Looking forward to the Vampire 4?
 

I know I am :) I've been following the progress of this and it looks like an incredible piece of kit! Whether you want it as an accelerator or a stand-alone, it's going to be pretty exciting.

Oh heck yeah! I just got a V2+ for an old A500 that I picked up cheap (the 500 that is) and am amazed at how fast it is. Really hope the SAGA mode comes to that soon. The V4 will be even better. I'm hoping to make it into either a NUC style case or possibly even into some form of laptop. That is to go along with the A500+Vampire and an A1200+Blizzard 030 card+128 MB RAM I have on the way...

Really awesome stuff they're doing with that setup.

Oh man! That sounds sweet! Also, i'm somewhat envious of what you have on the way! lol :)

Believe me, you aren't envious of my credit card bill! :banghead

Vampire rocks!

Hahaha! Good point :)

I’ve been on the lookout for an A1200 here in the US but can’t find any. All are being shipped from the UK. That’s kinda why I’m also really excited for the V4.

To me this is the first new Amiga since many many years. Looking really forward to this fantastic picece of hardware. Will buy a V4 standalone and put it in an empty Amiga case.

Depends a lot on price and ordering. I've never been a fan of the "unobtanium" model where you declare interest and if you're lucky 6 months later someone gets back to you, if you're unlucky you blink, miss it and then things are either sold out or on hold.

Yeah I bought one from the UK and had to wait a month for it to get here. In the mean time I bought a bunch of stuff for it. When it arrived I didn’t have a PSU to test it with. Installed stuff then finally got the psu to find that the machine was horribly messed up. Spent more money to ship the MB to Avill in California only to find out the board was toast.

In the mean time I bought a second one from the UK which is arriving today (fingers crossed). Hopefully this one works right. I picked up the A500 in the mean time and decided to Vampire it to make it useful. I’ll probably bring the 500 to the office as a showpiece. The A1200 and V4 (whenever it comes) will stay home for development and game play. Really digging the thought of putting the V4 into some sort of laptop style enclosure for portable use.

yeah, i'm looking forward to creating a case for the V4. I may even get a new A1200 case and fit it in.

The Vampire 4 is a standalone FPGA Amiga clone, right? What is the real difference between that and any of the other FPGA based boards that are available ,or for that matter a really fast PC that boots to UAE? I am just wondering what makes it special like our old Amigas? I am not trying to start a flame war, just curious is all. I do own many classic machines as well as a Vampire 500 V2. Thank you for any discussion.

The difference between it and a PC is pretty clear. The PC will be running an emulator whereas the Vampire is FPGA which is simulating at a hardware level and therefore very much more accurate and is basically as close as you can get to the real thing without either owning the real thing (as a lot of us do) or building a re-engineered version of the real thing. The latter is a great way to go but usually DIY, very, expensive (a lot more expensive than a vampire) and ultimately often still uses a lot of the original custom chips so can be difficult to obtain and won't be an option forever.

In general terms the difference between the Vampire and other FPGA? Well, there isn't really. Apart from (I believe) the Vampire is just far superior to anything that has thus far come before it. I don't know all the details of all the systems although I do own a DE-1 system (roughly a MiniMig). That's like a ZX81 next to the Vampire!!

Great post thanks :D

Always happy to have discussions! :)

I have a really fast PC that I can boot into WinUAE as well as a raspberry Pi 3. However, no matter how good emulation becomes, there are always a few things that cause glitches and can hamper the experience somewhat.

As for current FPGA based boards. This can be said about pretty much anything, right? However, many of the popular FPGA boards are no longer available and some required some serious setting up. From what I can gather, the Vampire 4 looks to be an easy solution (I could be wrong though).

I suppose at the end of the day it's all about what you want to do with it.

Yep Vampire V2+ is a recreated and enhanced version of the Classic 68k Amiga machines. Vampire V2+ recreates the whole machine and not just the CPU which is a common misconception as many people still refer to them as 'accelerators'.

The difference between using an FPGA computer and software emulation to get your Amiga kicks is an interesting question and is really just down to personal preference.

Obviously from a cost point-of-view then WinUAE wins :laughing

Not only that, WinUAE is much more powerful, and is much more compatible than Vampire.

I think you’ve got that the wrong way around? :)

No. Whole standalone project's goal is not to be just another accelerator, but a new 68K Amiga.

https://i.postimg.cc/qMBJJYWL/memory.jpg

The comparisons are clear, the tests prove it, WinUAE is much faster and performer and has a very high compatibility with all the ChipSets, Vampire currently does not meet these requirements, maybe he will have them in the future. :confused
With the Vampire try to run Games and Demo AGA both HD version and WHDLoad and you'll see the compatibility percentage, then try to run heavy games like Quake 2 and Quake 3 and then we'll talk. :)

Try doing this with the Vampire (same quality and speed):

WinuUAE AfA-OS https://youtu.be/tgEHQCy4GM4

WinuUAE Quake3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe6ugseDJ9g

WinuUAE Quake2: https://youtu.be/DIqyNYe2eb8

Standalone will give you a chance to buy a new Amiga instead of Windows PC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marcoch.../#6105845c6d74