't emulation.
I completely support what Apollo team is doing. Fantastic!
So do I! I am very excited that there is so much happening in the Amiga community right now!
Thanks!
you need to inform all the insane hardcore amiga fans, like me, when you have something which i can buy for my A1200....
and please don´t listen to the "....naah i use UAE an a PC...blah..blah guys" they don´t have a working machine anyways anymore and just weep that they can´t use this great thing of art. :) #AmigaRulez!!
Nice work ya'll...very informative. The Vampire is quite an interesting item, and a helluva polarizing piece of work. Thanks for sharing that, boys!
Glad you enjoyed it.
Thanks so much for the kind words DevilBunny. Yeah the Vampire can sure trigger some emotions! Keep up the great work over at Amigos. You guys rock!
It's polarising due to comments like this; 27:00 That's just... yeah, no, that machine isn't an Amiga 500 "running Doom AGA" anymore than running WinUAE on an ITX board inside a Amiga 500 shell, is.
I bet you don't know what LP is associated with the COMMODORE AMIGA A600?
If you can make this a box that you just hook to a keyboard and a CD-ROM to make an accelerated Amiga clone I'm very interested.
That is basically what the standalone version of this will be!
@@TheGuruMeditation that's what I want. Just throw in some Amiga keyboard stickers!
Nice! I wonder what the standalone will come with? I have a hunch it will just be the board, but you never know. There are some great options for it now with the A1200, A500, and Checkmate 1500 cases
What for? Get an ITX board and run WinUAE instead, it's faster, more reliable and a hell of a lot more accurate.
in this video ua-cam.com/video/6HZXM6cLVUg/v-deo.html it's said the best and fastest Amiga runs on a Raspberry Pi3 (U$45 with plastic case) using the emulator Amibien, tailored specifically for the Pie platform
always loved the way the windows worked on the Amiga, you could control weather a window came forward or stayed at the back. never took to the PC system and i have used pc's since the 33mhz pc 3.1 till windows 10
and i miss the Amiga.
So much of the Amiga was well thought out and way ahead of it's time!
Re the cunky pixels vs planr comments. I have been corrected by a team member, The chunky mode was faster for 256 or more colors due to the way memory was used in displaying the gfx. Pixel aspect ratio and speed are really unrelated in this context. AGA was a low cost stop gap measure to bring 256 colors to Amiga.
Thanks for clarifying Manny!
True, while planar is slower then chunky, it not so easy to do some effects like transparency, and multi layered scrolling (parallax). At least you don't get that for free, if Amiga had gone with chunky.
Yup I really stepped in it with my explanation.
No worries. It is very difficult to explain technical concepts spontaneously on the fly live in front of a group of people. I say things live on stream that I kick myself for. I really know better but it doesn't come out right
Well, it's about compromise and staying compatible. WHEN the Vampire goes ASIC, and it's operating at 2.7 GHz, and 1080p output, would chunky vs. staying with bitplanes (16 or 24 bits) STILL be a problem???
Regarding the expansion port... back in the day I had an Amiga 500 with first a Mega Midget Racer 030 board with RAM, and later a PP&S 040 board, both with an attached 8MB SupraRAM With a Bodega Bay plugged into that. In the Bodega Bay I had an A2091 SCSI, Retina GFX board, A2065 Ethernet, and an Emplant.
All worked fine. So yes. 68000 socket devices should still respond to expansion bus devices, if properly implemented.
Thanks Christopher
Many of those ECS games that look like AGA actually did use more than 32 (or even 64 colors in EHB mode). They applied a technique where the palette changed as the cathode swept over the screen. One such example is Eye of the Beholder where the upper half (with the 3D viewport) used one palette and the lower half (with the compass and controls) used another. I also think they used different palettes for different levels.
The HAM mode is an extreme form of using this alternating palette technique which also involves a form of compression to save memory.
While it might be limited use anyways, you can definitely use the side expansion port on an A500 when you have a 68k accelerator board plugged in. I've used that exact configuration with a dataflyer ide controller on the side with a VXL30 accelerator. The side port is mainly just the CPU pins +/- so as long as you don't have two devices responding to the same range of memory addresses you should be fine.
Thanks for the info kmonyt!
It's interesting to see fellow North Americans discussing the Amiga. It came from here but we barely seemed to realize what it was back in the day. I wish I had grown up with an Amiga instead of that damned Turbo XT with no sound card and EGA graphics. Much more fun would have been had!
Actually it was popular in video production for a time in the USA. The Amiga was the red haired stepchild of the computer industry.
amazing work they are doing. I am really looking forward to the stand alone system.
A fancy way of turning your Amiga into a keyboard.
Wow, this is quite a tune-up! Very neat job guys 👍👌👏
man will be already on mars when this thing come out
I loved watching this! The Amiga hardware scene just keeps on delivering. Amigaaah!
Glad you liked it
For me chunky pixels is when a single byte, word or long word contains the pixel/palette information. Bitmap graphics is more scalable and more dense with memory aspects in mind (if you not using a byte (8 bit palette, word (16 bit palette) or long (24 bit palette with 8 bit translucency value). So for a 1-7 bit palette bitmapped images is better memory wise.
Yup thanks for the breakdown and clarification.
Or tilebased systems is even more memory efficient
congratulation for this Amazing progress for a A500, my CD32 is jealous now !! when did we could have accelerator for her :/. . great vidéo, lot of passion inside ! keep the good work and Amiga Forever guys :)
Thanks it was fun to share my time with this user group.
I am a gamer and i came from NItendo in 1995...
I just wanted to state that games today do not have a SOUL.
naa your just shit
Oh for pete's sake.
The indie scene now it jam packed with soul, you're just looking in the wrong places.
Some games have it, very few indeed.
Great, I've been looking forward to a board that I can run HDMI only for a while! Thanks for the preview
You are welcome! Just note that as you heard in the video there are no Amiga interlaced modes available through the Vampire HDMI output yet, but that is something they will address.
