Vampire 2 Review - The Fastest Amiga Ever?!

so today's video is going to be looking at the Amiga 600 by far the worst Amiga ever created right the black sheep of the Amiga family the Amiga that no one really wanted well I've got a feeling in 2016 that may have just changed I also do a weekly retro gaming podcast and download it every Friday from the retro alikom hey guys how you doing now today we're going to be having a look at a really really exciting bit of hardware in fact I'd say the most exciting development in the amiga world in the last decade for me now you know my retro Amiga conv I've shown a few of my videos I've got my trusty Amiga 4000 set up on this table with an O 60 processor and I've actually reintroduced one of my other amigas into my setup permanently my Amiga 600 now lives on top of it so you might be thinking I've got that really beefy a 4000 what on earth do I want my Amiga 600 set up permanently for and honestly you'd be completely justified with that way of thinking to give you a little background on the a600 it's never really been the most popular Amiga you could say to put it mildly even when it came out back in the spring of 1992 most of the magazines and the readers of the mags and the Amiga community in general really considered this machine a complete waste of time as it came out 5 years after the Amiga 500 and really had pretty much identical specs it wasn't Amiga 500 in a smaller case with a built-in IDE hard disk interface and a PCMCIA slot on the side and apart from that there wasn't really anything new in there you still have the 7 megahertz 68k CPU you also had the enhanced chipset one megabyte of memory on board and really you know even David Pleasants who was the managing director of Commodore UK shortly after the a600 came out he said an interview with me on my channel recently and he even said you know this machine was a complete waste of time a big mistake releasing it so it's fair to say the a600 has really been that least popular Amiga for the last 20 years or so that's all changed in the last couple of months though and it's all down to one little bit of hardware and I've got it in my sweaty little palm here now you might be looking at that thinking well you know that doesn't look all that impressive don't be fooled by the small size this actually packs a lot of power into this little board here as this is the vampire 2 accelerator now as well as just bending that accelerator which is a board that speeds up the Amiga which this does to a ridiculous extent it also gives you a load of new features on here as well now to quickly explain what it is and how it works without getting really technical and nerdy it's got an FPGA on board and that stands for field programmable gate array so what it is it's really a chip that you can reprogram and that you can change the logic on board this IC here to kind of simulate other bits of hardware if you like some people say simulation but you know it's not really because you're doing it at a hardware level you really just rearranging the logic on this to be something else if you like so at the moment the way this board is programmed it actually has a motorola 68040 core on there so if you know the benchmarks on the Amiga it thinks you've got a know 40 CPU on board and however it's a lot quicker than a traditional low 40 this is currently running at just over a hundred megahertz and some of the beta testers have actually shown a benchmarks have been running around 120 megahertz I did say the a 600 originally a seven megahertz so that is quite a speed bump isn't that quite an improvement there and as well as just speeding up the machine it's also got other things on here as well like there's a thing called the sa Ga core so that will give you 24-bit graphics output including you know really high resolution screen modes I've got this running in like 720p and via HDMI which is got in here too you can run it in like 16 million colors and that's really quick and it also going to be bringing future stuff on here too including a 16 bit audio core and an FPU and also comes with 128 megabytes of memory all on that tiny little chip there so that is amazing isn't it I mean just for you know how much power they piped into this little core here but also the fact that this is actually programmable by the end-user so what they do is pretty much every like six weeks or so at the moment they're bringing out new cores and all you do is download them using the amiga itself you know just download the executable double click it and it reprograms the FPGA without needing any extra hardware so it is user upgradeable and every time they're releasing your bit of a firmware for it the speed goes up you get new features added so that is just incredible in itself and as well as having the uga there are some other little additions on here I mentioned HDMI so that means you can now put your amigas video output by this Portland here and you can say goodbye to stuff like scanner blurs and you know your CRT monitors you can look at it in them HD resolutions on your modem flat screen display which is incredible and also there is a micro SD card slot on here too which I know the Amiga 600 is got a building IDE slot and people use combat flash cards and all that kind of thing but this is actually a lot quicker so and you can use you know more modern storage methods like a micro SD card which you can buy in any supermarket compact flash