Vampire 600 wierd issues

Hey all ,

Recently i wanted to rebuild my Amiga system after a nostalgia attack i had this year I am a technician with lots of experience on electronics and computer staff for over 20 years now.I am so furious with Brians attitude and total non professionalism concerning support matters.I know the dude is buisy and everything but he must support his customers or he is just a bad deal for a lot of reasons.

To tell you my story i will start at the beginning so you guys might identify what i am doing wrong or come to conclusion about this terrible piece of hardware (from what i have experienced so far).

I started my build with a regular Amiga 600 system with 2.05 rom 1mb chip ram and June bug rev 1.5 motherboard.I then took a CF disk with the adaptor the adf kit with the PCMCIA card and everything.Some time after that i decided i needed more memory to run my staff so i took the A608 8mb fast memory card from Brian.Everything ok with the card except the known PCMCIA issues on 8mb fast ram setup.

So all ok so far i had my whdload games and everything but i wanted to be able to use the latest amiga OS's and programs.

So after some research and internet digging i decided to get the Vampire 600 card with the 3.1 Amiga 600 ROM and ofc the USB blaster Programmer adaptor.I ordered the parts was reading on how to do this that and was waiting for the card.

The card came first so i decided to test it with the 2.05 ROM.After i connected everything the Amiga started up and the issues are start now....the system was not stable i expected that due to the luck of the latest ROM but i saw that the floppy had a lot of read errors with all the disks i was trying to use.I came to the conclusion that the 25Watt Amiga 600 basic power supply is not the right staff to use so i modded an ATX power supply in order to provide my Amiga with more power.The issues with the floppy resolved after connected the new power supply but the system was unstable once again.Next day the USB blaster came so i used the Quartus II 14.0 (64-bit) Web Edition software to upload the other two cores while i was waiting for the 3.1 rom to get to my hands.I manage to make the system more stable by using the 0.1 core but again it was buggy and everything.

So i waited for the new Rom to get to me hands and start testing again.The Rom came this morning i did replaced the old rom with the 3.1 did one boot with the Vampire and the system frizzed after like 2 minutes.I turned the amiga off and on black screen and nothing more was happening.I decided to upload the 1.0 core again something might not be right and everything.I did the upgrade everything completed successfully.I turn off the amiga remove the Blaster cable powering on the amiga and there was a change.....Red and yellow screens was all i was getting.I say the card might not be attached right i reattached everything using kippers technique with the four fingers with no luck.The base for the cpu is ok and i hear the click of the card.I inspected every contact on the cpu and card and everything looks good lined up and everything.

I reconnected my old staff with the new rom and everything is working fine.So it has to be an issue with the Vampire card.Brian is nowhere to be found so i have to try my luck elsewhere.Its been more that 3 weeks of silence from Brian now.So i decided to open a paypal money refund as well due to his professionalism.And dont get me wrong i am the guy that will read test and then post and bother others.But again if you dont get support you have to tell the story so at least people will stop support this dudes.At the beginning when i was first read about the FPGA project i was so happy that someone is trying to build a card like that and i wanted to support him.But i never expected this kind of behaviour.

The only think i can think that i might do wrong is that i use Windows 8.1 and Quartus II 14.0 (64-bit) Web Edition

Sorry in advance if this is not the right place to post my story but i am kinda freaked out.

I hope you guys can help me out.

[kipper2k]

This has all been sorted, His V1.5 mobo does not like the vampire

Originally Posted by Retro

Hey all ,

Recently i wanted to rebuild my Amiga system after a nostalgia attack i had this year I am a technician with lots of experience on electronics and computer staff for over 20 years now.I am so furious with Brians attitude and total non professionalism concerning support matters.I know the dude is buisy and everything but he must support his customers or he is just a bad deal for a lot of reasons.

To tell you my story i will start at the beginning so you guys might identify what i am doing wrong or come to conclusion about this terrible piece of hardware (from what i have experienced so far).

I started my build with a regular Amiga 600 system with 2.05 rom 1mb chip ram and June bug rev 1.5 motherboard.I then took a CF disk with the adaptor the adf kit with the PCMCIA card and everything.Some time after that i decided i needed more memory to run my staff so i took the A608 8mb fast memory card from Brian.Everything ok with the card except the known PCMCIA issues on 8mb fast ram setup.

So all ok so far i had my whdload games and everything but i wanted to be able to use the latest amiga OS's and programs.

So after some research and internet digging i decided to get the Vampire 600 card with the 3.1 Amiga 600 ROM and ofc the USB blaster Programmer adaptor.I ordered the parts was reading on how to do this that and was waiting for the card.

The card came first so i decided to test it with the 2.05 ROM.After i connected everything the Amiga started up and the issues are start now....the system was not stable i expected that due to the luck of the latest ROM but i saw that the floppy had a lot of read errors with all the disks i was trying to use.I came to the conclusion that the 25Watt Amiga 600 basic power supply is not the right staff to use so i modded an ATX power supply in order to provide my Amiga with more power.The issues with the floppy resolved after connected the new power supply but the system was unstable once again.Next day the USB blaster came so i used the Quartus II 14.0 (64-bit) Web Edition software to upload the other two cores while i was waiting for the 3.1 rom to get to my hands.I manage to make the system more stable by using the 0.1 core but again it was buggy and everything.

So i waited for the new Rom to get to me hands and start testing again.The Rom came this morning i did replaced the old rom with the 3.1 did one boot with the Vampire and the system frizzed after like 2 minutes.I turned the amiga off and on black screen and nothing more was happening.I decided to upload the 1.0 core again something might not be right and everything.I did the upgrade everything completed successfully.I turn off the amiga remove the Blaster cable powering on the amiga and there was a change.....Red and yellow screens was all i was getting.I say the card might not be attached right i reattached everything using kippers technique with the four fingers with no luck.The base for the cpu is ok and i hear the click of the card.I inspected every contact on the cpu and card and everything looks good lined up and everything.

I reconnected my old staff with the new rom and everything is working fine.So it has to be an issue with the Vampire card.Brian is nowhere to be found so i have to try my luck elsewhere.Its been more that 3 weeks of silence from Brian now.So i decided to open a paypal money refund as well due to his professionalism.And dont get me wrong i am the guy that will read test and then post and bother others.But again if you dont get support you have to tell the story so at least people will stop support this dudes.At the beginning when i was first read about the FPGA project i was so happy that someone is trying to build a card like that and i wanted to support him.But i never expected this kind of behaviour.

The only think i can think that i might do wrong is that i use Windows 8.1 and Quartus II 14.0 (64-bit) Web Edition

Sorry in advance if this is not the right place to post my story but i am kinda freaked out.

I hope you guys can help me out.

Brian is right unfortunately we learned about it a bit late so i had to sell the card.Anyhow i am happy that something good came out of all this.

[RedskullDC]

Originally Posted by Retro

The only think i can think that i might do wrong is that i use Windows 8.1 and Quartus II 14.0 (64-bit) Web Edition

It's worth pointing out that Q2 v14.0 doesn't support the Cyclone 2 FPGA on the Vampire 600.

Last version to support the EP2C8 is Q2 v13.0sp1:

https://www.altera.com/download/sw/d...dex.jsp#tabs-2

Cheers,
Red

[majsta]

@RedskullDC yes that's correct

@Retro we could debug it online to see what was wrong, but now's too late, if you could only contact me. We could tweak it to work with your motherboard. I have few A600 1.5 versions and there is no problem with them using vampire.