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Author Topic: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.  (Read 21684 times)

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Offline TuKoTopic starter

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[UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« on: January 31, 2016, 07:59:51 PM »
Dear all,

I'm very pleased to announce that I've received my card, from the first batch from majsta. I received it quickly as I'll be demonstrating it within next days in Switzerland to our local Amiga usergroup.

I'll continuously be updating this thread with pictures, comments and videos.

1) Unboxing and first tests
I received it with the SILVER core, which will be the default one everyone should receive. The card was well packaged and it included two mounts. Kipper2k made a small tutorial explaning how to install them.

The card :




Physical installation went fine and after some minutes my A600 (rev1.5) booted. My A600 is upgraded with A604n, RTC clock and I'm using a RGB->VGA adapter and Rys MKII USB adapter for my Logitech mouse.



As you can see on the picture, my Amiga is showing ROM 3.1. The hardware ROM 3.1 is completely bypassed and only the dumped ROM inside Vampire is used. Why that ? It's because the Apollo team had to patch some routines to get the 128Mb fully adressed and standardize Vampire setups. It's also faster as it's acting more or less like a MapROM. Anyway, this part is not the most interesting one...

Then, I added my CF with 3.9bb2 (without ROM Update as it is known to cause problem) and it booted. After disabling FBlit which also cause graphic corruption at the moment, I then immediatly went to see my old friend Sysinfo.



I then headed to my favourite Amiga game... Simon the Sorcerer, running WHDLoad 18.2. It worked flawlessly and I even had less hickups than with my old ACA620.

So... yes, it's alive, it exists and it's just the fastest Amiga accelerator I've ever had.

The magic is there...


2) Silver core - my impressions

My first impression is exactly the same as the one when I went from my A1200 '030 to my shiny A4000 '060. It boots like a rocket and workbench is snappy as it could be in WinUAE.

Only thing that was a bit hard at start was to understand that the card takes a bit more time (I mean, no more than 1-2 seconds) than with the onboard CPU to boot or reboot. So when you want to shutdown your A600 and quickly power it on back, you'll have to wait some seconds.

I've been amazed to play a MP3 on my A600, it was just impossible until now !

So, at current state, Silver Core provides the user mostly speed and horse power. In the future, we will know how to work with P96 once the licencing thing has been sorted out.

3) Beta cores

I was in discussion with the Apollo team to join the testing team because I naturally love taking risks and testing new things. I'm that kind of user that will take time to push things to get last decimal of performance... adding real-use test case to the team will be my objective as I have no ASM knowledge. Taking this route, I have been warned that it might not be the most stable one, but I'm ok with that.

As I have access to latest beta cores, I installed Quartus software and flashed my card with the latest one and an USB Blaster. Majsta wrote a tutorial about this. I did it installing the latest version of Quartus on a Windows 10 x64 environnment.

First thing, and not the smallest one, is that it immediatly added about 20% of performance in SysInfo.


But the big thing is this...


After some days with it and several core tested, I got OS3.9bb4 running (screenshot taken with Sgrab) :
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #1 on: January 31, 2016, 08:46:05 PM »
Quote from: Bennymee;803213
Looks great! My card is coming soon I hope.

How compatible is it with games and demo's ?


I haven't had time to try it a lot but I can say it's very compatible with most WHDload games. I focused on setting up a working workbench with P96 :-)
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #2 on: January 31, 2016, 08:47:18 PM »
Quote from: Marcin1982;803214
impressive  , but when will be this card for sell for example in Amigakit ? retroami to other internet shop ?

today this card is virtual for me :-) I don't like pay for virtual thing


This review clearly shows it's not virtual.

You can order it from kipper2k.
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #3 on: January 31, 2016, 09:57:04 PM »
Quote from: carvedeye;803230
Me too :)


Only demos that do not require FPU (FPU is not enabled at the moment).
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #4 on: February 01, 2016, 10:52:10 AM »
Quote from: kickstart;803243
@tuko

Nice review and impresive card... the "problem" of this is that there are not enought cards for all with this low production =(


There will be enough for everybody. People will just have to accept it'll be slow process (majsta and kipper2k can each solder at best 4-5 card per day).

A600 has been some many years without a such powerful upgrade, I'm sure the community can accept to wait some more weeks ;-)
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #5 on: February 01, 2016, 08:46:47 PM »
Did some work on the Vampire socket. According to last majsta's message, I used some sandpaper to get the socket correctly mounted. Now it doesn't move a inch. I took my ACA620 mounting system to secure it ever more.

« Last Edit: February 01, 2016, 10:01:28 PM by TuKo »
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #6 on: February 01, 2016, 09:17:40 PM »
SysSpeed screenshot taken with current beta core (2988) :
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #7 on: February 02, 2016, 04:43:06 PM »
New screenshot
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #8 on: February 07, 2016, 06:13:34 PM »
A4000d, Cyberstorm MK2 128Mb (4x32Mb 50ns) 68060@66MHz


A600, Vampire 2, Dev Core 3024


AIBB :
« Last Edit: February 07, 2016, 09:44:12 PM by TuKo »
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #9 on: February 07, 2016, 09:53:48 PM »
Here is another one, with core 3024 x14

« Last Edit: February 08, 2016, 05:55:55 AM by TuKo »
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #10 on: February 13, 2016, 04:33:55 PM »
Doing some memory tuning with new WIP cores :


400Mb/s is approaching !
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #11 on: February 14, 2016, 01:07:22 PM »
Bustest 68k on AOS 4.1fe (SAM440ep)
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #12 on: February 20, 2016, 07:44:18 AM »
WIP Core. 21.5fps on Adoom (640x480x8)

 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #13 on: February 24, 2016, 08:46:08 PM »
Simon The Sorcerer 2 RTG on 320x240x8
https://youtu.be/ffwPrVcWOwg

ADoom on 320x240x8
https://youtu.be/4DeJ66A-Aeo
 

Offline TuKoTopic starter

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Re: [UserReview] Vampire V2-128 received and it's just pure p0rn.
« Reply #14 on: March 01, 2016, 08:51:29 PM »
Quote from: mikej;805083
The T68K opensource CPU we use in FPGAArcade and Mist runs at 28MHz single cycle when using I&D cache (in replay at least). If I was to build this on a Kintex ultrascale+ 16nm device (which are relatively cheap now) I'm pretty sure it would run at the base clock of 114MHz -  which would give it similar performance to the Apollo core for zero effort. I'll try this next week.


Mike, Mist and Vampire use the same Cyclone 3 FPGA. Mist runs at 28MHz on it when Apollo runs at 100MHz. Running Apollo on Kintex would probably lead to something in the 800MHz range.