cards getting a bit hard to find now so this is absolutely amazing I think it's probably the most exciting and mega bit of hardware that's come out in the last decade or so and it's all been made by a couple of guys at the moment Magister is a main guy behind it and keep at UK is that one of the guys who's making these boards and there is a bit of a waiting list for them they're kind of releasing these as they make them so I'll put information in the video description if you want to find out how you can get on that waiting list I had to wait maybe about three months I got mine at the end of March and I've had a lot of people saying when you're going to make a video on this vampire - it's probably been my most requested video to date but I have done quite a lot of setting up which has taken quite a while as I did want to kind of give you a proper demo over the board rather than just booting up a quick benchmark and showing you like you know graph so my Amiga 600 is ready to go let's show you how you fit this board to it and then I'll give you a demo of the vampire - in all its glory and here is my Amiga 600 all stripped down and naked saucy now what we need to do before we fit the vampire is locate the Amiga 68k process of which is there this small chip here and the way the vampire 2 works is it actually connects directly on top of the 68k and probably the reason that it's called a vampire because essentially it sucks all of the life out of the Amiga if you like and takes over everything because you're connected directly to the 68k all of those address lines go straight to this socket here and then the vampire can just take over control from the cpu now fitting it is actually a little bit more fiddly than I was led to believe by a lot of the tutorials and reviews I'd read so far because he may get 600 or at least minded has got a load of n nuts and bolts along the back on all the ports here and you can't actually remove the amigas board without taking all of those and bolts out the back first which was a bit time-consuming and you needed a very small spanner to do that because you need to put these little mounts in here on the underside of the board and the reason for that is you can just push the vampire to on top of the 68k like so and it's pretty firmly in place but it will have a tendency to pop off what you need to do to really make it secure it's put these little mounts on the underside of the Amigo and screw them in place and they actually do include these little mounts with the vampire too and then they give you some tiny screw so you can put in the top here as well and that makes it really secure and ensures that it isn't going to fall out of place and your machine will crash when you're in the middle of doing something so that is a little bit more fiddly than I was led to believe but once you've done it I mean you know chances are I'm probably not gonna remove the vampire too anytime in the future so when it's in there it's in there permanently and if you ever want to take the vampire 2 out like I have now all you have to do is remove those two little screws there now I'm still using a compact flash card at the moment and I will actually change it to an SD card at the moment though you can only boot from the IDE port you can't boot from the SD card slot yet although that is changing in a future a bit of firmware when they get around to releasing it I'll move over to it then and you've got the HDMI port here now I do have a slight complained about the HDMI port because of its location on the vampire - you can't actually fit most of the larger HDMI cables as the work fit with a floppy drive it kind of you know bangs into it there and it kind of raises it up a little bit so what you need is an HDMI cable with a really small back like this one here so that will fit into the the vampire two's socket and still leave plenty of space then it won't pop off the board otherwise it kind of catches the corner of the floppy drive and the way I generally run this at the moment is just from this very thin cable out of the amigas trapdoor port and into my flat screen monitor now a lot of vampire users have come up with a much tidier solution which is probably something that I'll do eventually and that is actually desoldering the Amiga 600 RF modulator because you know who uses RF these days and instead mounting HDMI port there and then just using a small extension lead so that's probably something I'll eventually get around to doing and it will be a lot tidier so that's the fitting process of the vampire tune you can see it in place there and you know it might not look all that impressive but I think you'll be impressed at what it can do when we put all this back together get this baby flight up okay so the Amiga 600 is all back together powered up and connected up to this Toshiba 22 inch LCD monitor it's actually a TV monitor with dual inputs which is quite important for the vampire and I'll explain more in just a second and also I've got a PCMCIA 2 Ethernet adapter in here as well which will allow us to get the a600 online which is kind of cool now the reason that the vampire needs dual inputs at the moment on a screen is because we're looking at the amigas native video here now there's then actually two connections on this monitor I've got Scott an HDMI so I've got a cable from the back of the a600 from it's an RGB video pause into the scart connector on the TV and also I've got the HDMI