Α600: Vampire V2 arrived and it's hawt!

Hey my friends.

Long time no see but I had a really good reason I was not much online or in the works.
I had my second child (a son this time) born on 18th of August so as you can imagine my personal time plus sleep have decreased drastically since then :(

Everything's turning out better as the time goes by and I have more time to tinker my lovely hardware.
Lovely things happened in my "absence" like new core with RTG support, cache, etc on FPGA Arcade and Vampire V2 with Apollo core and SAGA support... oh damn!

Well I hope from now on to write more frequently about my findings and tests on these lovely machines.

Yesterday I received my Vampire V2 board which took some time but was SOOO much worth it :)
Board is indeed small and has a JTAG connector, an HDMI output connector and a MicroSD connector. Lets put that baby on, shall we?

Yeah it's a bit messy as I had to dismantle the floppy drive combo, Subway and some wires that went on the former ACA630 in order to test the Vampire V2.

Workbench started just fine and INSANELY fast. My titlebar that is changed via MCP showed 040/ECS. Wow what a thrill!
I was amazed that Indyvision ECS worked just fine, cause I was under the impression by some posts that I read somewhere that they were incompatible. Turns out that atm they work just fine together even in SuperPlus 800x600 resolution.

Time for the classic SysInfo benchmarking and WTF!

Insane numbers for an A600 so it was time to make a module in SysSpeed to give a side-to-side comparison with my other accelerators (ACA630-OC, Furia, Furia2)

OK, I knew that Vampire V2 has the genuine kickstart that I provided inside. Time to give a test if it will work if I remove my former kickstart completely...
...OMG it works... :D

Last but not least, I thought about giving SAGA (P96 RTG) support a glimpse.
After I installed P96 and the SAGA driver... voila!

So far only 320x240 and 640x480 till 16bit are supported but we're still on early stages of awesomeness.

Today or tomorrow I'm gonna make a new post with some video of the responsiveness of the Amiga with the Vampire V2 along with the SysSpeed modules in order for anyone to compare it with his/her own benches.

Stay tuned :)

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...