FPGA/Vampire vs WinUAE

[Aegis]

For pure performance, your i7 running WinUAE will completely smoke the Vampire - that said, with a Vampire onboard, the A600 will be the fastest silicon Amiga ever made and there's something incredibly cool about that.

Vampire's only part of the equation though since the 600 is still a machine rooted in the 90's - sure you can get stuff done on it but there's little modern software available for OS 3.9 (and not that much choice on PPC/4.1 to be honest) - just trying to browse the web on a 68k Amiga is an exercise in futility.

WinUAE on a PC gives you a nostalgic Amiga fix whenever you feel like it and allows you run just about any piece of modern software available when the need's there - maybe something like A-Eon's upcoming ALICE laptop would work for you?

[Aegis]

Surprisingly, it does not always. It's really bizarre. After startup, I can see the workbench repaint the background tile by tile, really slooooow. Then, after a minute or so, the machine gets a boost and everything is fast.

Sorry Thomas, my post was directed at ming - shoulda been more clear

That said, yeah - WinUAE on an i7 is stupid fast - faster than there's any real need for an Amiga to be (unless you're doing 3D rendering on it I suppose) - not sure why your choice of UAE has issues but some ports take longer to get the latest developments/fixes from WinUAE.

I don't know. Do you have a link handy?

Again, that was a suggestion for ming A-Eon's ALICE is an Acer laptop running a custom build of Puppy Linux (AmiPup) and WinUAE with preinstalled AmiKit X and ROMs/AmigaOS 3.X from Cloanto.

It runs a full-screen AmigaOS environment but allows you to open native Linux apps and Wine-supported Windows apps directly on the AmiKit desktop - as wawzon mentioned, not much there you couldn't do yourself (apart from the seamless app stuff which is unique to ALICE) but as a complete package for someone that wants a pimped-out 68k Amiga laptop with the convenience of running modern applications I can see it having some appeal.

Oh, you have the option of running OS4.1 on it too but given that QEmu isn't blazing fast even on an i7 (though still faster than a Cyberstorm PPC) I suspect that's going to be a curiosity more than anything else.

*Edit* For anyone that's interested - here's a quick 50fps .mp4 I made (117 MB) showing WinUAE on an i7 running Quake/TVPaint/PPaint/Image FX - it's 720x540 'cause that's the resolution I run my desktop at (3.9 looks weird @ 1440x1080).

Best to download it 'cause Dropbox's movie player is terribad.

[Aegis]

I found some AIBB benchmarks for the Vampire and for the heck of it ran a few comparative tests in WinUAE - on an i7 with caches on in AIBB (v. important for JIT) WinUAE came out 5-7 times faster than the Vampire - with caches off JIT is actually slower.

Testing WinUAE with JIT disabled shows pretty comparable speeds so if you have a fast PC and you're curious to see how well a Vampire might perform for you just turn off JIT and run WinUAE at 'fastest possible'