Thanks for the reminder, I missed that in the vid somehow.
My pleasure. I mentioned it but there is a lot of stuff in this video so it is easy to miss. It is just a point that stood out to me because I need my hi-res modes with all the work I do in DPaint and ADPro
Hope we will soon have more looks
Us too!
That is a remarkable piece of hardware that spawned out of the the remains of Natami project.
I am eager to see the A1200 implementation of the Vampire.
Nice video!
Thanks
The A1200 version is the Vampire holy trail to mw.
I had an Insider-2 inside my A1000 and an Octabyte plugged in on the side connection.
Don't get me wrong, I love this direction, but I'm more interested in the stand alone stuff. I mean, this device "looks" like an expansion of an Amiga 500 but it's really more like a new computer in with an Amiga 500 (tiny by comparison) on it's backside for compatibility. Once all the custom chips are in the FPGA, what do you even need the Amiga for?
I look forward to the day when I can keep all my Amigas stock and working, and have a stand alone solution sitting on my desk for actual day to day use.
Looks like the V4 is actually standalone only now
My opinion is what we need is an affordable new Amiga with an Open Source OS (like AROS).
I own already an A1200 equipped with a Blizzard 030 and an SD to IDE adapter and I'm happy with that. I can run most of the old stuff. Ofcourse some people would need more than that but most would be fine.
Yep, that would be cool. I also have a 1200 with 030. It is pretty much the sweet spot, except that I would love to be able to run more of the demoscene stuff
Great to see your smiling faces again with an interesting new product :) I would love to see an SBC Amiga from Apollo on Kickstarter, I'd definitely get one.
'Old man fingers,' haha. I hear vodka helps with that :)
I think the stand alone Vampire will basically be a SBC Amiga. Ha ha! Yeah I suppose Vodka would help, or at least make me not care that my fingers don't work well anymore!
The Vampire 4 will have a model that is a standalone. They have made them already but are still fine tuning the code blueprint that recreates the AGA circuitry, and all the other features that the Apollo Core makes possible.
This is THE AMIGA that we have been waiting for since 1995!!!!
It is the LAST *personal* computer.
That would be brilliant...I'm sure the Gurus will cover its release, but please keep us posted.
Wow. That Vampire is coming along nicely! Shame I can't use it with my A570 Single Speed CD ROM drive, though... Great video, guys
Thanks! Sounds like there are many options for the CD-ROM so I am sure you could find one that would work fairly easy
Sure... But I would lose out on the Single Speed Caddy-loading CDTV goodness!
This comment is coming from "enemy territory" but a hypothetical Vampire board for the Atari Jaguar would finally allow that console to play Atari Games' arcade CoJag based titles like "Area 51" and "Maximum Force" [they used a 68020, more RAM, and a hard drive]. The original Jag case would probably be impossible to fit such a board inside but it would be possible inside a JaguarDuo - which was unreleased - case which there's a project in the initial planning stages to make such cases [and motherboards] available. Hell, a Vampire board could probably run Jaguar2 specs easily. If one were so inclined. :)
For the record, the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-Bit computers can read multiple fire buttons from their DB9 ports. And that's without "cheating" by using the 2 Paddle Lines which is what Atari Inc's own engineers did for their custom 3-fire button Trak-Ball Controllers they used on an in-house version of Missile Command. Sega later used resisters to squeeze in their endless buffet of buttons for the Genesis/MegaDrive controllers off their DB9s [not to mention their 4-player Team Tap Adapters].
Hey that is a cool concept and Atari is welcome here! Thanks for the great info. Appreciate this
Don't currently own an Amiga but if they ever follow their work to it's logical conclusion and basically release a 68080 clone Amiga then I would love to buy one!
The standalone version is now working so there is continuous improvement being made.
Flink is indeed Henk Nieborg's handiwork. Also check out Lomax on PS1, that's a great game, and gorgeous graphics. But Flink is easily one of the best CD32 titles.
Oh cool. Glad I was on target with that comment. Thanks for clarifying Vicky! Great point about Lomax. I have it ready to play on my RaspberryPi but haven't gotten to it yet. That is high up on my to-do list! Henk Nieborg is an amazing talent.
How about some application demos like Lightwave, Imagine 3D, Aladdin, Image FX, PPaint, DPaint, etc?
hi Check my youtube channel there are a few on there
Being a huge fan of Final Writer on my old & stored Amigas, I am interested in this upgrade path in order to glean my many Final Writer documents so I can print them once again on paper. So I am confused about how to print them on new Hp laser printers - will I need new printer drivers to do so? And where will I get them? Email me. Templar2b1ask1@mei.net
@@templar2b1ask as far as i remember, final writer can export to a postscript file which you can open with ghostscript, convert to PDF etc
It's best used for productivity, I guess
NIce, I wonder if there will ever be a Vampyre card for the A4000
Good question. I haven't heard anything about an A4000 Vampire but that doesn't mean it isn't in their plan.
If the Apollo Vampire accelerator boards design team has re-implemented that much of the functionality of an Amiga computer on their board then why not go all the way and offer a complete Amiga computer board, designed to just use modern peripheral standards of USB for keyboard/mouse, SSD for primary storage and compact flash card for removable media - the only thing left to the user would be to download and flash Amiga ROM images, which could be a utility built into ROM
They are coming out with a stand alone Vampire. Making it compatible with modern peripherals would be great. I am not sure if it will have this.
@@TheGuruMeditation even support of PS/2 ports for keyboard/mouse would be good enough and much easier to implement than USB. Most USB devices still have a backward compatibility to PS/2 where only need use a low cost adapter
I understand the Amiga doesn't benefit from SATA drives, but in the age we live in SATA drives (SSDs and now NVMe ) are cheaper and more reliable than IDE drives. Not to mention a huge space saver too. So it would be nice to see some developer go out of their way to incorporate this.
