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

[Hattig]

As always when upgrading old hardware, you are still working with old hardware.

The Vampire is an amazing card, but it's still coupled to the rest of the A600. On the other hand, at least it is a real Amiga still. Also I don't see this CPU core coming to other FPGA Amigas soon.

WinUAE works with your current PC, it is fast, it works at native resolutions. Underneath it all however is still Windows - albeit a far more reasonable Windows than in the past. Considering I thought UAE was pretty good 18 years ago running it on a P2-266, it's going to be more than adequate today!

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.

[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

[Duce]

Fun thing about UAE is you can disable all the Windows  bits you want and boot right into WB.

See the one x86/UAE guide for details.  I've had a Windows box booting into 3.9 that you never, ever see Windows in the least.  It's so Amiga like that if I hook an Amiga keyboard and mouse up to it and hide the PC tower under the desk it'll fool even the biggest Amiga purists into thinking they are running on the fastest Amiga they have ever run, lol.

Then again, I like modern hardware.  I detest the concept of paying $200 for a NIC for a 20 year old machine, or having to replace caps, or cobble together some A1200 tower that is assured to never be entirely stable.  I've run a BBS off this straight to UAE machine for over a year without ever rebooting the thing.  It's power efficient and entirely silent, an older AMD based rig that runs circles around even the fastest '060 boxes I ever owned.

I've never been too particular about what runs my Amiga experience, as long as it runs it well.  I've had terrific luck with emu boxes, and they are easy to set up without ever having to see one inch of Windoze past setting them up.

Never did understand the mental mindblock people have on the various different solutions, esp when all of them can be a sheer fun and bulletproof experience.  And I say that as someone who owns PPC 4.1 machines, MOS rigs, one lone legacy Amiga still, and a number of emu boxes, including a windows based straight to 3.9/never see Windows at all machine and an Amithlon machine.

[Iggy]

...Never did understand the metal mindblock people have on the various different solutions, esp when all of them can be a sheer fun and bulletproof experience.  And I say that as someone who owns PPC 4.1 machines, MOS rigs, one lone legacy Amiga still, and a number of emu boxes, including a windows based straight to 3.9/never see Windows at all machine and an Amithlon machine.

F'ing A right.
+1

[DutchinUSA]

"See the one x86/UAE guide for details"

Which one are you recommending? Link please

[guest11527]

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.

Frankly, I never had a vampire in my hand (I'm only programming for it. ;-), though it seems to be an amazing card. I would probably expect a couple of early-adaptor problems, i.e. there might probably be some issues here and there with the CPU or the graphics. But that will go away sooner or later.

I never really got happy with the emulators. Strangly enough, its the "small problems" that irritate me. Keyboard, to name one (my fingers are hard-coded to the Amiga keyboard, sorry, and the one extra key with the backslash near backspace), usability of the two-window solution on a shared desktop, shared mouse. I would have expected that performance problems should probably be resolved these days with more capable hardware, though strangly enough, the P96 emulation still crawls for bizarre reasons on my i5 desktop after startup. The problem goes away after a while. I don't know why and what's going on there. As soon as task-switching is involved, the emulation seems to hit its limits.

Then again, the vampire does not fit into my A2000, and I wouldn't expect a version for the big-box amigas any time soon, due to the increased complexity of the system (but one never knows.., so keep fingers crossed). I'm more a fan of the big boxes rather than the keyboard versions, and I wouldn't want to buy an A600 just to be able to run a vampire in it, so my A2000 will have to last for a while.

Thus, if you're a "keyboard Amiga user" and not afraid of a couple of typical "startup" problems, I would say you should go for it. It's at least a very cool development.

[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?

[guest11527]

For pure performance, your i7 running WinUAE will completely smoke the Vampire

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. I don't know exactly what's the problem here - though this should probably go into a separate thread.

It isn't winuae, though, but one of the Linux clones of it.

- that said, with a Vampire onboard, the A600 will be the fastest silicon Amiga ever made and there's something incredibly cool about that.

Even more so as it is a homebrew development.

maybe something like A-Eon's upcoming ALICE laptop would work for you?

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

[wawrzon]

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. I don't know exactly what's the problem here - though this should probably go into a separate thread.

