[foft]

If anyone was interested in the Amiga but has not kept up with recent developments, I suggest looking up the Vampire V4. It is mentioned in the article but I thought I'd add a few more details.

It has a reimplementation of the ECS and AGA chipset. It includes custom extensions to the chipset to 'SAGA' which is an attempt at extending the registers to more modern standards.

It also has a reimplementation of the 680x0 CPU, which is using more modern design techniques. The developer used to work on Power.

Anyway putting it all together its a great system in the vein of the Amiga. Of course it is not as fast as a modern ASIC, being consumer low end FPGA based. Still it is great fun.

Relevant to the Amiga 600? Well there is a standalone version but there is also a version called 'Manticore' that fits into the Amiga 600.

Many people will say you can get similar performance with emulation. This is of course true though, as someone who studied microelectronics, I see the value in real hardware. Both in future potential for making an ASIC and for more precise sub-microsecond level timing.

There is an alternative semi-emulation approach. i.e. emulating the CPU with a raspberry pi and using the rest of the original hardware. This is known as PiStorm and connects the GPIOs from PI onto the 68K to replace the original CPU.

[jug]

Vampire is real hardware alright, but is basically just emulation in that layer instead. The hardware has nothing to do with an Amiga. So I don’t see much being won over traditional emulation in this case, other than perhaps improved input latency and performance.

If I were to go there, I’d go MiSTer or a clone instead, and save a load of cash in the process. You’ll get an A1200 level + AGA performance, and this ought to cover by far most of the content from the Amiga scene.

[robinsonb5]

And for anyone who doesn't mind going down a massive rabbithole there are many variants of Minimig, the original FPGA-based recreation of the Amiga - most of which are on more affordable hardware than the Vampire - and open-source to boot.

The versions which have a soft-CPU are significantly slower than the Vampire - but for my money feel more authentic as a result. The versions which use a real 68000 CPU are slower still - but I think the version which combines an FPGA for chipset and an actual PiStorm for CPU is currently the fastest nearly-an-Amiga...

[snvzz]

The vampire v4 is too proprietary, has too many incompatibilities and there's way too much drama around it, besides costing an arm and a leg.

For a modern FPGA setup, I'd look at miSTer. There's an excellent miniMig core for it, complete with AGA support, and it is open source hardware.

[jamesy0ung]

The Vampire is way overpriced and the extensions it adds are useless because they only work on other Vamprire machines. The PiStorm is much, much cheaper, and emulates a standard 68k while continuing to use the Amiga chipset.

[pjmlp]

As someone that was the only PC guy among a group of friends all Amiga owners, I don't think these systems do justice to the original systems.

What made Amiga great was the 1980- mid 1990's landscape of computers, 30 years later it is hardly any different from running an emulator, even if modern OSes still lack features present on AmigaOS.

[amiga386]

I mean, sure, but, as the Vampire makes clear in its name... it's not an Amiga, it's its own thing, wearing the Amiga's skin as a hat. You can also stick a Raspberry Pi running E-UAE inside an Amiga case for pretty much the same thing (a thing that's definitely not an Amiga, emulating being an Amiga, in the shell of an Amiga)

[Keyframe]

older accelerators still work and are great compatibility-wise of course, there's also terrible fire which is great. I'd put Vampire the last actually, in-part due to compatibility and as you've said it.. you can pretty much do the thing with RPI and heck, you can even have rpi as an accelerator within an amiga - PiStorm.

I have three A1200s, two A600s, and an A500+. In each A1200 I have in order of least to most powerful: Blizzard 1230 with 030+FPU, Blizzard 1260 with 060, and TF1260 with 060. If I'm after most compatibility and games, it's 1230 that gets out. B1230 is just plug and play, you put it into Amiga and it's faster. That's it. With 1260 both Blizzard and TF you have to install stuff, play with it etc. It's good for demos and demo coding where target always is anyways Blizzard 1260. In A600 I have one stock and one with Furia with 030. A500+ is stock (actually A500 reworked to be A500+). Technically that's the full circle of it. There's no new stuff made for it or advantage of more power than this. Demos are made for 060 anyways. I also have PCMCIA cards with WiFi on them so that I can move stuff to amigas over the air, or even remote execute code.

Aside from ALL OF THAT (including a bunch of 1084s monitors), I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. I boot it up, it's an amiga, has all the crap on it and most of it works immediately. What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was. That's what I'd recommend anyone wanting to get a bit into it outside of WinUAE on their own comp.

[zozbot234]

> ...I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. ... What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was.

Worth noting that the RPi 500 is also out now, with much improved performance. It's the most "home computer"-like thingy on the market, so it goes quite well with that kind of usage.

[Keyframe]

RPi 500

Oh, I haven't been paying attention, haven't realized this came out in the meantime! Thanks

[snvzz]

Worth looking into pimiga and amiberry, if using raspberry pi for Amiga emulation.

Of course, retroarch has an Amiga emulator as well.

[johnklos]

The Vampire people really turned me, and likely many others, off when they tried to argue that FPU emulation isn't important and that hardly anything uses the FPU, rather than simply saying they weren't going to work on it then.

When you try to use bullshit to make excuses, people notice.

After that, they said the MMU isn't important, and that being fully m680x0 compatible isn't really as important as other things.

[zozbot234]

Didn't the original Amiga MC68000 use soft-FP anyway? Not sure why this would matter.

[vidarh]

The issue, I guess, is that the Vampire sits in this weird space where they've picked a pretty arbitrary cutoff in which classic hardware they care about - most users who stuck with the Amiga for a long time would have had an accelerator with an M68k with an FPU, and MMU.

At the same time the Vampire extends the 68k instruction set and chipset in various ways. So it reflects this very opinionated "alternate history" version of what the Amiga could've been that involves ignoring a lot of what was.

I find the Vampire fascinating, and would quite like one (but maybe not enough to fork out what they're asking for it) but I realise I probably wouldn't use it much - it's mostly interesting because it's a fun oddity.

I'd have loved a Vampire-like machine that actually tried to take things forward across the board. I'm happy to see them experiment with 68k extensions, but I'd have loved to see them match the "full" classic experience with FPU and MMU first.

But it's their project - they're of course free to do what they want.

[danby]

I think this the best analysis of the Vampire. To my mind it is more of an Amiga-compatible computer (with some odd graphics and CPU incompatibilities) than it is an actual extension of any Amiga platform ideas or plans.

Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.

I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing I think.

Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit your whole platform would just be better off being a PC