Vampire II non acceleration issues

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by sean_skroht

And therein lies my problem: I've never owned a Ferrari.

Seriously though, it would be nice if the Vampire team provided a number of different downloadable cores that a user could flash to their card depending on their usage requirements. If you werent into all that Apple Mac emulation stuff, PC game ports, playing MP3's and general benchmark bragging rights, but you still wanted a little extra speed while retaining excellent compatibility, why not offer a core that offers...say.... a 68020 at 25 or 50mHz. And have the same for 68030, 040 and so on.

Someone might say, why not get an actual Motorola based acceleration card? Well I already have one but I was looking for a little extra kick for a few games and applications. And really, at the end of the day, real Motorola CPU's are getting harder to get and they wont last forever. I see FPGA's as an excellent opportunity to continue the legacy. I'm all for developing the technology further and sometimes having to cater to backwards compatibility can stunt progress, so why not give users a choice?

you kinda can do that, turtle mode, i am led to believe, was only introduced in GOLD2, and this is what slows things down, to make WHDLoad games run at stock spped, so using an ealier Silver core, will probably net you the speed you are looking, then again, it might not. I guess its a case of, "you can please some of the people, some of the time". If the socket that clips over the CPU was better quality, or a better fit, similar to the Furia, then it would be better, thankfully, the A1200 version, shouldnt suffer from these issues.

[sean_sk]

Im assuming you can activate turtle mode either by disabling cpu cache in early-startup or using "cpu noinstcache nodatacache" in CLI? If thats the case then turtle mode has done diddly squat for me.

Lotus 2 floppy doesnt boot up at all with cpu cache disabled, whole thing crashes. When using Lotus 2 with WHDLoad 18.2 it runs semi ok but music slows down after awhile in attract mode and there are graphics clitches in the player cars when driving. Disbling caches sort of fixes the music but glitches still exist.

There are even bigger issues with WHDLoad 18.3, which was supposed to be better for Vampire users. Lotus 2 crashes during attract mode and the glitches are still there. When cpu cache is disabled, glitches are still there and attract modes still crashes, just takes longer. Ive see no real benefits to turtle mode. If anyone has had different experiences and how theyve handled it, it would be really interesting to know.

[grond]

@sean:

WHDload and its slaves will often override cache settings. You need to set them in WHDload (and even then the slaves will often ignore them)

@toryglen:

Try sanding the socket down quite a bit. I did and mine fits so well that I can lift the A600 PCB holding just the v600.

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by grond

@toryglen:

Try sanding the socket down quite a bit. I did and mine fits so well that I can lift the A600 PCB holding just the v600.

>sigh< i hear ya, and will give it a go, but ya know ... for the money paid, i really shouldn't have to.

[DrBong]

Originally Posted by grond

@sean:

WHDload and its slaves will often override cache settings. You need to set them in WHDload (and even then the slaves will often ignore them)

Yes, you can set them in the global prefs for WHDLoad to apply to all patched games. Alternatively, you can do it on a case-by-case basis for games by setting the NOCACHE tooltype to slow games down (or the CACHE tooltype to speed them up).

As for WHDLoad and its slaves "often overriding cache settings" - unless we hear that this is the case from Bert, people really should just ignore your comment!

Bert went to the trouble of improving support for Vampire owners in the latest WHDLoad 18.3 release, but problems still persist. Here is what Epsilon says on his Amiga blog:

"This gets me onto the topic of the Amiga 2000....

Last time I worked on it, it was as a Vampire 500 installed Amiga 2000 system. Although it was running well enough on the upgraded Gold 2 Core I did earlier this year as shown below, I found that I couldn't run any whdload games and demos on it. For me this was a complete deal breaker and not something I expected when installing the Vampire 500 in it.

I worked with the folks at the Apollo team IRC to try to resolve the WHDLoad problem but I couldn't get a solution that worked, even after installing the latest WHDLoad that is supposed to resolve some of the Vampire related issues with it.

Not willing to wait any longer for a "fix", I decided to downgrade my Amiga 2000 back to an 030 setup....."

The simple fact is that there are a few accelerators that exhibit more systemic problems with WHDLoad (e.g. Microbotics 1230 XA) no matter what, and the Vampire looks to be one of them atm. This has been commented on by Vampire owners in dedicated threads even on the Apollo forums, not to mention other Amiga forums including EAB.

[EzdineG]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

DISCLAIMER : Yes, i know yours works fine, yes, i know you haven't had to reseat yours, yes, i know you know what your on about, yes, you can think i am dumb because yours work.

I watched an excellent YouTube video by mjnurney on having he same issues with his V2. He desoldered the 68000, pressed the chip in a way that expanded the "legs" and soldered it back on. After that, always snapped on with no issues.

I know it's not for the faint of heart, but that's probably going to be what it takes to fix your 600's new found issues, too.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by EzdineG

I know it's not for the faint of heart, but that's probably going to be what it takes to fix your 600's new found issues, too.

YOu need a special setup to do that yes, but I am afraid at this point Toryglen-boy, you have inflicted damage on those solder joints and this will be the only thing that fixes it. You might have to send the mobo to a repairman

Originally Posted by Sinphaltimus

I'm already considering an Armiga just for gaming. Especially now that they support ecs and aga.

