I had ARs for my C64s and Amigas. I actually blew my SID chip on the C64 as i plugged the AR in while it was running as i didn't wanna start loading the game again lol.
Superb review ! Once I finish tinkering with my A1200 setup, I'm after a vampire and a 600 for my self. AGA support has me sold. The 600 was the machine I had as a boy. My Dad got one for the kids to keep our sticky fingers off his 1200 :)
Thanks for uploading this Dan, as a lifelong Amiga fan it is great to see people still developing hardware and software for it. The Vampire 2 chip looks amazing and really pushes the hardware way above it's original design. Unfortunately I don't have an Amiga A600 but I do have 2 x A1200 so I look forward to a A1200 Vampire being released some time in the future.
I PM'd and 're-sold' a palette of 20 A500's, one was dead, one had no voltage to RF. The other 18 sold on for £200 a pop. When you go to work one working as a field service Engineer and find they are selling everything one Monday morning, you think on your feet. My bro was working for a company in East Anglia that feel on it's sword. I took RF'less 500 + Philips CM8833, got an A590 +2Mb +20MB Connor drive + 1/4 tape drive on SCSI box [ KNOWS TAR very well ;0) ] and started writing 100% portable UNIX code. I ended up a coder because of this machine. The g/f used to call it 'the wife'. Great work Konrad :0D
My first computer was a TI99/4a My second was a Commodore 64. I've always wanted a Amiga but was just to poor to get one but I always followed there progress. Now we're in the 21st century and I still love Amiga! I never got to own one but now times has changed. I have the fastest gaming processor today (8700k) and the best graphics card. (1080 ti). Loved the video, took me back to the days when I longed for one. Thanks for sharing this video!
Amiga was my first computer in 1988 I was so impressed with performance and software can do. Shame that lost behind competitors. But still have the lovers. VIVA AMIGA
Never owned an Amiga and grew up with all the PC stuff. But I still can't stop watching these videos. I very much like the idea of the Vampire, shows how much of a following these things have!
Mac running on Amiga **mind blown**... I've actually sold my A1200 in anticipation of getting one of these instead. I always thought Gloom and Alien Breed 3D II were AGA only.
I wonder if this will lead to a small industry of software and games designed to run only on amiga upgraded with these cards. Amigas might become usable modern machines for browsing etc.!
I'm sure it is possible. Anywhere there is money to be made, there will be time and effort applied. I don't see any large software houses dedicating resources to it but I'm quite certain the "home brew" scene could end up developing some thing.
V. Sigma, the 1200 version is being worked on, and it's way more powerful. Also... doesn't the 1200 _come_ with an 020 on board? Oh wait, sorry, it's an EC020, which is even worse. So, I don't quite understand what you're getting at with that... What does it matter? Or do you mean an accelerator using an 020 or 030?
Awesome video, as a sidenote and updating the news a little bit, the A600 is now not the fastest... The A500 is now the fastest due to the new IDE implementation. The Vampire 500 is achieving IDE (CF card) reads of up to 11.5MB/sec which is 4 times faster than a standard a600/a1200. As we progress we are trying to improve so hopefully the specs will improve accordingly.. (i really don't understand the thumbs down you received, was it something you said ??... Kipper2k
Hey Dan, which classic WB version would you recommend to use (clean install) with vampire2 on a600? I have p96 version but I get some intuition messages and the HDMI out goes black for a second or two usually when I start one of games included in classic WB. It just seems as Gold2 Core is bit unstable or my a600 is allocating or looking for video memory for any new opened app (opening new windows) other that that if I just start the computer after clearing intuition messages and don't do much it's stable but it does freezes sometimes mostly then amiga is accessing CF card. Tried 4 different CF cards too but seems like a G2 core is unstable... Thank you! Great videos, learned a lot from you! Cheers!
Damn. Would love to see how the Vampire does in 3D rendering. I used to do 3D animations on my 600HD back in the day, this card would have made things a lot easier.
I have to say, I was blown away by this video!!!! I can honestly say this - I have an A1200 with the ACA1233 accelerator, and the Indiv Mk2 Scandoubler, and there is no way I can run Gloom like you can with the Vampire 2! And to be able to run the Demos which I simply cannot run, due to the 030 on my accel card is just amazing! Same for the game and other apps too. Maybe I should just sell my ACA1233 and Scandoubler now, and put that money aside for when they release the Vampire for the A1200!! The specs you mentioned sound INSANE!! Very good video and well done! Would be nice to learn some more from you about the applications I saw on your WB 3.9 setup. I didnt even know WB 3.9 would install on a A600 as I know you need the 3.1 Rom in the A1200 for that!
I've only followed the Vampire at a cursory level (no A600 here), and damn. I'm seriously impressed with the performance. Certainly so when seeing Alien Breed 3D II ('cause even under *UAE, I never got it feeling solid). Roll on the A500/A1200 versions. I'd certainly be tempted to rip the accelerator out of my A1200 for one of those. ^_^
Dan I must say the A600 was great for me, I really like its small form factor, which actually was really well suited to the compact 'in bedroom' gaming market of the time.