Yes, agreed
Last upgrade I did on my A500 was the 512KB RAM mem :] back in the days because you know you needed it to play some of the newer games :P
I could never imagine that I would do an upgrade in late 2019
I'm so Hyped for he Vampire 4 and the weird thing is that almost nobody understands me AHAHAH Thx for the Video highly enlightened! Kudos from the BBS
Our pleasure. Thanks for the kind words and for watching!
guys please mass produce this thing.
That would be great, not sure if the demand is there though
I think somebody already mentioned, but SATA is really what this baby needs. IDE is so 2003.
Yeah a few people mentioned that. It is a great point
Arananet, one of the Apollo team members has made a IDE to SATA adapter for use on the A1200 and A600
16:51 it's less chip RAM limitations than actual audio channel restrictions. Sound effects would consume at least one (maybe two if you want stereo) of four channels. You can hear it in games that actually do mix sound and music, they'll often dedicate one audio channel for sound effects, so playing a new sound effect will cancel the old one. In some cases they'll play music on that channel as long as no sound effects are playing, so playing a sound causes a channel of music to drop out temporarily.
I mean with modern software mixing and audio codecs you could play back all your music on two channels stereo easy. but it wasn't really an option back in the glory days.
**edited for clarity
Interesting thanks!
Manuel is a great evangelist for this, great speaker.
Thanks!
Yes Manny is a great speaker and product demonstrator. I believe he did it professionally for a while if my memory serves me right, but at this age my memory may be incorrect, LOL!
@Vojin Vidanovic lol
I demo'd Tricasters unofficially from 2006-2010 in the NYC area! lol
Digging the old hi fi kit in the background.
:)
Dis you spot the Commodore monitors in the back?
Thanks for this video. Very informative as usual. Great!
Our pleasure I hope you learned something.
You can still use the side expansion no problem at all Manny with the old v2 vampire because I use an Ariadne network and in the A2000 I used more boards :-)
thanks for the info!
Thanks for the info Stephen and congrats on the Kickstarter!
That's really good information to know! My favorite add on for the 500 is the A570.
@Will Williams, I'm glad you mentioned the a570 because I was just about to search for information about the vampire using that. Considering the a500 uses a 68000 CPU normally, the a570 has problems with CPU upgrades (accelerators or chips) except the 68010 CPU on account of timing issues. So basically it is fine with the 68010, which runs at about 8MHz approximately. Well, this is interesting when it comes to the Vampire (or any "full on" FPGA accelerator) because I *think* the a570 would in theory thereby also work with the 68012 without any timing issues. In the video you can see the GuruMeditation guys observing that options menu such as _"force it to behave like a 68040"_ (words pretty much to that effect). It would really cool if it also had the option to say _"force it to behave like a 68010 instruction set and also a 68012"._ That would mean you'd get that a570 kickstart compatability and CDTV software (such as homebrew) software going on it. However the interesting thing about the 68012 is that it was made to allow for usage with an MMU so that you could build computers (like say a freescale server, running its own OS or even BSD now) with multiple CPUs in it (man 68012, like maybe up to twelve but hey two would do fine). That way, if the intruction set was adhered to in such a vampire options menu, software could be written that would use it. Yeah I know that is niche but it is still cool. I would also help move over to the custom _"future amiga mockups"_ that might have the dual CPU in them. So you could switch between a single CPU or dual CPU, even if you were merely "emulating" the latter or using the "array architecture" instead.
The reason this is important is because both the a570 and CD32 have special kickstart ROMs. The CD32 has a modified a1200 kickstart that allows for CDROM booting. Leading the way into buying those kickstarts would be awesome for amigas with ROM switchers and customised boards. Games could run on CDTV (or a570) and therefore obviously also work on the CD32 by CD-booting without being forced to use the vampire. This would actually help the vampire because people can write software that uses the vampire but also use vanilla (purist) amigas (maybe with the settings turned down) all booting from CD (without needing to use say the CDBoot floppy disk you could once purchase for the a1200).
There are so many thing a person could do with a vampire and I reckon subtle ideas like that for homebrew will be some of those cool little ideas that percolate down and get the purists onboard.
The vanilla a1200 is a bit like that as well, in the way it has those subtle _"you know it is an amiga"_ aspects to it. So for example, take "blitter choking" in software (especially in games, like say Elite2Frontier). It is a "limitation" which means that coders with fast a CPUs in their amigas might abandon the usage of the blitter in the game (or software) they write. However, the fact that the a1200 does not allow you to change the clock speed of the FPU if you solder one on the mother board, means that your a1200 will still get some usage out of that blitter even though your cpu and FPU are chugging along at about 14MHz (ish). So either side of the CPU a small amount of help comes from the blitter and the FPU, just about taking the edge of and helping with some pre-calc maybe. With no on-cpu-cache in that, it helps against being stuck if you thereby cannot rely on cache-friendly routines in your code. Then if you want to flick a switch and activate a mega powerful trapdoor expansion containing a PPC and 68040/060 once the computer has been turned on and off again, you still can do. The 14MHz vanilla mode though means that the blitter being there makes sense and therefore the 2meg chip RAM limit is all part of that coding challenge. I mean you really know it is an amiga when these hard and fast standard expectations are there as the default. For example, see the new a1200 motherboards with the FPU instructions in the first minute of this video by chucky and mjnurney: ua-cam.com/video/KQLDi7Pm9D8/v-deo.html
To my mind, even though the FPU wasn't supplied wit the a1200, I think it being on the motherboard is a De Facto a1200 standard and it just needs a breakout containing a lever so you can literally disconnect the entire thing (pull-up resistors, caps and all) when you power off the machine on those days you wish it to not get in the way of trapdoor expansions' FPU accelerators.
