FPGA/Vampire vs WinUAE

[Lemaru]

Chaps,

So I am looking at getting back into the world of Amiga and am torn between just going the emulation route, or getting hold of a Vampire v2 for one of my A600's.

My question is regarding the performance, and which would give the better results. I am no longer interested in gaming on the Amiga so it would be used for productivity stuff, Amos, AmigaE, BBS, etc.

I know most people would say to go for the real hardware. I already have an A500 and a couple of A600's, and an old Apollo A630 50Mhz which i never got working stably in either machine.

So is the FPGA route going to give me anything that isn't available to me running WinUAE on my i7? What's the speed difference likely to be, does anyone have any benchmarks or Sysinfo grabs to show off?

Also if going for a Vampire when they are available I can see this costing a fortune as I have plans to tower my A600, get a custom backplate made up for the case, extend all ports to the back, few expansions and such which so far all the bits tallies up to £300ish

Anyways, any thoughts, comments or info most appreciated. Ta

[Lemaru]

There's always the middle ground of a Raspberry Pi 2 or Odroid C1+ board running a Linux UAE variant or Aros to consider too, if you just get that distaste about x86 and Windows.

I did look into using the Pi as I have a couple doing nothing. It looks like all the emu builds are aimed more at gaming rather than using it for anything else though

[Lemaru]

Thanks chaps. Some interesting comments made, much appreciated! Will have me a play with WinUAE once I found my OS3.9 disc

Ta