AdiSneakerFreak ditto. Hundreds of hours in my bedroom pinball fantasies, mega ball, llamatron, populous, assassin se, goal!, and I even did reports and made spreadsheets of which drawer each of my cds were in!
I have that same Logitech speaker system with the big knob! What a different world we could be living in if Amigas had been this powerful back in the 90s. Those FPS games are silky smooth, very nice indeed. That Payback intro was pretty damn exciting too.
i see it .. dont need to go back .. i was a original amiga nerd back in the big days of the amiga .. demoscene and everything. ;) AND I DO SEE IT! its unbelieveable .. and did he mention that he has a 4gb card? wtf? what type of card is it? and how much does it cost? must be something arround 20k or even more. who needs that much space anyway? this has to be a fake or he mispoken or so. if not .. this has to be magic or something supernatural (maybe he sould his soul to the devil!?) and need this dude needs to call me too. he really must be from the future ;)
They wouldn't have been able to replicate it. The technology was not there. Yeah, they would poop thier pants to see running on an any ECS hardware. But OS was only 3.0. SD memory? Etc. There's a reason we didn't have a PlayStation 4 back in 1995.
Also for perspective, my $300 cell phone hustle is a quad-core running 1.5 gigahertz... It's not much bigger than two 3.5 inch floppies stack on top of each other.... It's more powerful than any Amiga out there and it fits in my hand. I love my Amigas but I like the new technology too.
I think FPGA chips are a great deal for the future of retro imitation/recreation. Imagine a all in one System for the living room with original and up to date features at the same time...
Great video, really well presented. The Vampire 2 is quite amazing. This is how the Amiga should ALWAYS have been. If this chip had come as standard back in 1992, the Amiga would surely have reigned supreme, and everyone on the internet would probably be using Amigas today!
I remember this one video game, they would sing this weird song "are you there space station amigos oh" (Help needed finding this rare and Fun classic game)
Vampire's two biggest achievements - a from scratch 68K compatible superscalar core, and actually extended the modes of the Amiga chipset (Example: Vampire supports chunky AND planar -- in a way that's compatible with the original chipset). This is a real 'postview' of how the Amiga could have advanced back in the day had Motorola not given up on 68K (both overpricing 68K in the late 80s, and underdeveloping it in the early 90s).
They had to give up with the 68k line or Intel would have left them behind almost immediately with the Pentium range (you might as well say the 486). PC's only advance because Intel keep putting old CPU technology to bed quite quickly forcing users to keep buying the latest processors.
I respectfully disagree - the 68K is a CISC design that could have been extended just as well as x86. The 68060 was superscalar, just like the Pentium, with the 68060's main weakness being they hadn't fully pipeliend the FPU like Intel had the Pentium.. OTOH the Pentium pipelined FPU cost a lot of die space and at this point Motorola was already committed (thanks to moneys from IBM, Apple) to PowerPC. The Pentium also benefited from constant investment in fab technology that Motorola didn't push as hard. Though my original reference though was that Motorola priced the 68020 and later processors much higher than the equivalent x86 chips during the time period that could have helped push up performance on all 68K platforms.
I remember when the 68060 accellerator card was released for the Amiga 4000, it was the worlds fastest Macintosh for a while :) Would have been nice to see some rendering in Real 3D or Imagine.
So if the board is doing CPU, FPU, memory, graphics, sound and storage, what is the Amiga doing? Is it fair to call this an accelerator? It sounds like the Amiga is just giving you keyboard, mouse and joystick.
Yeah it's almost like an Amiga "emulator" that plugs directly into the Amiga 600. If you're a "purist" you might feel that it's cheating, since FPGA is essentially hardware-based emulation. You could just install UAE on any modern PC and get even better performance from software-based emulation. That said, if you're looking for an accelerator for your A600, this probably makes more sense than a more expensive accelerator with a "real" 68030 or similar, unless you absolutely must have "real" hardware.
FPGA is not emulation, it is chip design, you change wires between logic units and change the role of those units, that means you design a chip that can be converted into an ASIC, a regular chip.
You have a valid point, but what is more important ? The result or the means ? This looks like a lot of performance for not a lot of money, putting all the features of the larger Amigas into the cute tiny one. What's not to like ? I'm tempted to build and Amiga 600 laptop with one.
Creating hardware, chips by community, is a leap forward. Open hardware can become a thing in the future. But also, everything in FPGA is technically running parallel, not trying to match state of the emulated machine discretely,, so it is more or less the real thing.
You could make the same argument about an A4000 with a CPU card, graphics card, soundcard, scandoubler and SCSI card in its Zorro slots (even more so for things like a Cyberstorm Mk3/PPC which has its own ports for CyberVision graphics card and its own SCSI controller). Personally, I don't think it's worth arguing about - each person can decide if this is something they are excited by, or not :)
- I had an ZX Spectrum 48K, then an Timex Sinclair 2068, then an Atari 130XE, then an Amiga 600, then an Amiga 1200 AGA across that years. - And since my friends had all the other "dream" machines, like the Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Atari 600XL, Atari 520ST, Atari 1024FM, Amiga 4000, etc... I was very luck to see, play games and code on all those machines too... I´ll never forget those days... Was a real magical era! - Can´t forget ours firsts multiplayer games (everyone on the same computer)... And (mostly) because playing the "Barbarian" and "Skidmarks" with my friends, we destroyed so many many tvs, computers, keyboards, joysticks... Unforgettable days !!!... eheheheh... :) - My favourite software ever, was not a game, was "OctaMED" on the Amiga! :D
To note: The 600 is actually a shrunk A500+, not an A500. The A500+ apparently only came out a couple of months before the A600 was released, based on the A3000 hardware.