It isn't winuae, though, but one of the Linux clones of it.

you must be using some uae without jit. i know the pain on it running the fs-uae with jit off on debian within a vm on my tablet pc. its slow as hell, feels probably like an 020/14. unfortunatelly its necessary to let jit off to test my code, so in this respect vampire would be easily faster than even winuae on a reasonably fast pc hardware, i have compared the benchmarks. with jit turned on, though, its another matter. i cant seriously think of fpga catching up with that ever.

Even more so as it is a homebrew development.

right. this is awesome.

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

i doubt a laptop preconfigured with uae is anything one couldnt do all by himself. executing application on a host from within the emulation seems to be a gimmick there. everybody needs to decide himself, how much such feature is desired.

[Acill]

I have an A4000T that has just about everything you can put in it for performance including a CSPPC with 4.1FE running, mediator with all the PCI cards you could ever want, nearly 1GB of fast RAM now and so on.

The latest version of UAE with CSPPC support is amazing. I have been playing with my WinUAE setup all week and making it match the real A4000T. I am using the same install cloned over. I can say it blows away the real hardware in every way. The coolest thing about it is the ease at adding new "hardware" and RAM is endless if I want I to be. I have 128GB on my Mac Pro. I boot into Windows on it for WinUAE and it runs FAST.

I am seriously considering getting a broken Amiga case and putting a modern PC motherboard into it and an interface to use a real keyboard. Once setup properly you can boot directly into the Amiga environment with no windows as mentioned. It feels just like a real Amiga at that point. I have seen others do it, and unless told you have no idea.

[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.

[kipper2k]

Then again, the vampire does not fit into my A2000, and I wouldn't expect a version for the big-box amigas any time soon, due to the increased complexity of the system (but one never knows.., so keep fingers crossed). I'm more a fan of the big boxes rather than the keyboard versions, and I wouldn't want to buy an A600 just to be able to run a vampire in it, so my A2000 will have to last for a while.

In theory the A500 version will also work/fit in the A2000, if you dont want to place it in the CPU socket due to a mini megi chip or other addon then it can be placed in the co=processor slot. It would be  simple enough to make a small little adapter to make it fit there

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

In theory the A500 version will also work/fit in the A2000, if you dont want to place it in the CPU socket due to a mini megi chip or other addon then it can be placed in the co=processor slot. It would be  simple enough to make a small little adapter to make it fit there

Curious on your thoughts how would that interact with Zorro expansions?

[Duce]

"See the one x86/UAE guide for details"

Which one are you recommending? Link please

http://wowohl.de/Amiga_XP_x86.pdf

An older one, and for XP, but can fairly easily be adapted for a more modern version of Windows.  Can strip the cruft out of Vista or 7 just as easily as you can XP, and get the underlying Windoze OS underneath (which if you do things right, you'll never see anyways) as lean as possible, then out of the way entirely.

Only reason I'd not recommend XP is due to MS no longer supporting it on the consumer side, and the risk of underlying security vulnerabilities that come with that.

I've used this guide many a time for a dedicated UAE box where Windows is entirely invisible in the end and had nothing but luck with it, anyways, so good luck!

Could just as easily do it with Amikit or something as well.  It's not as fast of a solution as a dedicated Amithlon machine, but it's a hell of a lot less work and infinitely less finicky, hardware wise.  An Amithlon box is hard to beat if you have the right hardware for it, though - but this stripped down version involving windows and UAE works just fine too.

I've just got an Intel NUC type system (think Mac Mini footprint - mine is a Zotac, actually, not a NUC) on a VESA mount on the back of my monitor.  While I prefer modern, mechanical keyboards and laser mouse to the old Amiga legacy stuff, there's no reason you couldn't hook a big box Amiga keyboard and Amiga mouse up to such a machine for a more authentic "feel", with the proper adapters.

That seems to be the main gripe against UAE, anyways - "but it doesn't feel like an amiga with a PC keyboard and mouse!".  Well, use an Amiga keyboard and mouse then, strip Windows out entirely and boot 'er into WB right off the bat, and most Amiga fanboys wouldn't know the difference if they couldn't see the physical box running it.