Vampire V4 standalone Amiga and all-in-one accelerator announced

Quote:

---

These new FPGA boards from Apollo Team are expected to become available in Q4.

---

Read more.

I mean the product is cool but... that price?!

Hurry up and get the A1200 card out! It seems like forever since the A600 Vampyr came out!

Well done Hexus scoooping this news.

I have been thinking on a Vampire for my A600 for a while now but this looks even better. Mind you one for the A1200 would be a welcome addition if the price is right as current upgrades for the 1200 are pretty expensive. Presently I do have a CF IDE hard drive installed and I managed to source a 2Mb SRam module which goes into the PCMCIA slot on the side of the machine, most games including CD32 work just fine with it, only stuff that causes issues is the games like Monkey Island 2 which is on around 12 discs so not enough ram to preload it.

There is also the Armiga available which is very similar to this but not accelerated and comes in at €189 :

http://www.armigaproject.com/

I _still_ love the Amiga despite not having owned one for over a decade now. I'm tempted to splash out, because these Apollo guys seem to have serious technical skills and deserve the support.

What I find impressive is that it's not emulated (the Armiga uses an Arm chip) but implements a real 68060 with an FPGA. You can actually upgrade the CPU and graphics with a download! I'm amazed every time I think about that.

Seems to lack MMU and FPU so far from what I read, and I don't know how much spare space there is on the FPGA for these, but still ... could one day just be a download to add them?! Or specialist applications could add entirely new "hardware" such as DSP functions.

I did elec eng years ago, and once thought all computers would be like this. Instead we stalled at 4GHz, slowly added more cores, and shoe-horned in ridiculous instructions into the ugly x86 instruction set.

Daft question, what do you need the Amiga for, this looks like it takes over most of the functions, why not just release it standalone?

There is a standalone version. But you get access to legacy I/O when in an Amiga - floppies, serial, parallel, etc.

Think the Armiga looks to be a better bet pricewise. Miss my A500 and A600 and A2000 and A3000 and A1200 and A4000

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by 3dcandy

Think the Armiga looks to be a better bet pricewise. Miss my A500 and A600 and A2000 and A3000 and A1200 and A4000

---

Pretty sure those guys are just emulating though? Wonder how different to a pi emulator that would actually be.

Even though I don't need one for some reason I want one!! :p

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Biscuit

Pretty sure those guys are just emulating though? Wonder how different to a pi emulator that would actually be.

---

Yup they are..but heck I'm not fussed about some of the hardware as long as some of the games play right!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by 3dcandy

Yup they are..but heck I'm not fussed about some of the hardware as long as some of the games play right!

---

I've had pretty good results with a Pi tbh. Can't go wrong giving it a go for ~£30 all in

I do need a Pi in my life. Tempted to make a nice emulator with arcade hardware + pimame. Hours of fun.... or use a spare mobo I have here and make a cab. Would include a coin slot as an incentive to save!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Biscuit

Pretty sure those guys are just emulating though? Wonder how different to a pi emulator that would actually be.

---

Emulating? Then why the FPGA, a programmable hardware system.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Emulating? Then why the FPGA, a programmable hardware system.

---

I was referring to the Armiga

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Biscuit

I was referring to the Armiga

---

Fair enough. I keep meaning to make a Pi3 emulator box for suck things, but I only have the Pi zero-W that came with a MagPi subscription not in use, so I should solder a header onto that so that I can us it in the AIY Google Assistant instead of the Pi3 which is rather wasted in there. Such tasks never seem to make it up the priority list. I did get as far as 3D printing out a PI case that looks like a small Playstation :)