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...

Friday, January 3, 2014

Amigathering 12 - The Megablast

Hi everyone!

First of all...I wish all of you a really happy new year!!! Lets hope 2014 will be a lot better than 2013 in every aspect.
Sadly I wasn't around much lately due to unbelievable excessive work that took almost my entire time but now that I settled most of my work projects, I'll focus in my personal ones :)

Ofc, all this time I was tinkering with a lot of stuff in my minimal free time, but sadly I didn't have time to write about them. I'll make some new articles in the following weeks about every one of them.

Although time has passed, I couldn't miss making an article about the last Amigathering that took place in Athens and it was the first time for me (as the previous time I sadly couldn't attend). 



My beasty A600 was there as well so I'll post some photos of her bellow. First all of I'd like to congratulate the whole event organization that was really nice and also the people that visited the even were really great and enthusiastic.

Here are some photos from the first day (I'm the 2nd guy on the right with the Amibay T-shirt).




Installing da stuff :D



...and discussing all community matters (and not only that lol).



Time to setup my stash...



It's ready and it's also connected to Internet via Wi-Fi (thanks to free hotspot by our event hoster BIOS).
Ofc my miggy had to make some naked close-ups for people to see what I've been doing live :)





The next (2nd) day, we had even more people showing up, and some journalists that wanted to check out the machines.




After some time, and because people know I mess with custom kickstarts, I decided to make a brief seminar about the usage of Remus, Romsplit and how we can make custom kickstarts and how to use them on real EPROMS or kicked via ACATune on recent ACA accelerators.






After many hours of discussing, gaming and eating (lol) it was time for some anniversary photos :)




It was really awesome guys! I hope to see all of you again in the next Amigathering.

As always...more photos of all the Amigathering events (as always), can be seen in the official website of Amigathering here.