output from the vampire into the monitors HDMI input now the reason for that is the vampire currently can only output the high resolution RTG screen modes via the HDMI port anything that uses like the standard to make a video like you know this old-school workbench screen here or a lot of AM classic Amiga games you'll need to look at them via the amigas native output for the time being so that does mean on this monitor here I've got to manually flip between inputs when you know looking at standard Amiga stuff or the high resolution stuff for the vampire which is a little bit annoying but luckily they are going to change that very soon as in a future core that's gonna be released for the vampire they're actually putting the amigas AGA chipset on there so that means everything will come out of the HDMI cable and you won't need this scar connector or anything like that and also it will mean that the Amiga 600 will have the AGA chipset that normally you only find in the Amiga 1200 and the CD 32 in the 4000 so a lot of the lighter and more colorful Amiga games will now work on the a 600 which you know I think is pretty cool so what looking at here is the stock Amiga workbench 2.0 desktop this is the operating system environment that comes a standard on the a 600 and anyone that had one back in the day will probably recognize this in all of its early 90s for color glory very low resolution so I thought I'd show you that to give you a comparison about what it looks like after the vampire kicks in so will that reboot the Omega eject that floppy disk and I'll pop the monitors out put him onto the HDMI port Meimei furred that little sound there and be thinking what on earth was that they've actually got a boot sound on the vampire to which is taken from the original Amiga 1000 all the way back in 1985 that put that on the S startup Sam which knows a nice little nod back to the amigas heritage so here we are they're looking at my Amiga OS 3.9 set up via the vampire - and I think you can see there is quite a difference there so we're looking at this in s 720p sixteen point seven million colors we've got loads of screen real estate here and there's really you know high colour high resolution background here - and you know it looks absolutely gorgeous so the advantage of having a really high resolution screen mode like this and all of these colors means that stuff like web browsing becomes a possibility so I'm going to open eyebrows here we'll click on an Amiga website Amica World Net which is one of the more popular Amiga forums and as you can see you know that loaded really quickly we're looking at it in all of its you know true color depth and we can click on any of these forum threads here reply to them read them so assuming that previously you definitely couldn't really do with any sense of satisfaction on an a 600 now becomes a reality with the vampire and I mean you're not going to go on YouTube or Facebook using an Amiga 600 but for stuff like downloading software and even going on like IRC and forums and that kind of thing you know it's more than doable using the vampire so will come out the web browser and also you know for a bit novelty I can show you something that you previously couldn't do on an a 600 playing mp3s so I've got a few mp3s on this hard disk here quickly find one hopefully I won't get done by the YouTube copyright police so there you go using amplifier we're playing an mp3 there and also I can continue to do stuff on the Amiga without any lag or slowed down or anything so that's pretty cool if you listen to music or even stream internet radio that's a possibility and that you know audio is one thing and playing mp3s on the Amiga it's quite impressive but what about we try something a little bit more challenging it's going to my programs directory here and load up this willa program here this is called River now River is a video player so how about we try a little clip from MacGyver here that I got sent by one of the guys in the IRC Channel so there you go with audio we're actually looking at an MPEG video playing on the amigas workbench there and again you know I can continue to do things on the Amiga know like or slow down or anything like that now Riva is a pretty old video player and it only supports M paper one I believe at the moment but I heard the guys are actually working on and some newer codecs so you can watching them more high-resolution videos with more modern file formats but you know I think that's amazing I never thought I'd see the day when a video is playing on the Amiga 600 as workbench so that's pretty cool but what about we have a look at exactly what drives the vampyre - let's have a look at some benchmarks I didn't say we weren't gonna get too bogged down with benchmarking and all that but I know there's some people do find them quite interesting to have a look at and to be fair they are quite impressive so sis info is a traditional Amiga benchmark program from back in the early nineties it's not the most accurate benchmarking tool by any stretch of the imagination but I think this will give you a pretty good demonstration of the true power of the vampire so we'll double click that now I did mention the programs that come out of the amigas native video input need to be displayed on the scart connector so we need to change the monitors input for this one because it's not a high resolution program so there we go and I'll run a couple of quick