Vampire V1200 - The Best A1200 Accelerator Today

[Music] the o60 processor has long been heralded as the performance king for amiga 1200 owners but the king is dead and the processor is not produced even so o60 accelerators such as the blizzard 1260 demands high prices but perhaps that will change now with the vampire v2 for the 1200 hitting the scene but does this card hold up against the time-tested o6-0 accelerators how does an amiga 1200 powered by a vampire accelerator compare against the vampire v4 do we have a new king in this video we're going to find out as we give our trusty old amiga 1200 an internal makeover the key ingredient to our 1200s upgrade is of course the vampire v2 accelerator board this is the latest addition to the family of vampire accelerators and packs the same punch as the amiga 500 version featuring an 85 megahertz 68080 cpu 128 megabytes of fast ram rtg graphics expansion ports and an sd card reader you might also have noticed these two pin headers here the first is a 44 pin idea header and the second is a secondary led pin header these are currently are not activated but will be enabled in a future update in contrast to the amiga 500 model there are two expansion headers with the first being designated for ethernet doubling the expandability is a nice touch the various expansions and connectors are positioned to simplify cabling leveraging the amiga 1200s natural case design unlike the amiga 600 and to some extent the amiga 500 the amiga 1200 is very well suited to expansions with external interfaces the boards layout takes full advantage of this and thanks to fpga technology the car delivers eyebrow raising performance and features in a very compact card and without any need for large heatsinks or fans which can often be difficult to install something that previous owners of overclocked o60 accelerators would welcome there's also one other thing which made me smile and that is this illuminating v a requested feature believe it or not and a testament to igor mastorovich's passion for accelerator board design keeping the original look of the amiga 1200 is fundamental to our build here so we are going to try not to modify the case too much alongside the vampire we'll also be adding a cf card and cd-rom as well as a network adapter and usb now that's quite an ambitious build given the tiny amount of space available in the 1200. unlike the amiga 500 the 1200 has little room and that's bad news for our city wrong so this build will encompass an externally connected cd-rom however it is certainly possible to get a cd-rom into an amiga 1200 and miss mad lemon has several great videos on that i highly recommend checking out her build as well as her other videos on modding the amiga 1200 a link is in the description below individual computers rapid road will provide our usb interface via the clock port on the amiga 1200s motherboard now i could use the back cavity of the amiga 1200 for bringing the usb sockets to the outside of the case but that is where the digital video and ethernet connectors will be so we need an alternate plan to solve this we're going to remove the rf modulator and composite video out and use those spaces for an external connector using an esata connector provides a clean method of connecting not just a cd-rom but any sata based storage now a solder to e-site or adapter would fit here nicely with the old rf modulator hole being a perfect fit power for the externally connected drive can be supplied by a standard usb power supply and this cable and this setup works very nicely indeed however using a lesser known variant esata p the same connector can also deliver power to the drive the connector also doubles as a usb port and i found an adapter from d-lock which combines usb and sata into a single esp port and with the use of a cable i can bring this to the back of the amiga giving us usb and esarter at the rear of the 1200 without needing to modify the case not bad preparation is key to a successful build a reliable power supply will be crucial and it goes hand in hand with a recap to ensure we have reliable power throughout the amiga it is well worth getting the id header replaced at the same time as these can break more easily with time and corrosion sadly the keys on my mega keyboard are showing that less than cool yellow color that is common for computers of the era so the keyboard receives a full retrobrite treatment and this does take some time i planned a full day for the preparation treatment and rinsing and you really can't rush this especially if you live in a country where the sun doesn't shine as often but patients will be rewarded with white shiny keys and the result is well worth it now i'm not an expert on retro bridging so if you're looking to do this yourself i would recommend checking out the retro man cave's excellent videos on retrobrite techniques a link is in the description below now removal of the rf modulator is an exercise in patients and should be done slowly and carefully if you're getting your amiga recapped it's worth getting this done at the same time as it can really take a long time now power for the esata and usb device will come over the floppy connector and i was careful to find a cd-rom that draws the same current as the rapid road usb adapter which is 1.5 amps once we have everything inside the case the final layout should look like this with that done it's finally time to put our new omega 1200 powerhouse to the test an accelerator is a promise of a faster omega let's see how these cards fulfill that promise info is our first stop to get some indication of each card's cpu fpu and disk performance both the v1200 and the v4 deliver the same 153 mips and 81 megaflops the blizzard 1260 on the other hand is the slowest card by far delivering a mere 38 mips and 27 megaflops that's quite a difference looking at drive speeds the difference is clear again the v4 delivered a solid 12 megabytes per second on the a1200 internal ide the v1200 achieves three megabytes per second and that's ahead of the blizzard 1260 with a fairly lackluster one megabyte per second but i also have an internal test score for the v1200 for testing the vampire ide and the initial test look really good with an ssd connected sysinfo measures 7.7 megabytes per second putting our esata port to the test we see an externally connected ssd reaches 3 megabytes per second and with a cd rom about 770 kilobytes