[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by YouKnowWho

Well Bruce, if that is the list of "functions" than...well I wonder if the $500-1000 outlay for a Vampire or 1260 is worth this. Seems like games you note were designed to work on standard Amiga, what's wrong with IFF and why not just use PS on a PC at this point?

Except they weren't. Just as with PCs of the day, those games were 'designed' to work on high-end Amigas that either didn't exist yet or were far too expensive for most people to afford.

In 1991 I pre-ordered an A3000 and paid NZ$7200 for it on release. Then I added a 120MB SCSI hard drive, and later a 50MHz 060 with RAM and an RTG card, bumping the total up to over NZ$14000. After spending that enormous sum you would think any Amiga game would run like greased lightning, right? So I bought Quake for the Amiga, and it achieved single digit frame rates.

The A3000 was a nice looking machine, but that slimline case was more trouble that it was worth. It was too small to take a CDROM drive and barely had enough card slots for what I wanted. The 060 CPU board only just fit under the floppy drive tray, which I had to cut a hole in to put a fan on the overheating CPU. The power supply fan was extremely noisy, and the computer weighed a ton.

20 years later the situation has changed somewhat, as enough people have 060s to make it worth producing titles optimized for it. So I was looking at getting something similar to what I had but without the downsides. I wouldn't buy an A3000 today because it would be too expensive as well as bring back some not so nice memories of it. But A600s are nifty and cheap, and making it more powerful than my A3000 setup at a tiny fraction of the cost was an opportunity I couldn't pass over.

Previous accelerator cards I had tried in the A600 had issues, but the Vampire has proven to be rock solid with all the promised performance and more. It is truly a worthy successor to my A3000 for less than a stock A3000 would cost me today. The Vampire is faster and runs much cooler than an 060 and has RTG too, so to have one in an A600 is an impossible dream come true (PiStorm will never do it).

As for AMMX etc., I don't care what they call it so long as they can make it do something useful - or even if not who cares? The important thing is that after all this time amazing new hardware is still being produced for our old machines.

Look, to each his own, but the cost to run the few use cases has to be factored in.
Let me see...a 1260 or a new MacBook? Hmmmm.... Know what I mean Bruce?

Not sure what you mean, but I have absolutely no interest in a new MacBook. I might be interested in a 1260 if it was cheap and had the cooler running later revision CPU, but we all know that won't happen. I could go for a Vampire style card with just the FPGA and some RAM and Flash ROM, which I bet could be made for a few hundred dollars.

There has to be a limit of rhyme and logic of how much money it makes sense to throw behind this retro hobby.

....which to bring this back to the original point, the PiStorm value offering is hard to resist. For that money to get the capabilities...well...it's quite a nice compromise. Why wouldn't you put that into your old 500?

Because I already have machines with enough power to do what I would use the PiStorm for. Because I never had an A500, so I want to get the true retro experience of the stock machine. Because I hate the idea of a Pi turning my Amiga into a peripheral addon for its software based emulation. And because I hate the Pi anyway. It's a mini-me PC that stands for everything the Amiga doesn't.

But that's just me. If someone wants to put a PiStorm in their A500 then go for it! Just don't pretend that it's a 'Vampire killer', because it isn't.

Wonder if there is a 68000 CPU switcher already so that you can go between 68000 original CPU and PiStorm without switching out CPUs. Kind of best of both worlds, Original or PiStorm at a flick of a switch between power cycles.

No need. I bet the PiStorm could do practically perfect 68000 emulation if designed right.