speed tests now the bit that we're paying attention to here is the speed comparisons on the side and this will show you what the speed of the vampire is compared to a stock a 600 or various other Amiga machines so click on speed it will compute it and look at this graph here in the middle it's actually too big to fit in this little field here we've got a plus sign on it so compared to an original stock Amiga 600 we are now running at a hundred and fifty five point thirty five times of the speed and it's currently running at eighty five point seventy eight MIPS which is even faster than my Amiga 4000 with an O sixty card in there thing what Lee runs around sixty odds so as you can see we get a little comment there as well that I always loved reading phone me now he says so yeah you know that is a really basic speed test but as you can see from just that graph there one hundred and fifty five times the stock speed is pretty impressive so come out of that flip the monitor back onto the HDMI output quickly so it's all well and good I've showed you a few things that you know you can then do on the vampire that you couldn't previously but what about the stuff that most Amiga users care about then what about playing stuff like a classic Amiga games so gonna play one here that was one of my favorite and first-person shooters on the Amiga this is called gloom gloom deluxe actually this version and this was a program that really takes advantage of a higher suspect Amiga and you can really see the true power of the vampire when we play this so I'm gonna double click it and let's just get into the game now I used to practically live inside this game back in the mid 90s had this on the amiga cd32 and there it was a really good FPS for the Amiga and before Doom actually came to the platform and as you can see here we're running in essentially a postage stamp-sized window because that's really all the Amiga could do before it struggled throwing these er 3d shapes around the screen so this is the default that the game comes in so the Amiga could actually run it but if we press the Escape key we can bump the window size up to something that would have absolutely crawled on a stock configuration let's try a full screen window there we go pixel width 1 pixel height 1 and let's continue now look at the speed of this how fluid is that so I've seen a lot of people demonstrating you know doom and stuff like that on YouTube but I think having a native Amiga game and seeing how this performs on the vampire is what really excites me you know I could play doom on any PC or any console I've got but I fall into play gloom I have to play on the Amiga and this is by far the smoothest I've ever seen gloom run on any machine you know bar emulation but yeah I think that is absolutely amazing so another FPS Amiga fans may recognize from back in the day is Alien Breed 3d - so let's give that one a quick go now anyone that played this game back in the old days will definitely be impressed at this next demonstration as Alien Breed 3d to the killing grounds was the final game in the Alien Breed series the last couple were kind of in this em like first-person shooter 3d environment although this game has quite be unique accolade of being an amiga game that was released at a time when no Amiga was really powerful enough to play this game as even on a top-of-the-range o6d this game still has like framerate issues and stuff but on the vampire as you can see it has absolutely no problems whatsoever so it only took 20 years but we finally got there Alien Breed 3d to the killing grounds is now finally playable and yeah really for the first time you know even my Amiga 4000 to struggle with this but we're currently looking at it with all of the effects turned on all of the lighting effects nice big window and as I mentioned before you know it's doing this with absolutely no problems whatsoever now as you've seen already the vampire gives some really nice speed improvements to the classic Amiga software that was a little bit more demanding yeah but also it kind of opens up an entirely new world their programs are really too slow to use on stock amigas but actually work really well on the vampire 2 for example here we're looking at fusion version 3.2 which is a classic 68k Mac emulator as at the old Macintosh is used as 68k processors and this recognizes the vampire as a no 40 running at 72 megahertz which I think actually makes it faster than any of the actual original Mac hardware so click on a star emulator it will then boot into the system 7 environment in true color we got the match chime as you can see you know it's really responsive loads really quickly you got the full that color depth there as well and this means that it opens up a whole new world of software that never existed on the amiga or maybe actually improved versions of games that we got on the Amiga like a prince of persia' that to get a port to the amiga Zin about 1990 I think but the version on the Mac is much better-looking I think it's got 256 colors and it's got nice MIDI sound as well so it's a much more enhanced version than we actually got on the Amiga itself and playing it on the vampire - it runs really nicely I'll skip the intro here and we'll get into the game itself there you go if you've ever played the Amiga version of Prince of Persia you'll instantly recognize that this looks a lot nicer you know it's the graphics are just a world apart from the