A500 with Vampire 2 on Ebay!!!

[psxphill]

No it isn't, there is no translation of code going on.

Translating code is not a requirement or definition of an emulator.

An FPGA isn't a 68000 and it isn't using any of the original logic, therefore it's an emulation.

FPGA's even use software, so you can't differentiate by calling them software and hardware emulation.

The differentiation I think you are arguing about would be parallel vs sequential emulation. That is the only inherent difference between cpu's and fpgas. A cpu multiplexes it's logic gates, while an fpga has logic gates permanently allocated. The main difference is latency, as you can't make lots of things happen at exactly the same time.

But why let reality get in the way of defining a pejorative.

[psxphill]

So the Motorola 68K is an emulator? Because the 68K source code is, actually, not run on real silicon, but is interpreted by the microcode interpreter that is built into the 68K.

I think you're over playing the mask rom and state machine in the 68000 to build a straw man.

Obviously a 68000 isn't an emulator as it's the real thing and to emulate something you have to try to appear to be something else.

An FPGA programmed to appear to be a 68000, is an emulation. The vampire could also be programmed to emulate a c64 or pc if you put the effort in.

You might think that Vampire is great and winuae is %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!, but both are emulators. They are just different types of emulators. Deal with it.

[psxphill]

Even if the Vampire exceeded the 68060 performance by a factor of 1,000,000 times, it still wouldn't affect the cost of those original 68060 cards in todays second hand market.

If vampire supported 68060+fpu+mmu and sold for a couple of hundred euros then I think it likely would hurt the price of the accelerators with real 68060's in them. But it looks like they are solving the issue by restricting the supply of vampires and pushing the price up (plus the real 68060 is still the only way to get the fpu+mmu).