You wanna take my advice again? Don't. Isn't your machine an A500? You already have the most compatible setup for gaming available. If you really want to go that route, if you decided you will be using mostly ld stuff, and want chance of using floppies, kickstart switching easily, PAL/NTSC switching easily etc, I am sure someone can take your Vampire off your hands for a very good price and you can get something like the HC508 instead (which I really really want for my A500!)
My gaming Amiga is a CD32. Not absolutely everything runs on it, games need to be adapted or HD-installed on a CD and stuff for them to work and that can be a mixed bag, but so much stuff works and with no issues, that it has become my favorite gaming rig. I rarely play games on my desktop Amigas anymore.

[Sinphaltimus]

Yeah, I only have one Amiga 500 and I want to use it for creative endeavors as opposed to gaming. I thought the Armiga would be a good choice since I can get one with the floppy drive and it does ics/ecs and aga for about $150 U.S.

[Amiga1992]

You can get another A500 for that price. Maybe.
Armiga is an emulator. The floppy thing basically just images a disk to ADF then uses that so I don't even know how it deals with originals with copy protection if at all, and you have to image all the disks first which is a pain ( [ Show youtube player ]), ARM isn't really that powerful... I just wouldn't do it, but you do what you want.

If you are going to go the emulator way, might as well get a raspberry pi and use UAE4ARM (which is basically what Armiga uses). RPi3 is like 35 and everything else pretty much free.
https://gunkrist79.wixsite.com/amibian

(We've gone way OT, sorry guys!)

[Sinphaltimus]

I've been eyeballing A500 systems on ebay for the last few weeks. So tempting. Yeah, I'm aware of the Armiga pros and cons. There's a reason I don't have one already. I just can't get over it being so small, ready to go, hdmi and as a small bonus has Android OS also. Which I can develop for. Undecided. I probably won't make up my mind until August when my upcoming vacation is said and done.

My main focus on the A500 systems is really the fact that I do not have a spare should something bad happen to the one I have making it slightly more of a higher priority. Maybe I'll do both.

EDIT: I would have to suffer greatly from complete and utter disappointed before I could decide on keeping the vampire or not.

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

Hi Sean

The other 2 things, dare i say it, are build quality and customer service. Maybe its assumed that you have some knowledge of these things, but alot of people dont, my V2 arrived in a box, with no instructions, like everyone elses, but only 1 plastic mounting post, i had to get creative and make one from a rawlplug. The socket that clips over the CPU is woeful, and i mean woeful, even when it's on uber tight, you can still move it from side to side and hear metal grind on metal, and in the last few days the A600 has been in bits, because most of my time has been spent mounting, and re-mounting this thing over and over, which means stripping the entire thing down, and taking the mobo out, and even when i have the V2 bolted down on there, as hard as i can, it seems to last a while, and then needs remounting. Customer service to, is awful, i know these guys are not Amazon, and dont have a huge customer service dpt. i get that, but trying to get help, involves going onto the IRC channel for Apollo, and just shouting out questions, 9/10 times the answer will come from OTHER V2 owners instead of the staff, they say, "we are too busy on working on getting orders out to talk", and i understand that also, but its not great, and they appear to have thrown the baby out with the bath water. But seriously, the build quality on the socket on the V2 is shocking, on the Furia its a far tighter fit, and it SNAPS on there, and once its on, it's not coming off. In all the time i have had the Furia, i have never had to reseat it once, i have never had any incompatibility issues etc. dont get me wrong, I had some issues at the start, namely the Furia being really picky about what CF card it will use, and FFS. But once i got a good Sandisk card, and went with PFS3, those issues all went away, but to reiterate, the socket on the Furia is like Japanese carpentry, uber precise and the best fit possible. The socket on the V2 is like someone nailed some wood together with bent nails and a brick

I got the vampire 2 a week ago and I agree. Some included instructions would be nice.

I too only got one white plastic spacer so I fashioned my own from two small rubber grommets.

However I later found a demo video with the "new" mounting system. Looking really closely only one spacer was used there by Kipper2k and it's supposed to be on the SD card side.

Then you just tighten the screw on the cpu side enough for it to almost begin flexing the vampire pcb.

I got the white spacer on the cpu side and the grommets on the sd card side since I didn't know better but it's been working as is so I figured i'll leve well enough alone.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Sinphaltimus

I've been eyeballing A500 systems on ebay for the last few weeks. So tempting. Yeah, I'm aware of the Armiga pros and cons. There's a reason I don't have one already. I just can't get over it being so small, ready to go, hdmi and as a small bonus has Android OS also. Which I can develop for. Undecided. I probably won't make up my mind until August when my upcoming vacation is said and done.

My main focus on the A500 systems is really the fact that I do not have a spare should something bad happen to the one I have making it slightly more of a higher priority. Maybe I'll do both.

EDIT: I would have to suffer greatly from complete and utter disappointed before I could decide on keeping the vampire or not.

What the hell are you talking about has Android OS also?

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by Sinphaltimus

EDIT: I would have to suffer greatly from complete and utter disappointed before I could decide on keeping the vampire or not.

oh thats a very real possibilty, take it from me.

[Sinphaltimus]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

What the hell are you talking about has Android OS also?

The Armiga Dual-Boots. You can run the Amiga emulator part selecting A500 or A1200 or you can select Android (4.2.2 I believe it is) by leaving out the SD card.

Source: http://www.armigaproject.com/changing-android-launcher/

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Sinphaltimus

The Armiga Dual-Boots. You can run the Amiga emulator part selecting A500 or A1200 or you can select Android (4.2.2 I believe it is) by leaving out the SD card.

Source: http://www.armigaproject.com/changing-android-launcher/

I missed an R in there somewhere, that's pretty keen.