Another great video Dan and well done for not running Doom! That POP sprite looks great running Fusion. Hopefully they can get all the video outputs out of HDMI soon. The A1200 one almost seems like a dream come true lol
Best computer of its time, I still have my Amiga 040 and an A500. I loved the programming environment, programming for the Amiga was always more fun than for a PC. I must add though that seeing the Vampire2 run a MAC emulator faster than a MAC is zero surprise, The 68k MACs left a lot of the graphics manipulation to be handled in SW which seriously took the performance edge off. Seeing a 68k processor that has access to the Amiga's graphics acceleration HW and so lightening the load on the CPU, of course it's going to do well. When you emulate an Amiga on a PC all of the machine code has to be interpreted and converted to Pentium machine code which is an enormous performance hit. Add to that the image bit mapping between PC and Amiga are very different that adds additional challenges.
Holly shit. When I had a Lucas Board for my A1000 built I thought that was fast. (68020 with an 881 or 882). There was also a Frances board that would have held 4 MB of 32 bit memory as well but the guy in Ontario Canada no longer made those. Amazing to see that the Amiga is still going strong. Almost makes me want to get one again.....
I am working on the first ever amiga 600 laptop built from original amiga 600. it is the first to use an original pc laptop case, it uses a pc case and its matching pc lcd monitor. it has working laptop buttons for sound and monitor functions attached to the lcd controller, sounds: uses the pc speakers and a headphone socket. i have also managed to build in a keyboard that fits in the hole for the pc one, it also has a vga out for a monitor and it supports the vampire 2 and the aca620ec and the indivision ecs. its supports df0: as an external device. it has 2 fans for cooling, one under, one on the back. this was a 2 year project, i will make only 5 additional to sell! watch out for me on youtube!
@ 23:30 I must admit I fall into that camp. I loved my A1200 back in the day and I still have it in its original desktop dynamite box as well as all the big box games I bought. But this seems purely academic when the cheapest phones on the market are faster and more capable. I would rather see these machines preserved in an original condition with minimal interference to keep them going so that they can still be enjoyed.
question how programmable are the FPGAs? video mentions they are "hardware emulators" could one be reconfigured to "emulate" x86 cpu or don't they work that way?
I'm curious if you tried out any of the old rendering software such as sculpt or imagine and what kind of speed you are getting out of those using the highest rendering settings?
Nothing compares to the joy you can get from adding power to an existing older system I really want someone to do the same with the 128k Spectrum or indeed the 16k/48k speccies where you just shove an expansion port accelerator in the back and make it fly as fast as possible, there are already WI FI devices made for the Spectrum too but an FPGA expansion module would put a smile on many Spectrum owners face :) I'm off to search for an A1200 and look at what Vampire 2 will bring to it although I need to set it up to read SD cards etc and a PCMIA Ethernet card I will be busy next year catching back up with A1200 I miss mine a lot
Will the Vampire 2 for A1200 (when released) up the Amigas chipmem? Many WHDLoad games suffer from low framerates because they're hardcoded to use the limited 1MB chipmem on the original motherboard, which is kinda ruining the experience even though you have a lot of Fastmem available.
Hi Dan, is there any news on about what you said about that Vampire card WITH an AGA chipset on it? Would be great if that card came out. Would it still be possible to go back to kickstart 1.3 for games that are older and only work on kickstart 1.3?
If you want the whole package wait for the Vampire V4 and yes from Gold2.7 core there is a MapRom feature so you can go back to KS 1.3 or even map an Atari ST ROM!
This is incredible does this turn the A600 into an AGA 1200 or do they do a Vampire for the A1200 too? I want one I wouldn't mind souping up a CD32 as well tbh
Hi Dan, Vamp is great indeed! One more thing: is this the RTG-patched version of AB3DII? And if yes, can you please tell me where did you find it? Was it in the Zone perhaps? Thanks!
doesn't it defeat the purpose of running an older computer?. if you want that speed, ram and display run a pc, the "fun" part of using older hardware is running it as it is and seeing the stuff as it was, on crt monitors. this is like an overclocked emulator.
A retro purist would only use original hardware. it's only a few games that benefit from a card that costs a lot of money, so a retro enthusiast with more money than sence might be interested.