Just to extend this enthusiastic comment a tiny bit more _(because I'm sure you're loving wearing matchsticks in your eyes right now - They're all the rage),_ it means that when low MHz (say 33MHz, 68030 like the MC68EC0300) CPUs intended for embedded solutions get used in homebrew handheld amigas, the software written to expect a modest amiga will run on that. I think "atari lynx" style handheld for the amiga (say called the "amiga Rock Lobster Shrimp") with specs like that could (should?) be made, and could use 8cm CDROM disk that hold about 200meg (or 180meg). These days a big fat lithium battery could handle it, totally. The lynx had such a batery addon but for D batteries. Definitely needs to happen. Hoik a vampire up that!
Reference to the MC68EC0300 notion is here:
www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/68030/
Awesome video....now I have a working A500 this would be my dream Amiga.....might have to sell both legs to be able to buy a vampire....but I'll be happy still lol
For all the hate - surely it comes down to personal taste? I've got a recapped A1200, that I bought way back when the Vampire V4 was suppose to come out a few years back now. I'm not knocking the time frame, I personally don't have a clue where to start creating such a device, never mind programming one up. So it takes as long, as it takes.
I just wish the team would at least hint more about if they're going to come out with new back plates that fit the A500/+, A600, A1200, so that all the different ports, drives, LEDs, PCMCIA can be used, with a standalone? Also, what are the benefits of sticking one in as a hat or expansion board, or not.
I understand they're making different versions to fit different machines, but surely it would be more cost effective to get people to just pull their motherboards, and replace it with a vampire board, rather than different hats or expansion boards? If I'm completely missing something where say, using an A1200 version would have benefits over an A500 version, or over a standalone - then please educate me? If people are really wanting to hold on to a chance of using a CRT, then why not build that into the standalone board or just have them use converters down from HDMI.
Since I've got a new case and keys coming, I'd kind of like to know the answer to some of those questions, so I know if I should sell off my A1200 or not, while I still can.
I think the new cases from A1200net and Stephen Jones are more the answer. I would hate to see people rip apart their original machines just to put a stand alone Vampire in them. I am all for the stand alone Vamp, but I wouldn't kill a perfectly good Amiga just to make a case for the Vampire. Great point about the CRT as well. Personally, I think LCD screens are 1/2 way to emulation for me anyway. When I exhibit my Amigas at shows it is CRT all the way.
I am surprised by how many questions are still raised, people still in essence asking "What is a Vampire"?
Vampire 2 has 128 Megabytes of RAM.
Vampire 4 has 512 Megabytes of RAM.
The Vampire 4 will be an accelerator for the A500, A600, A1000, A2000 and A1200 and a standalone model is coming out too. I think it will work in a CD32. More a question of will it fit in there. (A3000, A4000, not sure.)
Vampire 4 is about 20 to 27% faster than a Vampire 2.
Vampire 4 standalone is the "real deal" when it comes to AMIGA *as it should have been* from 1995 to ~2001.
1) What you get is 512 Megabytes that can be configured to *at least* the 3 options of 2 MB chip/510 fast, 256 Chip/256 FastRAM and 512 MB ChipRAM. (To change these options, it's most likely one would have to reboot the system.)
2) 16 instruction/data and 16 address registers, instead of 8 each on the old CPUs.
3) Full FPU. 68040 and 68060 had some of the FPU instructions in libraries that had to be loaded to do computations.
4) 32K instruction and 32K data caches (okay, it might be 16K, depending on how much extra functions they put into the FPGA as they may run out of room, but it still would be double that of the 68060 that has 8 K of each.)
5) Just about ALL of the instructions that the 68000, 68020, 68030, 68040 and 68060 CPUs have.
6) Some assembler commands are 64 bit.
7) AMMX. That is SIMD. The equivalent is SSE that was first introduced in 80586's (pentiums) by intel.
8) 720p resolution, and I think even 1080p.
9) 16 bit audio, through upgraded Paula custom chip. It is called Pamela.
10) Ethernet port and SD card slot. Ethernet speed, unknown. SD transfer rate of *at least* 20 MB per second should be possible.
11) Don't need a flicker fixer or scan doubler.
12) Standalone reliability. Doesn't have to rely on being connected to old, possibly dodgy hardware.
13) Boot up time of under 10 seconds!!!!!!!!! (No one knows yet what's possible.)
14) There are other subtle enhancements.
15) The DOOZY of them all is, IF you SUPPORT THIS EFFORT by buying any Vampires, it INCREASES the VERY GOOD CHANCE that they will EVENTUALLY make an ASIC of this CPU core!!!!!!
What does THAT mean? Well, *imagine* a Vampire (AMIGA) that runs at 800MHz, or 1.2GH, 1.8GHz..... *or even* 2.5 GHZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also, Hyperion is willing to entertain the thought of making AOS3.1.x that SUPPORTS 68080 instructions!!!!!!!
HOW AWESOME WOULD THAT BE????
AND IF THAT ISN'T ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Imagine if you will, the custom ASIC that is the Vampire, having 2 or 4 or 8 megabytes of L2 cache in it......
This is "impossible", and I mean IMPOSSIBLE by the "competition"............
The WHOLE operating system running INSIDE the CPU!
!!! W O W !!!
VAMPIRE (Amiga/AOS) F. T. W. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now all we need is super aga and a html5 browser. I heard there's a new RISC processor out. Maybe Vampire 5 will be based on that?
I am not sure, but yeah an HTML5 browser would be great!
Some questions:
Firstly, can the standalone version of the Vampire support ATX cases?
Secondly, what about the newer CD/DVD drives that do not support analog CDDA decoding anymore? Can the Vampire emulate analog CDDA support on drives that do not support it?
Thirdly, AGA supposedly no longer supports Chunky Graphics mode. Will Vampire re-add Chunky Graphics support to AGA?
Lastly, can PowerPC 603/604 co-processor emulation (ie BlizzardPPC/CyberPPC) be added in the near future?
