Masjsta's A500 Vampire

[Crom00]

The current Vampire 500 has the same feature set as the V2 600 with the addition of an IDE controller. They were operating below cost. Now they have some breathing room. I expect the standalone versions on the way to cost more but they will be bristling with features. For $800 Apollo Team would make a super system

[Crom00]

I don't care about the price people are paying on ebay for them, but the price of the production units appears to be on an upward trajectory. So by the time they start shipping in greater numbers, that ebay price might be a real steal.

hahaha! I don't price creep is in the future of the Apollo team offerings. They were simply operating at a loss. And the cash that come in funds, Vampire 1200 , Phoenix and Standalone. The amount of work being done is staggering to witness first hand. They are writing processor cores from scratch and squeezing every bit of performance out of each FPGA gate.

I think it's hilarious how 68k is panned as dead platform and here comes Apollo Team out of no where and accomplish so much in a short space of time.

[Crom00]

Such a short time? Vampire has been going for years and Apollo years before that. [/QUOTE

Vampire 1 came out in 2013, used an open core. Vampire 2 benefited from previous work done for Natami... another can of worms.

Yep it's all essentially homebrew with 2 guys on hardware and a couple of heavy hitters unpaid core dev and some upaid testers. Hardware done at cost until the price increase and core dev is free.

Not exactly Amiga, Commodore, Newtek, or GVP by a longshot. So with that in mind I try to be supportive and not complain too much unless something really outlandish happens due to all the comp work being done on this project. Is a $100 price increase outlandish, some would say so. I don't think so.

[Crom00]

Hopefully Vampire and projects like it will inspire growth in the Amiga scene.

[Crom00]

I understand that they were operating at a loss & are now increasing their price to cover the cost, that is fine. But the official price has already increased.


Ok and I don't think it will increase unless future versions benefit from more features.
From what I have seen they are developing solutions to maximize every penny spent for future iterations. They appear to respect both classic hardware and standalone enthusiasts in future projects.

I have a test vampire2 500 on the way that does 140/150 mips as standard.....150 MIPS.... A have an A4k that does 18 mips. There is no comparison...! So I try not to hassle them too much. Also other developers run a few hundred units at each production run and take months if not years to develop so I can't get too critical of them either. I never in my wildest dreams though I would see such developments.

[Crom00]

There is an old saying "you can't please everyone"

In the Amiga scene you can deliver an AI with a Quantum CPU, and holographic display the size of a shoebox for $150 and folks would still complain about it..

The Vampire isn't such a device but it's as good as we got right now.