amigas version so we'll try dropping down here and play this game for a while and even though we're emulate emulated a Mac here it still runs really smoothly and you know it's more than playable and speaking of opening up new software to the Amiga that wasn't previously available has about the third Monkey Island game that never originally came out on this system is finally playable after all this time thanks to scummvm now they've actually done a version of this which is optimized for the vampire and as you can see the curse of Monkey Island or Monkey Island 3 if you like REO official title is now playable on the Amiga 600 which is really cool because the first two games came out in the Amiga but the third one never made it to the to this platform but playing it by scummvm it opens up all of these old out LucasArts adventures that you can now play with the power of the vampire and it runs really well actually and even though I have since played the later Monkey Island games on the PC and the PlayStation 2 for example been able to play the third Monkey Island game on an Amiga itself is just you know kind of history completed for me the fact that I can finally do that is pretty cool and it's not just about emulation also exploring some of the later Amiga games library can be quite exciting and interesting for example if you left the amigas gaming community just after the fall of Commodore there was a good few years of games that still came out on the Amiga including some more demanding titles that required a higher hardware specs that most people had for example this game is called payback and it came out in 2001 that my company called apex designs and as you can tell by looking at it it is a Grand Theft Auto clone and it's got this really cool FMV introduction here that runs really smooth on the vampire and I think the game itself I actually found this more fun than the original GTA game if I'm honest and it's definitely worth a look in if it's an Amiga game that you never had a chance to look at and play properly in the old days now maybe the demo scene was a bit more your flavor back in the old days well actually believe it or not the Amiga and the Commodore 64 demo scenes are still pretty active and there are still annual parties all over Europe and checking out some of the more modern amiga demo titles can be really exciting and that the vampire handles them really well including this one here that got released at breakpoint party in 2008 now this one's called electric ocean and it's got pretty high requirements in inter no 60 at 32 megabytes of memory to run but as you can see the vampire can handle this in its sleep [Music] now I didn't want this video to go on for hours and admittedly I've really just scratched the surface of what's possible with the vampire 2 but hopefully this brief demonstration has given you a little insight into what's possible with this board and the enhancements that it brings to a classic machine like the Amiga 600 now I do appreciate there will be people watching this video but a kind of shrugging their shoulders going well what's the point why not just use emulation and you know that is a completely valid argument but really this expansion and probably this video is not really intended for you if that's your attitude there are people like me that really get a kick out of pushing these machines right up to their limit and taking them far beyond where they were originally designed to be and you know I just get an absolutely massive kick that was seeing like MPEG video and that nice responsive web surfing on an amiga 600 I never thought I'd see that day and for the price that you'll pay for a vampire - I mean I know 30 accelerator for the Amiga 1200 cost about the same price and you get a lot more bang for your buck with this and actually speaking of other models of the amiga development on the vampire continues and the team have actually announced they will be making vampire cards for other models of the Amiga including the a 500 and the a 1200 or 12 with the next couple of cards they're making and a development on the a 500 version already seems pretty far along in fact kippur has posted a couple of video demonstrations showing a vampire for the a500 up and running so hopefully that board is not too far away now and then I think the one most people are excited about the vampire for the a 1200 which is meant to have some insane specs a much faster FPGA it's meant to have like one gigabyte of ddr3 1600 megahertz memory a SATA controller on board HDMI SD card all of that kind of goodness on there as well and obviously development for the vampire 2 for the a600 is continuing at a rapid pace new cores and new firmware is coming out all the time bringing new features and even further speed improvements so as I mentioned at the start of this video for me personally this is the most exciting development in the Amiga in absolutely years so anyone who's got an interesting this classic hardware it's gonna get on the waiting list all the information will be posted in the video description thank you for checking out this little look at the vampire 2 for the a600 and in the next video

Channel: Dan Wood

Views: 268,249

Keywords: amiga vampire 2 review, amiga vampire accellerator, amiga vampire 2, fpga amiga, commodore amiga, amiga 600, amiga 1200, dan wood, fastest amiga, amiga in 2016

Id: 8S3B8a8N83k

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2016