No ATX cases but no doubt an adapter can be developed for 3d printing on thingiverse. I used a classic CDROM drive for this demo and modern day DVD drives didn't work. That is not to say modern day DVD Drives won't work if you have the right driver. The IDE 97fix software controls the CD-ROM access in this demo, you can use whatever cd driver you like. AGA in this demo is an alpha demo, in the final release AGA, Pamlea 16 bit audio, S-AGA (think RTG graphics with chunky modes) and FPUand 68080 with AMMX will all live in the FPGA. No plans for 603/604. The intent here is to use FPGA tech to eventually surpass PPC in every way as the designers of this project believe the 68K architecture to be a better design than PPC. So no PPC support planed or implied ever.
Well, it looks like the proper Amiga hardware here is just used as a simple keyboard ^^
I guess that's make the Vampire standalone more appealing (but still very expensive thou) ^^
Yeah, that is why they call it the "Vampire" It is cool to have a powerful A500 and run it in a real machine, but I totally understand why someone may prefer the standalone.
I would have loved to attend this. Not much in terms of user groups that I have seen in NJ (where I am located). How do I find out when the next event takes place?
AFVP
Another fantastic video production!!!
Thanks Amiga Bill is a pro
Thanks VincentGR! Love you man!
Watching tonight Bill.
I haven't died buddy. Just busy xxxx 😘
No worries Anthony. Busy is good!
so any news on the vampire standalone? i'm really itching to get one but news about it sorta disappeared..
Yes. Standalone Vampires are now booting, but I don't know of a release date yet.
@@TheGuruMeditation cheers for the reply, i'll just have to be patient for a while longer. : )
@@bamdadkhan Yeah, it is coming, but like a lot of this stuff it is a labor of love and not coming from a large company so we just have to be patient. I am sure the standalone will be the next release from them, then the Vamp 1200. But those are just my guesses. That isn't info from them.
I was hoping you were going for a Monty Python joke with the lapel mic on a stick. Know what I mean, nudge nudge? Crazy to see an old A500 with a transplanted new FPGA brain!
There are lots of new cool projects out for the blessed A500. Fun times.
So what's the point in even connecting this to an Amiga though? It turns the A500 into an external keyboard.
I dunno Karl is someone would have offered me an AGA and FAST cpu upgrade for the A500 back in the day I would have loved it. The A500 casework is a nostalgic touch! The blood still runs through the veins of the old hardware in some crazy way. At the end of the day this is complete insanity as a PC with emulation trounces many FPGA solutions.
Some people will like the experiences of pimping their Amiga. It is a different experience sitting at an actual Amiga with floppies, original mouse, controllers, etc... vs. a standalone board with a new keyboard, mouse, and so on. But keeping your Amiga original and going with a standalone V4 when it comes out is a very viable option as well. I will likely get a standalone and put it in one of the new cases.
I think a standalone board with a 5 pin header to connect an A500 keyboard, and 34 pin floppy drive controller is the way forward now.
[At the end of the day this is complete insanity as a PC with emulation trounces many FPGA solutions.]
Manuel Jesus, I respectfully DISAGREE!!!!
The emulators run the CPU, then the FPU, then one custom chip, then another, then another then back to the CPU.
It "sort of" works. There are hiccups, as well, as win-dohs does vile and corrupt activities in the background too. I'm not talking, spying on your activities, but some OS junk that *personal computer users* aren't interested in.
And to top it off, NO emulator does AMMX, 64 bit assembler commands, increased sized data/instruction caches, extra registers, OoO (who knows what else I'm missing) and our QUEEN enhancement Super-AGA!
Vampire, short of going ASIC at 1.8, 2.2 or 2.7 GHz is EVERYTHING that I've been waiting for since 1995!!!!!!!
(Oh, it's VERY sad to not have a full 2GB of RAM!!!!)
Karl Hamilton Exactly. At the end, you better use only the case, to avoid relying on an aging motherboard just for the inputs. And by the way, what's the point of using a ball mouse in 2018? And what's the point of using a yellowed case too when there are brand new cases out there?
This model business is based on the frustration of Amiga fans due to the lack of competitivity and reactivity that killed C=
Why don't you just sell complete systems in brand new cases, along with a brand new fpga motherboards with all the modern inputs, Eth, USB, SD and the old external floppy one, joystick et voilà.
Wait. I know why. Because it will cost twice the price of a modern PC without the capabilities. Crap.
Still watching - I'm a little surprised there isn't a SATA Port on the Vampire V4
Guys. I ha w an Amiga 500 board rev6 with bad RAM and roken Kickstart chip. I could get this vampire and it would work? As the vampire has just taken over
4:42 bottom left.
Is that a pioneer sa88/9800
WOW I am impressed. It is a Pioneer SA-7800. Amazing eye. You can see photos of the room here: facebook.com/pg/thegurumeditation/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2696914840348433
@@TheGuruMeditation wasn't too sure as It's far and blurred.
I've got a new old stock boxed sa-9800.
Bloody amazing amplifier
Thanks for the reply much appreciated
@@abc-ni9uw cheers. I am blown away that you could recognize it there. Sadly my dad had to retire this semester so we are trying to find homes for all this stuff. This pioneer amp went to our great friend Thierry who now has it up an running in his home!
@@TheGuruMeditation sorry to hear that.
Yes I've always had a keen eye.
The second I spotted it i had to ask
Would be cool if it had built into it the CD32 FMV module but with mpeg2 support for DVD playback over that optical drive they have plugged into the IDE there.
As for the sidecar expansions, the ActionReplay would perhaps be a thing people would like to use. For that matter, FPGA accelerators can do cool things (sometimes) like having insane amounts of chip-RAM (way above 2meg, be it 128meg or higher one day). Rumour has it, even 512meg. With any such large amount of FPGA chipRAM tricks, having game savestates as per action replay could be really cool since they can not only be loaded in all at once fore multiple instances but you could actually have many instances of multiplier-tree instances (and custom chipsets) popping into existence in the array architecture. So you don't just switch between savestates (even though that too would be awesome) but you can switch between instances of (almost entire) amigas. This would be great for development testing but also would be great for a whole new genre of games and software could take advantage of it.