@Pelger, You pose a good question. It doesn't defeat the purpose of running an older (Amiga) computer. The custom chips on the amiga can still be used depending on the accelertor used. In the situtaion of the Vampire though, like getting an RTG upgrade of graphics in the past, it does largely stop you using the graphics chipset (and I think a network stream for graphics over PCI-e like firewire or thunderbolt or ethernet would get around that, but I digress). The video timing still works on the amiga when upgraded (and that is one of the original reasons to have an amiga). The sound chips of the amiga still work. So for demoscene and homebrew, and accelerator like the vampire would be cool. You also get a FPU. You also still get to use your floppy drive for reading/writing floppies. Also you get to use your peripherals (e.g. an external floppy drive or a null modem cabled connect to anothe amiga which may or may not also have the vampire). It depends on your workflow. Youcan also connect a parallel port vampire amiga to a PC for transfer or serial for MIDI music. That means you have an amiga as a "go between" for less painful hooking up to a PC. Even though the vampire puts aside the original chipset of the graphics, you can till use the vampire for development whereby the same coding styles apply, such as the coding challenge of chunky-to-planar conversions. For demo coding you still have a lot of those redundant registers and you can still code those cache-friendly routines.
So I'm sitting watching this video and the girlfriend is listening to the radio.........I nearly stated you sound like a local radio presenter, then I realised it is you! Love the channel Keep up the good work.
5:52 hehe, i like how you say that. find it interesting it just pushes on top of the existing chip. and what's more "It Works" Bloody thirsty chip. I also find it interesting you could probaly do the AGA on "a future-Vampire". All this suff you can do now Commodore has gone bust and no longer holds the patents ???? Looking back, i don't think Commodore would have liked this.
Would i be correct in saying "the only use fr 4096 colors would be in Dpaint type programs static pictures" ? Wile the amiga boast was 4096 color on screen. technically i always imaged to achieve that, you had to only run paint programs, as it think games could only handle 256 (if you wanted to stick to smooth game play)
I'll be keeping my eye out for the A1200 version. I have a 1200 in a power tower that (had) an '040 card until one day after some time of non-use I discover to my horror that the clock battery on the accelerator card had leaked and killed it! :(. Might be able to get my old machine up and running better than ever!
Awesome hardware. Amiga was a big part of my past as I was the Action Replay developer
You must have God-like powers. You developed the Action Replay?
Olaf Boehm I have an action replay card for the commodore 64. Very cool.
I had ARs for my C64s and Amigas. I actually blew my SID chip on the C64 as i plugged the AR in while it was running as i didn't wanna start loading the game again lol.
Was the Action replay developed on the Amiga?
@@chocobillysranch9205 AR Amiga was developed on Amiga
I love the pure joy in your voice, Dan.
Superb review !
Once I finish tinkering with my A1200 setup, I'm after a vampire and a 600 for my self. AGA support has me sold.
The 600 was the machine I had as a boy. My Dad got one for the kids to keep our sticky fingers off his 1200 :)
Exactly what I have been waiting for, what a video, perfect! Cheers mate!
Thanks for uploading this Dan, as a lifelong Amiga fan it is great to see people still developing hardware and software for it. The Vampire 2 chip looks amazing and really pushes the hardware way above it's original design. Unfortunately I don't have an Amiga A600 but I do have 2 x A1200 so I look forward to a A1200 Vampire being released some time in the future.
I PM'd and 're-sold' a palette of 20 A500's, one was dead, one had no voltage to RF. The other 18 sold on for £200 a pop. When you go to work one working as a field service Engineer and find they are selling everything one Monday morning, you think on your feet. My bro was working for a company in East Anglia that feel on it's sword.
I took RF'less 500 + Philips CM8833, got an A590 +2Mb +20MB Connor drive + 1/4 tape drive on SCSI box [ KNOWS TAR very well ;0) ] and started writing 100% portable UNIX code. I ended up a coder because of this machine. The g/f used to call it 'the wife'.
Great work Konrad :0D
My first computer was a TI99/4a My second was a Commodore 64. I've always wanted a Amiga but was just to poor to get one but I always followed there progress. Now we're in the 21st century and I still love Amiga! I never got to own one but now times has changed. I have the fastest gaming processor today (8700k) and the best graphics card. (1080 ti). Loved the video, took me back to the days when I longed for one. Thanks for sharing this video!
Now the amiga port of outrun will finally be playable.
The EAB thread of the cannonball engine brought me here! =P
Amiga was my first computer in 1988 I was so impressed with performance and software can do. Shame that lost behind competitors. But still have the lovers. VIVA AMIGA
When I heard you mention this on your podcast I wasn't interested but having watched this comprehensive tutorial I'm a lot more sold on it. Thanks.
Never owned an Amiga and grew up with all the PC stuff.
But I still can't stop watching these videos. I very much like the idea of the Vampire, shows how much of a following these things have!
Mac running on Amiga **mind blown**... I've actually sold my A1200 in anticipation of getting one of these instead. I always thought Gloom and Alien Breed 3D II were AGA only.
they are
Gaaah I just gave my Amiga 600 away, still I really enjoy these quirky videos from the amiga-age. Keep up the good work Dan.
I wonder if this will lead to a small industry of software and games designed to run only on amiga upgraded with these cards. Amigas might become usable modern machines for browsing etc.!
I'm sure it is possible. Anywhere there is money to be made, there will be time and effort applied. I don't see any large software houses dedicating resources to it but I'm quite certain the "home brew" scene could end up developing some thing.
the best bet would be some kind of emulator to tap into more games like the Mac one. Depending on how fast they end up going in the future.
you seen the ARMIGA project?
