Monday, January 6, 2014

A600: Vampire 600 - A new toy in town!

Well I guess many Amiga enthusiasts already know about Majsta and his first worldwide FPGA accelerator for the Amiga 600 called "Vampire 600".
In case you are one of the few that don't know about it (where have you been all this time?) you can visit Majsta's official website here.

I was one of the first that welcomed Majsta's idea and tried to help as much as I could at the time, so I was one of them that received the board soon after the announcement and first release. Sadly due to my excesive work the last month I wasn't able to give a thorough test but surely I will more in the future.

Majsta was kind enough to send me the Vampire 600 accelerator and one spare Vampire 600 newer revision PCB in white as you can see bellow



The accelerator is really well designed and fitted really nice on my spare A600 motherboard.




As it's an 020 accelerator (at least on it's current FPGA core) I couldn't run my beefed 030 setup that I host on my main A600 beast (with ACA630) alas I used the already setup of ClassicWB Full that I was using on my Furia S628 accelerator.

I had not a single problem for Amiga recognizing the accelerator as you can see in the Early Startup Menu.



After that, ClassicWB booted just fine and ready to use! Wow 64MBs of memory was super sexy!





Ofc I couldn't stop by quickly firing up SysInfo to make some quick benchmarks :D




Not bad at all aye? I can't believe how well it performs with such short core development!
I really hope for more core improvements and speed increases in the future.
Some days ago I received my USB Blaster so I'm ready for some new upgrades :D

Stay tuned...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic. I hope he will make one for Amiga 1200!

Anonymous said...

Impressive with a FPGA implementation of the 68020 doing so well.

I used to have an A4000 and it was a nice system to work on.

It would be nice to see how fast an FPGA+GPU (Nvidia?) could emulate the whole system (680x0+custom chips).

Another interesting thing would be if someone would try to make the 68060 core on a new 22nm process at high speed (maybe not a big market, but iteresting anyway). With only 2.5M transistors one could (in theory) get >50pcs of 68060 cores into a intel i7 area. Good for multitasking..