So you might switch from one game "level" to another but actually it is a whole new savestate already waiting, and you may possibly also have a different chipset and/or microarchitecture in that "game level" too. Normal non-games "boring" software (lol) could use it too. If a video-toaster render farm could use it, that'd be neat. Not sure if a dual cpu amiga could be done? Can it? the Mac did that with two 040 chips.
As an aside, when new CD32 boards are made, it would be cool to see mounting holes around the 68020 CPU so you could "vampire on" an accelerator like the a600 did. It just kinda sets a precendent.
On any amiga (using aboot floppy or boot CDROM to piggy bck), booting games-cartridges from the parallel port would be a nice default standard so that all amigas could use it as long as they had a good enough ieee on the CPU (say for example minimum 68030 and maybe with FPU). I now there are faster ways beyond parallel, but it'd still be cool.
The Amiga S-AGA is FAAAAAAARRRRRRRR from over!!!!!!!!!!!!
@Atheist7, Indeed. It would be cool of the FMV cartridge could be made for a1200 (with the akiko gate array dumped into FPGA for good luck too) although with the FMV cartridge supporting mpeg2 also. That way, when such a cartridge is used in a CD32 or a1200, some games or software (just some of them, mind you) could use the mp3 playback capabilities of the FMV cartridge (which obviously can play mpeg2) and also those games or software could use the FMV cartridge to handle jpeg. So a game like Myst could use that but perhaps even some 3D games could use jpeg compression on textures, although it might really be a proof of concept for those depending on how practical it is. But then again, if a vampire is running of the CPU on an a1200 or cd32, the trapdoor and/or sx32-pro bay can be free for that (mpeg2 compatible) "futuristic FMV" cartridge.
You made a good 3D model a1200 case btw.
Someone named Marko Hirv made that "Amiga Fantasy" case.
I don't know who he might be on Amiga.Org or AmigeWorld.net. Seems that he isn't around anymore, and that would be, if even he ever was.
Anything for my Amiga 2000? Any SATA support instead of IDE?
Play Doom after 25 Years - That is Innovation! But I love my old Computers!
I love the old stuff too, but it is neat that people are still making things to update them.
Similar to FPGA concept, is anyone exploring the use of video cards to accelerate Amiga emulation? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_graphics_processing_units
That would be cool.
So whats the A500 actually doing?
Anthony! You're back buddy. Missed you. Hope you're well.
Great video V4 seems good.
Like AmigaONE I am still not sure what the goal is? Are the systems going to be pushed retail to compete in a modern market or is it just a rich guys hobby?
When they sell enough of them, they will go for ASIC.
Imagine, Vampire running at 1.8 (or more) GIGAHERTZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Anthony is like the Loch Ness Monster. You never know when he will appear! I doubt if they plan on these being a big commercial hit. More of a niche product for the retro community, but who knows what will happen.
@@TheGuruMeditation I'd still love for it to go back into mainstream. That would be crazy. But I guess we can all dream.
It would be really cool it it was, but mainstream would probably be something like an AmigaMini
The Guru Meditation ... If you're going mainstream, maybe it could use a product like Siri / Alexa. So, what would we call our amiga? Surely not Eva because when it crashed, instead of a guru meditation it might sing "Don't Cry for me Argentina". 🤩
Hi I am an Amiga user in CT. I have a 1000, and 500. I want one of these Vampire cards!!! I want to wait for ver4 however. Do you know how much and when this will be available? Or do I go for the v2 now? Love your channel and love the Amiga! Regards Flash.
Thanks Flash! The v4 exists, but I have no idea when it will be available for the public. I think it should be on the sooner side, but I don't know. We may have a V4 standalone demo soon in Westchester County NY if you are interested
Amithlon on x86 on AMD and Radeon 6790HD will be killing machine. Or Mac mini G4 moana?
I know this is a silly question, but any chance of A1000 support? I know there's not a lot of difference between A500 and A1000, but I admit the extra space inside the A1000 case would be welcome, plus the whole being able to pull the A1000 back out of storage. I have a Phoenix accelerator in it at present with a whopping fast 14Mhz 68010 processor (and a math co as I recall) and 1.5M of fast RAM, but yeah, it doesn't get much use. :P So an A1000 version would GREATLY encourage me to use it again.
Installation in the A1000 requires CPU risers. AGA core is the best thing for an A1000 as it replaces the 512 Agnus with a 2MB AGA Alice. It makes your beloved A1000 come full circle and become the Alpha and the Omega of the Amiga universe.
The funny thing is, that this video demonstrates the main problem of The Vampire's AGA skills perfectly:
There is no single AGA game worth playing. Yes, some of the later games, making use of the PPC and AGA or retargable graphics are kinda technically impressive for the Amiga, but you always can play the better and original games in dosbox or ePSXe.
I'm saying this from the enthusiast perspective of owning an A4000T with PPC 604e/68060 128MB RAM, Cybervision PPC, 4GB Harddisk, soundcard and all that stuff back then... So I know what is was worth. The only use was for applications, I could do video digitizing, burn CDs, digitze sounds, and listen to an mp3 all at once, when carefully choosing tools. But gamewise it didn't have an advantage vs any other Amiga (maybe equipped with a hard disk, for the few later AmigaDOS compatible games with many disks). I had Wipeout 2097 and some other of the rare games that could actually make decent use of the hardware, but none of these was at least same quality as the PC or Playstation original counterpart.
I think there are some really cool AGA games, but if OCS games are all you want then an Amiga 600 with CF to IDE adapter or a 500 with ACA500+ is a great option. CD32 with a CF card would be great too, and possibly the best Amiga gaming setup, but if you don't like AGA games then probably not worth it. Man, I would love to have your A4000T setup. That is a beast!
ElMariachi you have a point. The 1989 PC 256 color standard didn't hit Amiga until 1992. Three years too late if you ask me.