I guess not =)
www.armigaproject.com/
how do you tag someone in YT? @a survivor
I've played Gloom on CD32 but seeing it through the Vampire 2 was something else. Very impressive. Great video.
Gobsmacked. I've always been happy with my 1200 tower with 060 board, but... blimey!
This trounces the 060. wait until the next core comes out ;)
I would not mind one of those in my A1200
I'm not a fan of the 060. Too many compatibility issues.
I definitely would rather have a 1200 version of this than paying out for something using an old 020 or 030 processor.
V. Sigma, the 1200 version is being worked on, and it's way more powerful. Also... doesn't the 1200 _come_ with an 020 on board? Oh wait, sorry, it's an EC020, which is even worse. So, I don't quite understand what you're getting at with that... What does it matter? Or do you mean an accelerator using an 020 or 030?
Brilliant development I will be ordering one and watching progress with the same excitement! Keep us updated great video
Awesome video, as a sidenote and updating the news a little bit, the A600 is now not the fastest... The A500 is now the fastest due to the new IDE implementation. The Vampire 500 is achieving IDE (CF card) reads of up to 11.5MB/sec which is 4 times faster than a standard a600/a1200. As we progress we are trying to improve so hopefully the specs will improve accordingly.. (i really don't understand the thumbs down you received, was it something you said ??... Kipper2k
Hey Dan, which classic WB version would you recommend to use (clean install) with vampire2 on a600? I have p96 version but I get some intuition messages and the HDMI out goes black for a second or two usually when I start one of games included in classic WB. It just seems as Gold2 Core is bit unstable or my a600 is allocating or looking for video memory for any new opened app (opening new windows) other that that if I just start the computer after clearing intuition messages and don't do much it's stable but it does freezes sometimes mostly then amiga is accessing CF card. Tried 4 different CF cards too but seems like a G2 core is unstable... Thank you! Great videos, learned a lot from you! Cheers!
excellent review as usual Dan. keep up the great reviews.
Damn. Would love to see how the Vampire does in 3D rendering. I used to do 3D animations on my 600HD back in the day, this card would have made things a lot easier.
Wow, this is great! I'd be very interested in the A1200 version. Exciting!
After all these years it is still amazing what the AMIGA is capable of!
Only AMIGA makes it possible!
Suuuuperb! Finally after two decades something useful on amiga.
I have to say, I was blown away by this video!!!! I can honestly say this - I have an A1200 with the ACA1233 accelerator, and the Indiv Mk2 Scandoubler, and there is no way I can run Gloom like you can with the Vampire 2! And to be able to run the Demos which I simply cannot run, due to the 030 on my accel card is just amazing! Same for the game and other apps too. Maybe I should just sell my ACA1233 and Scandoubler now, and put that money aside for when they release the Vampire for the A1200!! The specs you mentioned sound INSANE!! Very good video and well done!
Would be nice to learn some more from you about the applications I saw on your WB 3.9 setup. I didnt even know WB 3.9 would install on a A600 as I know you need the 3.1 Rom in the A1200 for that!
subbed!!! just bought a A600 off ebay because of this video and pre order myself one a Vampire 2 card! Thanks for the video!!
I'm currently not a vampire fan but this video contents is very interesting and well presented. Thanks Dan!
Thanks for the review and good choice for the games !! Keep going mate, your videos are perfect !
I started with a computing with A600 I loved it dan
I love the Amiga 600, especially with all of the upgrades readily available and still being produced
I've only followed the Vampire at a cursory level (no A600 here), and damn. I'm seriously impressed with the performance. Certainly so when seeing Alien Breed 3D II ('cause even under *UAE, I never got it feeling solid).
Roll on the A500/A1200 versions. I'd certainly be tempted to rip the accelerator out of my A1200 for one of those. ^_^
Dan I must say the A600 was great for me, I really like its small form factor, which actually was really well suited to the compact 'in bedroom' gaming market of the time.
AdiSneakerFreak ditto. Hundreds of hours in my bedroom pinball fantasies, mega ball, llamatron, populous, assassin se, goal!, and I even did reports and made spreadsheets of which drawer each of my cds were in!
Will you do a Vampire V4 board/Vampire V4 standalone video?
I have that same Logitech speaker system with the big knob! What a different world we could be living in if Amigas had been this powerful back in the 90s. Those FPS games are silky smooth, very nice indeed. That Payback intro was pretty damn exciting too.
This is awesome. Wouldn't it be cool if you could take this back in time about 25 years and show them....?
Amiga would win and the world would be a better place! ;-)
New time travel life goal.
i see it .. dont need to go back .. i was a original amiga nerd back in the big days of the amiga .. demoscene and everything. ;) AND I DO SEE IT! its unbelieveable .. and did he mention that he has a 4gb card? wtf? what type of card is it? and how much does it cost? must be something arround 20k or even more. who needs that much space anyway? this has to be a fake or he mispoken or so. if not .. this has to be magic or something supernatural (maybe he sould his soul to the devil!?) and need this dude needs to call me too. he really must be from the future ;)
They wouldn't have been able to replicate it. The technology was not there. Yeah, they would poop thier pants to see running on an any ECS hardware. But OS was only 3.0. SD memory? Etc.
