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...

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.

Raspberry Pi: Some accesories and mods for my Pi

Not something Amiga related by all means, but since I love my Pi I thought about sharing some mods I done some days ago.

Well my Pi isn't something special. It's a normal Rev.B from the first batch.

• It uses a tiny USB WiFi NIC for connecting to my home network.
• It's housed in a ModMyPi case.
• It also uses a 16GB MicroSD card for it's OS via an MicroSD card adaptor

Everything's fine so far :)

Some time ago I pledged for a nice and tiny ON/OFF switch adapter for the Raspberry Pi. You can see the Kickstarter page here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1312527055/micro-usb-on-off-power-switch-for-raspberry-pi

After the project being funded, sadly I haven't received anything, so I email Mausberry Circuits where they were very polite and send me another one, and also one more switch of their new line for free :) Lotsa kudos guys! Their switches was these...

I decided to use the second switch they sent me cause it was mounting directly to the Pi, and the same PSU (micro USB) plug was also needed to power the switch. Win-Win situation. After giving it a test on my Pi and everything was working... I desoldered the header for the GPIO pins, and soldered the wires directly to the mini PCB.

Also I soldered both it's wires to pins 23-24 of GPIO connector as I wouldn't use them at all (at least for now). I can desolder these anyway whenever I want as it's too damn easy :)

So this is how it looks with the power switch attached :)

Some time ago I got an Sony Vaio US UMPC which had 2xZIF HD's. One 32GB SSD and one 40GB HD. As I wanted to increase my storage, I got an 128GB SSD so I had both these ZIF storages sitting doing nothing. Ofc, because I always want to use spare stuff, I ordered some time ago the appropriate ZIF2IDE and also ZIF2USB adapters to be able to setup and use these ZIF HDs for other machines.

Time has come and I discovered that the 32GB SSD HD would be awesome as a external storage for my Pi. If only it could fit inside that tiny case!!! (Damn I shouldn't have said that...)

I saw that I could remove the innards of the SSD by simply removing 4x screws on the back of the metal case. That was it! The SSD was really thin and awesome! After putting the thin ribbon and positioning carefully the ZIF2USB adapter, everything was placed safely inside (ofc some insulation with tape was put for safety) :)

You must have seen the custom USB cable that was stripped from a USB to Mini USB cable that I had after cutting it, making a small hole to the case.

WHY DID HE MADE A HOLE ON THE CASE (you might wonder).

Well for three reasons actually...

1. First because there isn't a TINY bitsy space or hole in order to bring the cable

2. Because there isn't a TINY bitsy space or hole in the PCB in order to bring the cable on the bottom side of the PCB if I wanted to solder it directly to the USB connector.

3. Because bringing a cable outside, could give me the possibility to just disable it, and mount the USB connector to a PC/Amiga etc and use it as an external 32GB HD :)

So this is what the hole looks like and this is how the USB cable is connected simply in the original connector.

Whenever I want, I simply disconnect the USB cable (even with Pi powered off) and attach it to anywhere I want as a mass storage device :)

This is how it looks from the outside... It's tiny and powerful shiz LOL.

And this is my Pi working and seeing perfectly the 32GB NTFS partition...

I hope you like it (although non Amigish) :)