I agree 98% were stinkers & shovelware, but Banshee was decent, made good use of the color depth, and had lovely fog effects. A touch too unforgiving today, though. Civ AGA, SlamTilt and UFO were fun. And I would easily play the AGA versions of EotB I and II over the VGA versions, with better music and an automap facility.
But on the whole yeah, AGA wasn't the boon to gaming that we wanted it to be.
Always been rather fond of Banshee and a spot of Guardian, myself
Neither of those work, I think when Banshee works I will crack open a bottle of Champagne
Granted there is no performance gain to use SATA, someone should still come out with a SATA option, IDE drives aren't manufactured anymore nor are IDE CD/DVD ROM drives. So it would be more a compatible issue thing I guess. :)
The thing is all the people saying this is not an Amiga do you think Commodore would still be running the same Hardware they made back in the early 90s if they were still around they would evolve eventually all the original Amigas will be harder and harder to maintain so Omega in whatever form needs to move forward . Who’s to say there won’t be a vampire 567or 8 And I don’t see anybody else stepping up to make a 68k Great again
Mr. Dave Haynie gave a nod of approval in an Amiten TV video interview a couple of years ago. That is good enough for me in terms of an endorsement. The vibe was #1 If Commodore would have had this tech back then they would have ruled. and #2 USING the FPGA is the right way to make a modern day classic Amiga implementation with 68k.
Great video guys
Thanks so much Pete. Appreciate the support as always!
So good I watched it twice! :-) I am fortunate enough to be able to have backed Stephen Jones Checkmate 1500 kickstarter (I loved the live stream you hosted for that BTW, really enjoyed it), so I'll have a case coming next year in classic white... which is super sweet! The problem I have is, what do I put in it? I change my mind almost by the day LOL. After watching this, I am tempted to get a V4 for it. The issue is I have an A1200, and I haven't heard much about availability of the 1200 version other that it will probably be later than the 500 / 600 version? So i'm not sure it'll be ready in time?
If you get the standalone Vampire 4, you will have the FASTEST bootup Amiga in existence.... also, no interference of old, slow, possibly flaky hardware making it look like the Vampire is not working right, maybe.
What's the cost?i ve an old Amiga 500 1.3v in my home
18:56 - I feel like there's some issues with that HD setup he has going on there.... It's not just CRT magic that stretches the video, you can hook that sucker up to a VCR and it's going to be recorded in 4:3, the video going out should not be that wide in either PAL or NTSC. Plenty of people have newer monitors showing old stuff in the correct aspect ratios (not enough though), there's just something wrong somewhere in that setup, for sure, and I really hope there's a way to fix it and that he's not just going to claim magic from a CRT.
the screen is being stretched to 16:9 from 4:3 and being upscaled to hd. Aside from that nothing else is going on. It looks better when run on a 4:3 aspect ratio monitor using hdmi.There are better scalers for sure. But anytime I take an Amiga NTSC or Pal scree and scale it to a HD screen that runs at say 1920X1080 naïve res there is a hit in quality due to scaling, This is a known artifact of using HD era LCD screens with NTSC / PAL SD gfx. ECS and AGA screens look better on a CRT PVM and 1084. Lots of folks confirm this. There is also a bit of lag when using the LCD but its not a deal breaker. When using the RRG core that runs at higher resolutions closer to the NATIVE resolution of the LCD screen the display quality improves as there is less scaling.
DOOM AGA on a 500 with 16-bit jams = LEGIT! Great content. Vampire tech makes the original hardware a dream machine IMO. I love it when Manny name-drops Neo Geo
Thanks for the kind words pishbot! Really appreciate all the support. Yeah, Manny loves his Neo Geo, LOL!
@@TheGuruMeditation come on we all wished our Amiga games looked as good as neo geo stuff ... I know I did...;)
@Manuel Jesus Ha ha! They are great looking games for sure, although I was wishing for ROTT, Descent, and Full Throttle at the time!
I really hope you can fit this inside the Amiga 1000, the 500 is such a desk hog and not my thing at all.
Awesome stuff!
Just one question which is kinda important to audio users
(and people that need hardcore-microseconds-fast game-reaction-speeds):
Is there more latency in audio output due to the fact it outputs thru HDMI?
I use a scart to hdmi scaler to run the RTG core and Amiga RGB core. There IS a slight lag when using the scaler. This has not been a deal breaker for me. I have never heard a team member complain about latency using HDMI.
Is there a complete new Amiga motherboard + CPU or is it a Raspberry Pi the best hardware you can get for Amiga?
Sadly one does not exist. I use a RaspberryPi, but you can also use something called a MiSTer which is a FPGA board and supposedly the closest thing to a real Amiga from what I have heard. You can also use other, more powerful than the Pi, ARM devices.
In terms of the Amiga 500, I'm wondering if this could be made into an expansion device like the GVP or A590? From what I read you can completely override the internal 68000
This goes on the inside int the 68k socket so it wont run as a slap on the side accelerator unless someone made a 68k CPU holder for the slap on the side expansion port. But I don't know if that would work.
About the fifth time I am watching this video. Good stuff.
Aw, thanks so much for the positive feedback. Much appreciated!
Hold on a second. Can I use this as a 16 bit soundcard with OctaMED Soundstudio then?
Good question. I am not sure. Hopefully Manny can answer when he reads the comments
Curious to know this too...
Cool dudes....great video
Thanks
Thanks David!
Where can I get info on WAUG? The website seems to be a work in progress. I live in Lancaster, PA and would love to come to meetings in Westchester if you're having them.
That is a great question. I simply haven't had time to make a WAUG website but it is on my to do list. The best way is to get into our Google group where we discuss if we will meet that month or not. Would you like to join the group?
yes
Awesome dude, Cheers
Thanks!
is there scanline emulation via hdmi , I have a rev 5 a500 does this vampire v4 overcome the chipram limitation?
