In the closest this channel will probably come to a Halloween special, we look at the latest from the people who brought you the Vampire Accelerator, a new standalone Amiga, the Vampire v4.
That was a cracking game, I loved playing it as teen. I am suprised more people dont know it. So I take it you where there the same time as Mike Clarke ?
There are some like me who use their Amigas for more than games; I like the workbench environment over windows and Linux by far. I use OS 3.9 with winUAE and I do word processing, image and video viewing and a bunch of other things - the tight code from those days means that the Amiga side generally runs snappier than the machine that hosts it. I like what the Vampire team are doing with AROS and will probably buy one of their machines eventually...
I am interrested in what office and productivity tasks that can be done on a V4 as well. I am like, fine, OCS games is great, you only need an a500. How about something that really show what the V4 can do.
Really? Back in the day the horrible UI was what turned us all off to the Amiga. The hardware and the games were great, the price was okay, but that blue and Orange pull down multitasking floppy based user interface was absolutely horrid. Maybe I was just totally already spoiled by Macintosh. I went with a Macintosh SE instead, and the Amiga 500 ended up the forever runner up that never got bought.
@Brad Viviviyal Commodore was started by Jack Tramiel. It was initially a typewriter company. Whatever you can say about him, you cannot say he didn't build Commodore into what it was. Jack DID turn Atari around and make it profitable. For all of his flaws, and they were MANY, you have to give him credit. It's easy to forget as a fan 30 plus years later that both Commodore and Atari existed to make money, not to make our pet projects. Every single one of the small computer companies of the 80s is every bit as gone as Commodore and Atari.
@@scouse1967 true. It could be argued that by outselling all of them, that Tramiel was more important than any of them. But the truth is that there were a lot of people who don't get recognition who were all instrumental in this.
Your channel came up in suggestions and I've watched this and your amiga 1200 tower video and quite enjoy your take on it all so I've subscribed. Cool videos by the way.
The V4 and Mister are amazing pieces of engineering but I prefer a Micro ATX motherboard board running WinUAE and Amikit. Much cheaper and will get you a pretty amazing Amiga system with this emulation setup. Also, great things are happening with the Raspberry Pi4 which for a relatively small cash outlay and will also get you a noteworthy Amiga system !! I do realize that not everyone has this opinion so the Vampire will always have a spot in the hearts of many Amiga enthusiasts. Very nice video ! Thank you.
@@mrfoameruk thats also very good, I have seen that. A nice variant of WinUAE. It's all about what works for each individual. I am impressed with the Apollo teams work on their 68080 FPGA version of the 68k processor for the Vampires.
PC WinUAE > MiSTer and this thing for Amiga & Atari ST emulation. Hopefully the core on this thing is better than the terribad core on the MiSTer. RPi400 + Dan Woods PiMiga loads are pretty good as well - and for $150 all in not terrible,
@@godslayer1415 As I'm sure Dan Wood will happily confirm, he is not the creator of PiMiga. That title I believe belongs to a certain Chris Edwards, who of course has his own RU-vid channel. Hopefully the Amiga god's, up in silicon heaven, will forgive you rather than striking you down with lightning bolts or a decade long court case. 😁
Really cool. I bought a V4SA as my 1st Amiga about 2 years ago and the Apollo team really supports it well. As I learned about the Amiga models and history I realized I wanted a big box 3000/4000 Amiga. I have since acquired an AA3000+ / A4000TX / ACILL A4000 board and assortment of Zorro cards including ZZ9000, ReA4091, and BFG9060 cards. Hopefully the V4 Kraken for 3000/4000 will be released? Awesome video.
I was so tempted I jump in the queue the moment there was a queue and I was still number 387, if I was 386 that would have been a more interesting number :-)
I purchased the A1000 when it first came out. Great to see so much enthusiasm still happening 30 something years later. What Amiga software are people using apart from games?
I use Protracker. Its a sequencer that you use to create and play music with. Additionally, lots of folks use the Amiga to create pixel art as well with various paint programs. I also use PT1210 which is a program that can be used to DJ with. It can manipulate and effect music on the fly and if you use two Amiga computers, you can use them to do mixing ! Another use is demo's !! The demo scene is still very active. These are programs that exploit the virtues of the Amiga hardware sound and graphics ! IT also allows coders to boost their egos and demonstrate their coding abilities.