There's a reason we didn't have a PlayStation 4 back in 1995.
Also for perspective, my $300 cell phone hustle is a quad-core running 1.5 gigahertz... It's not much bigger than two 3.5 inch floppies stack on top of each other.... It's more powerful than any Amiga out there and it fits in my hand. I love my Amigas but I like the new technology too.
I think FPGA chips are a great deal for the future of retro imitation/recreation. Imagine a all in one System for the living room with original and up to date features at the same time...
Anyone who can program an FPGA gets's my respect.
Great video, really well presented. The Vampire 2 is quite amazing. This is how the Amiga should ALWAYS have been. If this chip had come as standard back in 1992, the Amiga would surely have reigned supreme, and everyone on the internet would probably be using Amigas today!
Love your videos Dan.
Cheers for the video. Takes me back a few years seeing some of the games.
YOU... WANT... ONE!!!!!!
I think my Amiga A600 is great. Had it since April 1994 and still have it set up and use it.
I remember you talking on your podcast about a version could be coming out for the A500, Do you know if this is still happening?
Got the answer at 24:00 :)
I remember this one video game, they would sing this weird song
"are you there space station amigos oh"
(Help needed finding this rare and Fun classic game)
Vampire's two biggest achievements - a from scratch 68K compatible superscalar core, and actually extended the modes of the Amiga chipset (Example: Vampire supports chunky AND planar -- in a way that's compatible with the original chipset). This is a real 'postview' of how the Amiga could have advanced back in the day had Motorola not given up on 68K (both overpricing 68K in the late 80s, and underdeveloping it in the early 90s).
They had to give up with the 68k line or Intel would have left them behind almost immediately with the Pentium range (you might as well say the 486). PC's only advance because Intel keep putting old CPU technology to bed quite quickly forcing users to keep buying the latest processors.
I respectfully disagree - the 68K is a CISC design that could have been extended just as well as x86. The 68060 was superscalar, just like the Pentium, with the 68060's main weakness being they hadn't fully pipeliend the FPU like Intel had the Pentium.. OTOH the Pentium pipelined FPU cost a lot of die space and at this point Motorola was already committed (thanks to moneys from IBM, Apple) to PowerPC. The Pentium also benefited from constant investment in fab technology that Motorola didn't push as hard. Though my original reference though was that Motorola priced the 68020 and later processors much higher than the equivalent x86 chips during the time period that could have helped push up performance on all 68K platforms.
You could even fit an entire Amiga on an FPGA. I haven't tried it (yet) but I tried to fit an sparcstation 5 on an FPGA couple of years ago.
Nice, this is really cool news. Can't wait to get my hands on the 1200 version, sounds absolutely insane!
I remember when the 68060 accellerator card was released for the Amiga 4000, it was the worlds fastest Macintosh for a while :)
Would have been nice to see some rendering in Real 3D or Imagine.
So if the board is doing CPU, FPU, memory, graphics, sound and storage, what is the Amiga doing? Is it fair to call this an accelerator? It sounds like the Amiga is just giving you keyboard, mouse and joystick.
Yeah it's almost like an Amiga "emulator" that plugs directly into the Amiga 600. If you're a "purist" you might feel that it's cheating, since FPGA is essentially hardware-based emulation. You could just install UAE on any modern PC and get even better performance from software-based emulation.
That said, if you're looking for an accelerator for your A600, this probably makes more sense than a more expensive accelerator with a "real" 68030 or similar, unless you absolutely must have "real" hardware.
FPGA is not emulation, it is chip design, you change wires between logic units and change the role of those units, that means you design a chip that can be converted into an ASIC, a regular chip.
You have a valid point, but what is more important ? The result or the means ?
This looks like a lot of performance for not a lot of money, putting all the features of the larger Amigas into the cute tiny one.
What's not to like ?
I'm tempted to build and Amiga 600 laptop with one.
Creating hardware, chips by community, is a leap forward. Open hardware can become a thing in the future. But also, everything in FPGA is technically running parallel, not trying to match state of the emulated machine discretely,, so it is more or less the real thing.
You could make the same argument about an A4000 with a CPU card, graphics card, soundcard, scandoubler and SCSI card in its Zorro slots (even more so for things like a Cyberstorm Mk3/PPC which has its own ports for CyberVision graphics card and its own SCSI controller).
Personally, I don't think it's worth arguing about - each person can decide if this is something they are excited by, or not :)
Wish I haddent seen this, the vampire 1200 might make me dust off my old power tower Amiga, will keep an eye on this project. Good vid as always.
ive had a 600 for years and loved it
every time Dan says Vampire he sounds like a kid at christmas time , love the enthusiam
Your videos made me getting my 600 back up and running.... and now in know what i will buy for it
Hi Dan, can you tell me if you can run AGA games with the V2? Thanks.
- I had an ZX Spectrum 48K, then an Timex Sinclair 2068, then an Atari 130XE, then an Amiga 600, then an Amiga 1200 AGA across that years.
- And since my friends had all the other "dream" machines, like the Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Atari 600XL, Atari 520ST, Atari 1024FM, Amiga 4000, etc... I was very luck to see, play games and code on all those machines too... I´ll never forget those days... Was a real magical era!
