Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2794 from 2006/3/21
From: Northern Calif...
Quote:ernsteiswuerfel wrote:
I think one of the good points or rather 'side effects' of the Vampire success is it's impact on the 2nd hand market of Amiga 680x0 accelerator cards! Before that time if you wanted a fast classic machine you needed to pay several 100 € of not more than 1000 € to get 68060 cards in a good working condition. Then you had to get suitable RAMs, maybe an SCSI-card for faster HDD-speeds and so on. A rather painful process... And in the end there always was a chance your config does not work 'cause of soldering issues or other things.
The advantage of the Vampire is, it provides a complete package CPU/RAM/fast MicroSD for *A LOT* less money. It even seems to get working chipset graphics output via HDMI. A powerful Classic-Amiga now is in the reach of a lot more people than it was before. I think that's why the user base is growing.
Having said that I do not plan to buy a Vampire. I got two A1200 with ACAs' and the 68030 is more than fast enough for almost all classic gaming needs. And I got my PowerBook G4 and PowerMac G5 for all other stuff, and they are way faster than the Vampires' will get in the years to come. I even can comfortably run Linux on these machines. So at least for me there is no need for an additional Amiga 'in between'. I might be interested in a standalone Vampire though if some day one of my A1200 fails. ;)
Neither do I think the Vampire-A1200 nor the standalone will boost the sales much. What's the advantage of a Vampire-A1200 if you can have AGA graphics via HDMI on a Vampire-A500 Amiga?
But it seems the active Amiga community as a whole is growing a little bit 'cause of the Vampire and I like that.
Also AROS-680x0 seems to get a boost which I like too.
Good points regarding why the Vampire accelerators are popular and what effect it is having on bringing the high prices for old Phase5 & DCE 68060 accelerators. But I disagree with you that the A1200 model Vampire will not have much effect on its sales. The A1200 was the most popular Amiga model AFTER the A500, and I would guess the A1200's were used longer into the 1990's, than the A500's, due to having AGA. I think that more former Amiga users might have kept their A1200's, while many of the A500's were sold, or eventually (and sadly) put in some trash bin. I don't live in Europe where the A1200 enjoyed its greatest popularity, so I don't really know how many people kept their A1200's and set them up every so often to play old Amiga games for nostalgic reasons, but it seems to me that every set of pictures from Amiga gatherings held anywhere in Europe, always showed mostly A1200 desktop, or tower conversions, being used. There also seem to be many forum posters who write that they are waiting for the Vampire A1200 model to be designed and produced, before they will buy any Vampire accelerator.
I do agree with you that the Vampire project has given the Amiga 68k community a boost, as well as AROS for 68k. As others have stated, any new software written for Amiga 68k will probably also run on MorphOS3.9 and AmigaOS4.1FE, either natively with their translation layers, or under emulation, if the new software needs the Amiga custom chips. So, in at least a small way, the Vampire project appears to give a small boost to all parts of the Amiga community, and that in itself is a feat that not many other projects can claim to have done.
@soviet,
The only person that the Vampire project seems to have "pissed off", is ppcamiga1. There are 1 or 2 others who complain about missing MMU, or FPU (now at least partially implemented), but I think those are forum posters who would complain about anything, just so they can have something to write about.
MorphOS - The best Next Gen Amiga choice.