I've had so much fun playing with mine, there was a bit of fiddling to get some games working as I needed to copy a bunch of kickstart images to the correct folder of the cf card, after that most game just worked.
@@RetroBytesUK It has arrived, but I can't get it to boot pass the 'Please insert IDE boot drive' screen. I have also asked in the facebook group, one suggested to try another CF card... So now I'm waiting for a new card I bought on amazon...
Great video. I'm so torn. This, or a MiSter, or an UNAmiga, or just a Pi 4 or 400 (even though that's software emulation and I can do that on my PC). I'll think about my options while I play on my A500 :D
You're the viewer I assumed probably did not exist. So I finally got to tell someone that the vampire existed, well that's brightened a rather dull Tuesday morning thanks for letting me know.
I don't know. I never really _liked_ the Amiga games but what I loved on the old A1000 I had was programming the 68000. I never even bothered to learn C until I started programming the PC and was faced with Intel's segment/offset addressing and limited registers. Then again, if I'm just going to program it then I may as well stick to emulators. But... Waaaaant!!!!
Try finding an amiga that matches its memory, performance and periferals and see what price you land on, and what load of equipment you will have to have stacked up. IMO this is perfect for people who truelly enjoyed the amiga for heavier workloads (like demo-making/grapahics) but don't want 40kg of retro computer in their living room.
Stage 1 - Something is new, and the cost is what goes with brand new. Stage 2 - It ages, it's no longer the hot new thing, the price declines. Stage 3 - The price finally bottoms Stage 4 - As volumes implode and it becomes an exercise in recreating/maintaining something archaic, the price goes back up. This four stage process applies to almost anything, from motorcycles, cars, computer memory, processors, etc. If you're a keen collector, or have an old machine you need to keep alive, it's worth it. If not, it isn't.
I had an Amiga 500 back in the days that I got after a commodore 128. Just picked up a new to me Amiga 500 from eBay. I want to see what else besides games I can do on it. This looks interesting.
Pagestream was a rather good DTP application and was in use in a number of publications. It even recieved a 2010 update release for m68k and PPC Amiga, Linux and Windows. As for midi Bars and Pipes was incredibly good, there is a reason sony liverpool kept using it to record all their PS1 music with. So if used bar and pipes there is nothing that works quiet the same. There is also the whole tracker scene for music creation. There are a whole bunch of graphics applications, 3d renders, fractal landscape genorators. If you get board after that hold fire on the joystick and it turns of the custom chips and runs tos emu so you have the fastest m68k ST.
@Mr Guru Faster? Almost certainly. Easier? Debatable. Many applications have become so big and complicated over the years, simply because software houses need to sell more copies. The only way to do that is to 'improve' a program by adding new features. Most of which won't be used by the vast majority of people. Let's face it, any version of MS Office or photo editor from the last 25 years will do more than most people need.
Aros runs on a raspberry pi and also x86. I urge you to try out those versions before you buy this - you can run the x86 version in VMWare if you wish. I was an Amiga user back in the day, and I'm not impressed with Aros.
I ordered mine with a CF card that came with Aros installed, and most of the software you see in the video (if you have your own CF card already you can just download that image). The games I had to add my self along with the kickstart roms, I just copied them on to a SD card formatted fat32 and inserted that into the vampire. You can also using the ethernet port just copy them from a share from a windows machine (or samba on Linux and Mac)
I was bought an A600 as a present, back in the day, but did a part-exchange about a year later for an A1200. I stuck with it through thick and thin right up to 1997, when even I realised that PC was the way to go. A shame really, as, if they'd developed it, it could easily have been competition for both PC and Apple. But, sadly, it wasn't to be. It's not a bad idea, having a modern-day equivalent that plays all the old games with an equally modern-day processor/memory and hard-disk to go with it. I wonder, how does Frontier: Elite II perform on this?
Frontier runs very smoothly on it, the frame rate is great. You still don't get textures like in the PC version as they where just not included in the the amiga version, but it still sound significantly better than the PC version.