- Can´t forget ours firsts multiplayer games (everyone on the same computer)... And (mostly) because playing the "Barbarian" and "Skidmarks" with my friends, we destroyed so many many tvs, computers, keyboards, joysticks... Unforgettable days !!!... eheheheh... :)
- My favourite software ever, was not a game, was "OctaMED" on the Amiga! :D
OMFG at the DHRYSTONES speed test result in SYSINFO. I almost fell out of my chair when i seen it! Wow
To note: The 600 is actually a shrunk A500+, not an A500. The A500+ apparently only came out a couple of months before the A600 was released, based on the A3000 hardware.
Hi Dan, quick FYI the beta of the AGA core is now out. Imagine that, finally a compact A1200 alike.
Another great video Dan and well done for not running Doom! That POP sprite looks great running Fusion. Hopefully they can get all the video outputs out of HDMI soon. The A1200 one almost seems like a dream come true lol
Anyone know how much the Vampire costs? Looked on the website but seems to be a secret (unless I've completely missed it)...
Best computer of its time, I still have my Amiga 040 and an A500. I loved the programming environment, programming for the Amiga was always more fun than for a PC.
I must add though that seeing the Vampire2 run a MAC emulator faster than a MAC is zero surprise, The 68k MACs left a lot of the graphics manipulation to be handled in SW which seriously took the performance edge off. Seeing a 68k processor that has access to the Amiga's graphics acceleration HW and so lightening the load on the CPU, of course it's going to do well.
When you emulate an Amiga on a PC all of the machine code has to be interpreted and converted to Pentium machine code which is an enormous performance hit. Add to that the image bit mapping between PC and Amiga are very different that adds additional challenges.
I have an Amiga 2000 which I have just booted up after a long time...it still works perfect..it there a vimpire card for the 2000?
The Vampire 2 has now been made available for the Amiga 500 as well!
I loved my A600. Best Christmas ever. So ner!
Nothing better than a 1980's era computer playing 1980's MP3's.
Thanks for pointing out that an FPGA is NOT emulation! Excellent video.
Holly shit. When I had a Lucas Board for my A1000 built I thought that was fast. (68020 with an 881 or 882). There was also a Frances board that would have held 4 MB of 32 bit memory as well but the guy in Ontario Canada no longer made those. Amazing to see that the Amiga is still going strong. Almost makes me want to get one again.....
I have a 020 board for the A1000 too, but withut the chipmem its quite useless...
I thought it was OK at the time. Ran a BBS on it. My A3000 was a much better machine.
Twowheelsrule Cagersdrool I would love a 1MB Chipram thing on my A1000. The 020 Turbo has 33Mhz and 8mb RAM...
Ya. The A3000 has 14 Meg of ram (yes I still have it) and a hard drive. I don't use it anymore but maybe I need to get it going again.
The a1000 can run the Amiga 500 vampire 2 I believe. Also the vampire 2 May have a chipmem patch this year and it won't even be 2 meg only :)
Did the vampire for A1200 come? I can't find a video of it?? ;)
I am working on the first ever amiga 600 laptop built from original amiga 600. it is the first to use an original pc laptop case, it uses a pc case and its matching pc lcd monitor. it has working laptop buttons for sound and monitor functions attached to the lcd controller, sounds: uses the pc speakers and a headphone socket. i have also managed to build in a keyboard that fits in the hole for the pc one, it also has a vga out for a monitor and it supports the vampire 2 and the aca620ec and the indivision ecs. its supports df0: as an external device. it has 2 fans for cooling, one under, one on the back. this was a 2 year project, i will make only 5 additional to sell! watch out for me on youtube!
Fantastic! Nice to see your experiences with the Vampire 2! Looking forward to the 500 and 1200 models!
Wonderful job, Dan! Sorry that it took me over a year to re-take an interest in the Amiga.
I loved the A600. I took it on stage for years as a live sequencing/sampling platform before upgrading to an A1200.
Great informative video as always Dan! Thumbs up :)
Is it possible to run AGA games and applications on A600 + Vampire 2?
@ 23:30 I must admit I fall into that camp. I loved my A1200 back in the day and I still have it in its original desktop dynamite box as well as all the big box games I bought. But this seems purely academic when the cheapest phones on the market are faster and more capable. I would rather see these machines preserved in an original condition with minimal interference to keep them going so that they can still be enjoyed.
Are they still making the Vampire 2 for the A600? I’ve looked on the website and it’s saying orders are on hold 😞
Excellent video Dan the Vampire looks amazing cant wait for the A1200 version very tempted to get an A600 again in the meantime
question how programmable are the FPGAs? video mentions they are "hardware emulators" could one be reconfigured to "emulate" x86 cpu or don't they work that way?
I'm curious if you tried out any of the old rendering software such as sculpt or imagine and what kind of speed you are getting out of those using the highest rendering settings?
Can't wait for the A1200 one! Great video, thanks for sharing.
is this compatible with the Amiga 2000 and 3000 from the states or just the basic 500 and 600 models popular in the UK?
I got my Amiga in 1992 and got the 600. Never regretted it !