That is an excellent question. I was thinking the same when I was editing it. I didn't notice them at the meeting, but I was mostly looking through my camera so I wouldn't have noticed. Manny supplied me with the screen recordings from the Vampire so I will ask him. I THINK it may be the recording software he used because there was also a red flashing "REC" light in the upper left corner of the recording outside the picture area that I cropped out, but I am not 100% sure. I will ask him.
Yes scanlines are turned on and 4mb chip ram cores have been tested. More chip ram is possible
How to get more information on the Vampire v4 ??
Without new AGA software I will stick to retropi emulation but nice work.
Hi true I think AGA compatibility is really for legacy software. Newer software uses RTG standards. Thanks for the support.
Agree, creating a new base standard and also a platform to move forward with.
AMIGA FOREVER
AMIGAAAA!!!!
Have you reviewed the vampire v4 standalone?
No, we haven't yet
@@TheGuruMeditation look forward to your detailed review
I ❤️ this project.
Amiga best strategy games....only strategy players can keep an online game alive,lije Game of War "GOW"
So will there be Vampire that works without an orginal amiga? I might want to get that.
There will be a Standalone version, the one for the A500 is going to be released first though. An A1200 version is in a long term plan.
Yep, exactly what Roy said!
Sweet, thanks :D
It will be the FASTEST BOOTING personal computer that there is.... The standalone!!!!!!!!!
@Sjarken www.winuae.net/
Looks good, but what about the production? Will it be possible to get your hands on one, or will it be like the other iterations - a severely slow and limited production?
German factory handled production and the production by some other team members. (not Majsta)
No one knows when they will become available.
It is *anywhere* from November of this year (2019), though that's unlikely, to summer 2019. :-((((
They have ONE overriding obstacle. Money.
But, if one were to invest, there really wouldn't be a substantial profit to be gleaned from it, unless the buyers are prepared to pay premium prices.
Small production runs, high prices, desperate customers...... Amiga is stuck in the mud (and lots of FUD, by the looks of it too.)
I was in queue 2 years for the vampire v2 for the amiga 600. It just seems ridiculous promoting something that most people will never be able to buy.
@@cherrystarscollide too bad about your wait. I suggest contact Majsta direct if you are still interested. It took 4 months to get my v600 and a year to get my V4 and I am a team member.
@@Atheist7 money isn't an obstacle as they are made in small batches. Can't give a date in release. I think your timelines are realistic. There was a one year delay as the migration from C3 to C5 took longer due to a pesky bug. One plus here is that core updates are free. So those that purchased a v500/v600 can now download latest core and aga alpha 3 for free. You don't have to pay for a driver update or core update. Vampire core updates are hardware upgrades in a software download. In my case Amiga is my hobby so I am willing to wait. Core dev is time consuming and it's literally guys doing core dev and testing on spare time. That being said progress is surprisingly good given the constraints.
To the Apollo team and other REALLY adorable smart guys, who Love -d(b)oing- great stuff. I was wondering whether it would be an idea, to replace Denice with a part (of) expander board that can provide high res 3D graphics through the video output of the main-board and create an adapter (like the old school Amiga expansion adapters) to change 25 pins to DVI and HDMI? Also to put a SATA controller there and the necessary powermanagement for SATA, by which now slim drive DVD writers and SSD's can be connected. Where this board can connect to expansion headers of the Vampire board? This would make Amiga like the most awesome PC ever created, don't u tink? :D (in fact; it might even be possible to place a thin board on top of all chip sockets and (re)place them so, that original or new tech can be switched between, Like a full size daughter-board )
Oh man, that would be cool!
just one word: wow!
The Vampire is pretty amazing!
Great video and hardware. Will there be a way to force 4:3 aspect ratio? A lot of Tv's have 'aspect ratio' settings, but it seems rare on PC monitors. I would like to play in original aspect and not 16:9 or 16:10. Work bench in widescreen will be useful though.
Use a TV with switchable aspect ratio so you can get 4:3.
@@manueljesus3147 yes, but can't the team implement something for monitors?
I don't think I am alone in having my AMIGA setup next to my PC. My PC monitor has VGA/DVI/HDMI but no 4:3 mode/switch. So I would have to use/buy a dedicated HDMI TV :(
One thing to test is the Vampire's HDMI output, is it 576p 50Hz? (PAL) I have an FPGA device (crowdfunded - FleaOhm) running a Minimig Core. It's ouput is 576p @ 50Hz and the 3 Samsung LCD TV's in my house will not recognize the HDMI signal (Our Panasonic TV is ok).
I don't know if the Vampire is outputting a native Amiga resolution over HDMI or it is scaled/upscaled.
Is it possible for the testers to check it works on Samsung TV's? I am happy to assist if required. I guess not an issue with RTG resolutions as you can run at screen sizes which are compatible with our new digital age!
Thanks
P.S. I like your presentations and I think you are a good speaker/ambassador for Vampire.
@@TheSeanBean I have seen team members use a cheap HDMI to vga a adapter if I remember correctly.
Great to see progress with AGA en CD32. Which type of Dell monitor is it.
Deull u2410
What about a Vampire card with a 16 or 32 core PowerPC processor will maybe need a good quality heatsink and fan but will make games run smoother and video editing complementing the Video Toaster hardware as some AMIGA users will want it as it will also speed up raytracing.
The core developer doesn't really believe in PowerPC. They are more interested in continuing with the 68 range and updating that platform with modern development techniques.
That is unfortunate as I don't think that the 680XX will be around for much longer and that is why Apple Corp initially moved to the PowerPC before moving to the INTEL range of chips.
The 68K range has been gone for a while now. New old stock or recycled (rescued) CPU's are used for accelerators as far as I know. The 68080 used in the V2 and V4 is a recreation of the original 68000-68080 range with some extras thrown in. It's goal is full compatibility and is continuously updated by the team. The 68080 already offers a great range of compatibility. The ultimate goal is to get the 68080 on an ASIC and run it at faster speeds one day.
how come using ide is not better to use sata as getting ide device is only going to get harder to get hold of