@@another3997 A "normal" US-layout typewriter keyboard has, for example, ^ on 6, & on 7, * on 8, ( on 9 and ) on 0 . A C64 keyboard had a layout that was much closer to an old Teletype machine, with & on 6, ' on 7, ( on 8, ) on 9, and nothing on 0. Semicolon and colon are on the same key on a typewriter or PC, while they're on separate keys on an ASR33 or the C64. Etc. etc. Touch typing on a Commodore keyboard required a good deal of rethinking and relearning, and was quite frustrating. 's why I never really bonded with my Commodore. :) My dad, on the other hand, was fine with it, as he spent his early career interacting with computers on an ASR-33. :)
You'll have alot of fun when you get it. I'm currently playing with vista on mine, I'm finally rendering a flying sequence that I tried to do as a kid but my parents would insist it was turned off long before it could complete.
What is with the 01-Jan-78? Did you know google's scanning books with OCR tech and making numerous errors with no hope for future corrections? I am sure that will lead to eventual and permanent closing of our libraries, as well as the removal of hard copies in circulation. This is gonna help with the messing up the future generation's. All that modern tech but yet you negated date and time correction? Picture twenty years from now, this video being filed as dated 1978. We already know RU-vid can alter upload dates and time for companies as they see fit. Nice review by the way.
Sadly I ordered the same way you've been doing it. I submitted my details to the Apollo accelerator site radio silence for about 1 year, then I got an email saying its your turn.
@@RetroBytesUK I think I submitted my details on their order page around 5-6 months ago, but I have never got any kind of confirmation mail in return. I'm starting to think I might never ordered one... I might order again and see if I will get some kind of email response....
still just as different plus, to many conflicts. also, we did play many of those games he said we couldn't/didn't, and on 68k amigas,,oh yeah RISC amigas . can go further on the risc topic,but suffice to say u dont need to be a purist to know that Amiga systems.. classic ones with the original OS.,, Can never be duplicated beaten or bettered or hence emulated in actual factual way. Why, well a astronaut aka a mason once told me x86 will never improve from its original "only seem to" or hence cell phones, pads. and pcs It will all be one big lie.
The Vampire V4 implements a compatible, but modernised version of the 68K Amiga architecture. It can run any version of the old 68K Amiga OS, and it can therefore also run the 68K version of AROS. AROS is a reimplantation of Amiga OS, but written from the ground up without any code from the original. Some versions of AROS run on CPUs other than 68K, such as x86. The Vampire is 68K compatible, and both it and 68K AROS will directly run most software designed to run on the original hardware and the original Amiga OS.
@@jamesaurelianus7482 Sorry James, perhap English isn't your native language, but your comment doesn't make much sense. I don't understand what you're trying to say. 🤔
What the heck are those serial ports doing in there instead of USB 3 ports? I've been using computers since the mid-80s using DOS but as far as I can remember, the only thing that I connected to the serial port of the 80286 based computer back then was the serial mouse when I had my first Windows OS.
@@RetroBytesUK I think I got the idea now. So this is a retro or old Amiga computer system that is inside the modern case, or was made to look modern which is also the reason why the graphics and the OS still look retro. The Amiga ports are there so that you can connect the original Amiga keyboard and mouse that came out during the 80s. Am I correct? Anyway, since it also has USB ports, can you also connect the modern keyboard and mouse that are available today?
@@gerrycrisostomo6571 No, you have entirely the wrong idea: it has USB for keyboard and mouse, and Atari/Sega style DB9 connectors for lagless joysticks and gamepads.
I was one of the first to own the amazing Amiga 500 and was a true fan until the mid-90s. When I see stuff like that, I ask myself: Why? I don't see any other reason than nostalgia. Is it really only for playing old Amiga games and run the (nostalgic but very aged) workbench? I don't get it. I don't see a benefit regarding existing computers and operating systems. Well I guess the reason is "Because we can" :-)
Because we can does explain a huge amount of human activity 😀 Nostalgia is a huge part of it, and solutions like the vampire allow the that nostalgia without the hastle of floppy disks etc we are not nostalgic for. There is also software developed long after Commodore went bust people want to see and play with, and the vampire is cheaper than any 060 card + rtg graphics card you can buy to try this stuff with.
It is just like classic cars. Sometimes they cost more to run and maintain than modern cars and people think the same..‘what is the point?’ Computers in the same way are either a hobby or a tool (most people use stuff as a tool), and imagine this is for the community hobbyists.