Nothing compares to the joy you can get from adding power to an existing older system I really want someone to do the same with the 128k Spectrum or indeed the 16k/48k speccies where you just shove an expansion port accelerator in the back and make it fly as fast as possible, there are already WI FI devices made for the Spectrum too but an FPGA expansion module would put a smile on many Spectrum owners face :) I'm off to search for an A1200 and look at what Vampire 2 will bring to it although I need to set it up to read SD cards etc and a PCMIA Ethernet card I will be busy next year catching back up with A1200 I miss mine a lot
Will the Vampire 2 for A1200 (when released) up the Amigas chipmem? Many WHDLoad games suffer from low framerates because they're hardcoded to use the limited 1MB chipmem on the original motherboard, which is kinda ruining the experience even though you have a lot of Fastmem available.
I still have a fully loaded Amiga 3000 tower with Keyboard & Mouse. Been knocked about a bit but still works.
Great video mate, thanks
This is friggin Amazing !! I can't find an Amiga 600 on ebay now. lol Will it work on other Amiga Models ??
I'm looking at getting an amiga 500 or 600 soon, and I live in the US. I'm wondering if it would be a better choice to get a PAL or NTSC Amiga?
PAL amiga if you can afford shipping. The Amiga was much more popular in Europe than the US.
Hi Dan, is there any news on about what you said about that Vampire card WITH an AGA chipset on it?
Would be great if that card came out.
Would it still be possible to go back to kickstart 1.3 for games that are older and only work on kickstart 1.3?
If you want the whole package wait for the Vampire V4 and yes from Gold2.7 core there is a MapRom feature so you can go back to KS 1.3 or even map an Atari ST ROM!
This is incredible does this turn the A600 into an AGA 1200 or do they do a Vampire for the A1200 too? I want one I wouldn't mind souping up a CD32 as well tbh
Hi Dan, Vamp is great indeed! One more thing: is this the RTG-patched version of AB3DII? And if yes, can you please tell me where did you find it? Was it in the Zone perhaps? Thanks!
+Risky Woods I think the patch is on Aminet
Well I never thought I'd say this but you're Amiga just totally blew my 90's PC out of the water.
I can't wait to get one for my 1200!
doesn't it defeat the purpose of running an older computer?. if you want that speed, ram and display run a pc, the "fun" part of using older hardware is running it as it is and seeing the stuff as it was, on crt monitors. this is like an overclocked emulator.
The "fun" part is that it costs more than a ps4 and the waiting list is massive.
It most certainly does for me.
A retro purist would only use original hardware. it's only a few games that benefit from a card that costs a lot of money, so a retro enthusiast with more money than sence might be interested.
@Pelger, You pose a good question. It doesn't defeat the purpose of running an older (Amiga) computer. The custom chips on the amiga can still be used depending on the accelertor used. In the situtaion of the Vampire though, like getting an RTG upgrade of graphics in the past, it does largely stop you using the graphics chipset (and I think a network stream for graphics over PCI-e like firewire or thunderbolt or ethernet would get around that, but I digress). The video timing still works on the amiga when upgraded (and that is one of the original reasons to have an amiga). The sound chips of the amiga still work. So for demoscene and homebrew, and accelerator like the vampire would be cool. You also get a FPU. You also still get to use your floppy drive for reading/writing floppies. Also you get to use your peripherals (e.g. an external floppy drive or a null modem cabled connect to anothe amiga which may or may not also have the vampire). It depends on your workflow. Youcan also connect a parallel port vampire amiga to a PC for transfer or serial for MIDI music. That means you have an amiga as a "go between" for less painful hooking up to a PC.
Even though the vampire puts aside the original chipset of the graphics, you can till use the vampire for development whereby the same coding styles apply, such as the coding challenge of chunky-to-planar conversions. For demo coding you still have a lot of those redundant registers and you can still code those cache-friendly routines.
So I'm sitting watching this video and the girlfriend is listening to the radio.........I nearly stated you sound like a local radio presenter, then I realised it is you! Love the channel Keep up the good work.
5:52 hehe, i like how you say that. find it interesting it just pushes on top of the existing chip. and what's more "It Works"
Bloody thirsty chip. I also find it interesting you could probaly do the AGA on "a future-Vampire". All this suff you can do now Commodore has gone bust and no longer holds the patents ???? Looking back, i don't think Commodore would have liked this.
Would i be correct in saying "the only use fr 4096 colors would be in Dpaint type programs static pictures" ?
Wile the amiga boast was 4096 color on screen. technically i always imaged to achieve that, you had to only run paint programs, as it think games could only handle 256 (if you wanted to stick to smooth game play)
I'll be keeping my eye out for the A1200 version. I have a 1200 in a power tower that (had) an '040 card until one day after some time of non-use I discover to my horror that the clock battery on the accelerator card had leaked and killed it! :(. Might be able to get my old machine up and running better than ever!
Use a IDE to SSD converter! Should work. What is the max size drive that the Amiga 600 can see?
Dan, that mp3 player is outputting audio on amiga RCAs or HDMI?
Via Amiga's Paula and the RCA ports, the 16-bit audio isn't implemented yet.