per second to put this into context if we were to use a usb for external storage the best transfer speed we can expect is about one megabyte per second so there's a clear win for our combination e sata port over usb and i'm really pleased with that next on the list of performance indicators is ram speed the v1200 powers through with 609 megabytes per second on fast ram and 7 megabytes per second on chip ram the v4 delivers speeds of 530 megabytes per second on fast ram and chip ram the blizzard 1260 once again shows its old age with 36 megabytes per second on fast ram and 4.5 megabytes per second on chip ram in the chip ram test the v4 enjoys an unfair advantage here since its architecture is completely new but the v1200 enjoys a double chip ram speed and is almost 20 times faster in fast ramp speed when compared to the blizzard 1260. next up is the classic doom benchmark and to keep the benchmark as comparable as possible we're only testing a doom on aga and not rtg i also tuned a doom settings so that it was optimized for o600 on aga as you might expect we see more or less the same trend as with the benchmarks the v1200 is capable of around 36 frames per second on average and that is in line with the v4 with roughly the same frame rate the blizzard 1260 on the other hand delivers about 18 frames per second and that's approximately half of the vampire quake on aga is a similar story too and you can really see the difference here it isn't just a simple stat it is a case for playable or not playable with vampire cards belonging to the former v1200 achieves about 14 frames per second behind the v4 with 16 frames the blizzard barely manages 6 frames per second once again showing its age [Applause] if we compare the blizzard and the vampire side by side the difference is like day and night it may seem unfair to compare a 20 year old accelerator against a vampire but it's actually the more expensive card here and that's really the point these old octo accelerators aren't worth the 500 euros price tag they come with with our cd-rom connected and the power switch flipped we finally get to enjoy our revitalized amiga after enabling rtg the first thing that stands out is just how quick this thing really is everything responds instantly even if you set a resolution of by 720 at 32-bit color the rcg graphics chipset built into the v1200 shares the same memory as the cpu and the driver can write super fast to the frame buffer that translates to very fast graphics and the 080 cpu really ensures a silky smooth desktop experience even if i unpack three large lha files in parallel the system is very responsive so to unleash this new configuration i thought i would start with exploring some cover cds from cu amiga in the pre-internet days a shiny 600 megabyte disk seemed like a limitless world to explore i think amy net in the internet has spoiled us since then the cover this experience today seems to be more about wading through the junk to find those one or two gems what is this demo here then an interesting effect but i'm not sure that the magazine's editor's hearts were in it when they compiled this collection hello stan but one gem i did find which i thought could benefit from an ultra fast a1200 was this demo of vista pro making my own virtual world seemed so much more fun when i didn't have to wait for it as a young fellow i didn't seem to mind waiting an hour for my image to finish rendering if only i had a v1200 back then of course it isn't always about speed sometimes the simple pleasures are the best and i found at least two of my amiga cd32 games that work without any need for emulation just pop the cd in and away it went liberation of course one of my favorites and who could forget pinball fantasies since we're talking about gaming again i looked at the rtg version of quake and it is much faster than the aj counterpart and his time demo achieves about 27 frames per second that's pretty good since the quake 1 experience is so good let's try something a little more power hungry this is quake 2. maybe it's not playable but at 11 frames per second it's certainly impressive for a 68k processor one thing that got people's attention in my v4 video was running an mpeg video in the background now you can enjoy that same pleasure on an a1200 but before we get carried away with fancy tricks like this take a look at this now you might be thinking this is just one more shameless promotion of the v4 rtg and mpeg playback capabilities but this is an rtg this is high-res pal on aga and from an amiga 1200 this is almost flawless and i have to say i nearly fell off my chair watching this the faster ide combined with the faster chip ram access speed afforded by the v1200 gives that extra kick to make video playback on aga enjoyable and this extra performance is enough to reduce tearing in fast moving scenes as you can see here all this additional capability translates to better demos as well this is eludes we come in peace a visually impressive demo but it's most impressive on the v1200 if you compare the frame rates there is a visible difference [Music] the additional number crunching capability of the v1200 makes demos many more times pleasurable to watch even on aga hello there so do we have a new king absolutely the vampire v1200 wipes the floor on all the performance tests it's certainly much faster than these old 060 accelerators and it's actually cheaper but it's very hard to talk about over 60 accelerators and not mention the warp 1260 because the guys at sea slopes have come out of the gates racing with an absolutely stellar car i mean this car has 256 megabytes of ram it's got an on-board arm core processor a sound chip and loads of other features but it's all based around the highly overclocked o60 and that might be its achilles heel because these processes are getting hard to find they're not guaranteed to do the overclocking and with the overclock you only get about half the cpu performance speed of the vampire and about one tenth of the ram speed and you're paying a lot more so if you want real performance the vampire is the absolute loop so if you want raw performance the vampire is the way to go i hope you enjoyed this video [Music] so [Music] hello stan that could be stan you don't know

Channel: Ronnie Beck

Views: 26,694

Keywords: Amiga, Vampire Accelerator, Vampire 1200, V1200

Id: 1SuqM06LZcA

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020