Nostalgia is a strong motivator, and the 'what if?' factor too. What if the 68060 wasn't the last of it's line etc? How different would things have been? If you couldn't afford a really high end Amiga back in the day, you can now experience what it would have been like for fairly sensible money. For some, the Amiga was a huge factor in their formative years. The Sinclair ZX81, the 8 bit Atari machines and the Amiga 1200 all played big, and very enjoyable, parts in my life. I use emulators of each, but it isn't the same. 😁
€550+ seems like a lot even for Amiga enthusiasts like me. Maybe if it would come in a Amiga 600 case and:or if you could run a HDMI version of the video toaster on it I also wonder how it compares to a Mister, that’s also FPGA based.
Performance is the primary difference between it and the mister. The fpga processor they use for the vampire is leaps and bounds ahead, not just it terms of running the regular instruction set (and you get an fpu) there is also the AMMX instructions people who are porting games across are using to significantly improve 3d performance. The 16bit audio is also really rather nice to have as well. I've been using it to play some of the later games that even my acceleratored A4000 struggles with like Payback and Alien Bread. You also have networking which is a big deal for me as most my Amiga's are connected either using a pcmcia card or for the big box amigas I have a very old ethernet card or in one a x-surf. The price will definitely mean it's not suitable for many, a
@@FuZZbaLLbee So if you old down the fire button on the joystick it boots into tos emu so you can run Atari ST stuff. There is also a good 68k mac emulator you can run from workbench.
It is hard to imagine a more pointless endeavour. The whole point of a demo is to do something the hardware is not supposed to do well. It is for trickery. The underlying hardware doesn't have most of the limitations of the original.
@@tarstarkusz Tell the people at Pouet.net that, and they'll CRUCIFY you! The whole point of the demo is not just to show off the hardware, but their own skills. And it's fun, with a lot of the best tunes I've ever heard anywhere.
Hardware trickery or not, all YOU are doing is staring at a screen watching a demo. Basically, your primary use for an Amiga is to sit there and watch what are essentially fancy screen-savers. So yes, that is pointless.
That would be nice. I seam to remember someone was selling a box to convert an A4000 keyboard to ps/2 so in theroy with a ps/2 to usb convertor you could eventually plug it into the vampire. However that is a cpmplex and expensive way to get an Amiga keyboard. Hopfully someone will do a good Amiga like keyboard for it.
No Cd or floppy drive? Can I boot from a CF drive? My first Vampire refused to recognize the Cloanto installed CF drive in my A600. I don't see any way to load software into this configuration.
Yes it can boot from the CF drive. The V2 in the A600 can't boot off the built in SD card, not sure why you could not boot Cloanto off the A600's IDE head though. It might well be an issue with Cloanto's distro and the KS version built into the vampire.
As someone who was still an Amiga user in the early 2000s (A1200 tower, Blizzard PPC, Voodoo3) while everyone else was using Win XP and pentium IIIs, I've got to ask what the point of this thing is? Is it mainly games?
Games is always going to be part of it (especially the more advanced Amiga games that came out after the Amiga commercial live came to an end). Part of it it getting an Amiga experience close to what you had, you also have those who felt they wherw robbed of their platform when commodore went under who wonder what the next gen Amiga could have been. Compared to trying to get a PPC system running the Vampire is comparitably cheap, not cheap cheap, but compared PPC accelerator card prices.
@@RetroBytesUK Sure thing - I sold all my PPC accelerators etc because I was really only using it for Octamed at that time, and only sequencing external synths and samplers so I could run that on winUAE. Had some great fun playing payback though before I got rid of it all, hah!
@Mr Guru Yep, it was fun, in a 'computing as a hobby in of itself' type way, but other things took priorities. I keep eyeing up the raspberry pi in a similar, "That's cool, what will I do with it? Does that matter?" type way. Crazy to think that for £50 you can get a machine far more powerful than even a PPC Amiga :o
MiSTer is definitely cheaper, its if you want the cpu power and menory, and RTG of the vampire. If you want to be able to play ports of Doom, Quake etc and those late 90's Amiga games then the Vampire wins, if not then MiSTer is cheaper and currently better tested with older Amiga games.
Exactly, buying an amiga to play Quake and Doom is pretty pointless. It's not exactly in the spirit of retro gaming, as it wasn't ever a thing back in the early 90's. The MiSTer now has RTG and works perfectly well and pretty much plays everything faultlessly, including scene demos.
I really wish I understood hardware nuts. Everyone gets very excited and they enthuse about the numbers and love fiddling with innards but when it comes to actually doing something, it's three common games that run better on original hardware. The fourth doesn't even run! We're told that the most recent games run the best they ever could, but you'll have to take the word on that. LRG is another one. Clint's a lovely chap, but he just plays Duke 3D and SimCity 2000! It's like buying a Laserdisk player and shoving Indiana Jones on there. I just don't get it. An Amiga on speed?! OK! Let's go! Bit of video toaster, high end image processing and other hardware stuff like you dreamed of in the mags, some advanced demos, the ubiquitous "OMG, it plays MP3s!!!" and "I can browse (some of) the Web!!", pretty desktops, networking perhaps... Nah, too busy mate. Got a wide and kids and a mortgage now. Oh well, Scorched Tanks and that WHDLoad install of Agony then I guess... And if anyone can explain to me the appeal of FPGAs over emulation, I'd love to hear it. Native screen resolutions that don't work well on modern screens??
I can understand owning a thing. A new thing. Sure, I get that. But I can only assume it's the limitations that specific hardware restricts you to (i.e. you can't go into the settings and add more resources etc.) and that you have only what you're presented with and how that can focus your approach. When I thought about it that was the only conclusion I could come to. You plug it in and you get what you bought and it'll show on a screen in a guaranteed way. I know I'm venting but the earlier Vampire boards stumped me even more. Why would you want a faster A600 / 500 in modern times anyway? What need was there for them, as impressive as they are?
@@MagikGimp Appeal of FPGAs over emulation: FPGA is a better way of preserving history. Emulation is never perfect. FPGA simulates the hardware to a level that's not practical in software. The Yamaha sound chips used in Sega Genesis/Megadrive/Arcade machines and the SID chip used in C64 are really hard to emulate because they are not purely digital. Software emulations sound like cheap imitations. But they can be simulated very accurately with FPGA
It is a nice blend of old and new, as far as I can see. However, if one only want to play the games from the era of the a500, then this is way overkill. Can you test out office and productivity stuff on this, and tell if it is a good choice if one want to do something like writing a book on an Amiga? 99 percent of all Amiga videos seem to be about gaming these days.
I've used page stream on it, and that ran rather well. I've used wordsworth also and it's as good a wordsworth ever got, but it would be fair to say you would not be able to tell much difference between running wordsworth on a good 030 accel with 64Mb of ram, where you will notice the difference is from the rtg graphics allowing a nicer screen mode. I've not tried protext which was the other text tool I used a fair bit back then.
I've also used the 68k mac emulation on my A2000 with the vampire 2. It's the best 68k mac I have ever used, Including may of the mac desktop applications.
@@RetroBytesUK The high resolutions might be a good thing for having lots of texts on the screen. Personally I have an a600 with Furia020 and scandouber. It is nice enough for my personal needs.
@@brostenen The vampire really does improve the desktop experience some what, just being able to grab stuff directly from websites using a half modern browser (netsurf) is a god send. Also I like to listen to a bit of music while working on something, so being able to play mp3s on the same desktop I'm using might not sound important but makes a difference to me.
I have a question that I am really struggling to find answers for across the internet: I am interested in playing retro Amiga games, yes, but I am primarily interested in playing NEW Amiga games that really push the boundaries and capabilities of what the Amiga computer line and related modern chipsets can do (i.e. mister, fpga, etc). What is the best piece of hardware to buy? The Vampire v4 looks amazing but is expensive for just gaming purposes. The MisTer options seem pricey, too. Is there some avenue I am not coming across? I'm not a programmer/coder or anything, so a complete board or consolized box is what I'm interested in. Thanks!
It's a lot of money to pay out just for a few 'modern' Amiga games. Some are either direct ports of PC or console games, or just Amiga specific games that are similar to existing games on other platforms. Playing the original version on original hardware would be cheaper and "better". I doubt there are many new and unique Amiga games out there that will push a Vampire V4 to the limit. The other FPGA platforms aren't as powerful and have hardware limitations. Everything else out there is just software emulation, which you can run on any PC/laptop or single board computer like the Raspberry Pi.
It's a lot of money to pay out just for a few 'modern' Amiga games. Some are either direct ports of PC or console games, or just Amiga specific games that are similar to existing games on other platforms. Playing the original version on original hardware would be cheaper and "better". I doubt there are many new and unique Amiga games out there that will push a Vampire V4 to the limit. The other FPGA platforms aren't as powerful and have hardware limitations. Everything else out there is just software emulation, which you can run on any PC/laptop or single board computer like the Raspberry Pi.
All A600 CPU boards (and most fast RAM boards) attach to the 68000 chip the very same way, nothing “vampire” special about that - I have an old Apollo 630 board from 1996 that attaches the same way.
It depends what you want to do with it. If you want to reproduce an Amiga 500 accurately, then yes, a Mister is the way to go. If you want a new, modern Amiga, then that’s the role the Vampire fills. It’s about as powerful as if Amiga had never abandoned the 68k architecture, and this was a unit released in about 2005, I think. The Vampire v4 is really about advancing the Amiga as a platform.
Different things appeal to different people, If I did not have an 040 based amiga with RTG I would definitely have picked up a Mister, but I do so I was more interested Vampire as I wanted a new significantly more powerful Amiga for my none gaming stuff, that I could do some games on.
@@RetroBytesUK I love retro computers and love the idea of the Vampire V4 however with the price it becomes a piece of gear that is just now worth it imo.
You can add your self to the waiting list on their website (www.apollo-accelerators.com/), you then wait for longer than you would probably like, then they contact you to see if you still want to order one, then 2 weeks,later it turns up.
Whatever happen to that Amiga FPGA called Lisa from late 2017? However Original Hardware is very hard/expensive to get. So I am excited to save my money to get my first Amiga
BTW the difference in core and ApolloOS quality, even in the last six months, is night and day. I generally stay on the lunatic fringe with this system and the last set of cores, SAGA drivers, and WD's boot loader are much much better. I still use Coffin or Caffeine, however.
<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="135">2:15</a> Kind of like how Levco’s “Monster Mac” upgrade worked just a few years earlier macgui.com/news/article.php?t=470 . Complete with fangs on the boot icon, too. Not that I’m suggesting the Amiga copied anything from the Macintosh world ...
I can assure you that the idea of piggybacking one chip on top of another pre-dates that Mac upgrade by several decades. You might want to ask where Levco "borrowed" the idea from. 😁
Whee!! I had an Atari 800 and was really looking forward to the release of the Amiga "Lorraine", the next generation of my dandy little computer. Same folks writing the custom chipsets. But then Amiga went to Commodore, they booted out "Mad" Jack Tramiel and he bought Atari. I ended up learning more about the Atari ST and it was cheaper than the Amiga so I got a 'Jackintosh.' This looks like just the way to see what I was missing and to get back to that superior 680x0 architecture (so much better than that 40-year-old x86 stuff Intel has been foisting off on us all these years).
Yes, I'm using it as my living room Amiga for games. I've got an 8bit-do controller for it. I will also use for it running the odd Amiga application on as well, mostly for screen capture for videos etc.
@@RetroBytesUK right now they are adding some V4 features backported to the V2 to run some specific Apollo Games that use the SAGA bits of the 68080 core. They will then double back to improve classic AGA compatibility for the V4 range.
Weird living as a retro gamer in a world of FPGA'S... Mist, Mister, ZX UNO, ZX DOS, neptUNO ect... How does this Vampire FPGA compare to the Minimig core?? In my opinion its pretty damn expensive and has a long long waiting list for something that is pretty much out there already and cheaper...8bits4ever's ST Mini looks really similar and is quite cheap and available if anyone wants to go down this path on the cheap...
The V4SA is different beast. The other ostensibly similar products that I am aware of are simply attempting to implement historically correct hardware in FPGA. The Apollo stuff is all about dragging the classic amiga, 68k and custom chipset included, forward into the less distant past and eventually the future. Hence the "68080" and "SAGA" chipset.
