Apollo Vampire accelerators (V2/V4) compatibility concerns

[Feliksas]

Greetings, everyone,
I'm genuinely interested to know what experience you had with said accelerators in terms of compatibility with older software and WHDLoad stuff? I happen to own a V1200 for my Amiga 1200 and it's...well...it tends to have weird issues with running some demos thru WHDLoad - glitches, random crashes, etc. - which I don't have with a "dumb" 68030 accelerator on the same system and OS installation. Recently I got a V4 Standalone, and had an extremely awful experience with it - constant freezes, instabilities, garbled screen and sound in demos. And their support was...let's say, not very forthcoming in terms of helping me with these matters, so I've decided to send it back. It would seem that the real state of things is being covered up to the point of simply deleting messages with negative feedback. What was your experience with their products?

 

[miggymad]

In my experience with the V4SA, it wasn't a struggle to get things running smoothly but more a labour of love.

Things broke but were fixed by patching the OS, or Installing the very latest core with a more up to date version of CoffinOS.

Nothing was ever 100% right with it, but that was half the fun of owning one

Would I get another one? Maybe ... an internal V1200 perhaps - after I get the Warp1260 first

 

[Feliksas]

In my experience with the V4SA, it wasn't a struggle to get things running smoothly but more a labour of love.

Things broke but were fixed,by patching the OS , or Installing the very latest core with a more up to date version of CoffinOS.

Nothing was ever 100% right with it, but that was half the fun of owning one

Have you tried running OCS/ECS demos from WHDLoad? Because, like, every third one I tried (maybe I got incredibly lucky!) had some kind of issues - crashing, not running at all, or various graphics bugs (looks like they are blitter-related), and, well, latest core didn't really help much; also looks like those issues were OS-independent (and I've tried quite many different configurations before calling it quits). Looks like much of the stuff depicted in is still true today (I even have the very same glitch in Desert Dream, as shown there).

 

[miggymad]

I don't own one anymore, no room in the man cave now since the MAME arcade machine was delivered.

Most GFX glitches I put down to the buggy SAGA drivers available at the time. Don't forget that some games/demos also used somewhat shady coding as well which didn't help the V4

 

[SilkWorm]

Have you tried running OCS/ECS demos from WHDLoad? Because, like, every third one I tried (maybe I got incredibly lucky!) had some kind of issues - crashing, not running at all, or various graphics bugs (looks like they are blitter-related), and, well, latest core didn't really help much; also looks like those issues were OS-independent (and I've tried quite many different configurations before calling it quits). Looks like much of the stuff depicted in is still true today (I even have the very same glitch in Desert Dream, as shown there).

Send me please some more demos names and I will check them out in the V2 for A600.
By the end of this month I should be able to test with V4SA as well.

 

[Feliksas]

Send me please some more demos names and I will check them out in the V2 for A600.
By the end of this month I should be able to test with V4SA as well.

Try those:
D.O.S. by Andromeda (might crash shortly after the red pyramid scene in the beginning or not work at all)
Desert Dream by Kefrens (this one has issues with V4SA, but should be working fine on the V2)
Guardian Dragon 2 by Kefrens (V2: crashes at the helicopter scene, V4SA: Garbled graphics in the intro, distorted sound, crashes at the helicopter scene)
Tint by TBL (blatant graphics issues on V4SA, haven't tried on the V2 yet)

 

[miggymad]

If you were using the WHDLoad global settings at the time then maybe that contributed towards your problematic experience. I recall some demos and games needed certain switches in the icon tooltypes to be enabled or switched off for it to run correctly on Vampires.

FWIW I never had any experience with the ApolloOS as it was just being offered when I sold my V4SA on.

 

[Feliksas]

If you were using the WHDLoad global settings at the time then maybe that contributed towards your problematic experience. I recall some demos and games needed certain switches in the icon tooltypes to be enabled or switched off for it to run correctly on Vampires.

Well, I've been experimenting extensively with those, too, in addition to always setting the turtle mode and disabling superscalar execution - to pretty much no avail...SAGA drivers should be of no consequence in this case, as none of the stuff I had issues with uses RTG screenmodes.

 

[amifan]

I didn't play many games on the V4SA, but I found that after adjusting the CF speed and installing the correct patches, it performed better. However, it was still a little too unstable for me to do any productive work. There were often issues with the machine freezing or rebooting when I was working in art packages like Brilliance or editing text in Protext. It is an amazing machine but in regards to being used as a creative machine work still needs to be done.

 

[SilkWorm]

Try those:
D.O.S. by Andromeda (might crash shortly after the red pyramid scene in the beginning or not work at all)
Desert Dream by Kefrens (this one has issues with V4SA, but should be working fine on the V2)
Guardian Dragon 2 by Kefrens (V2: crashes at the helicopter scene, V4SA: Garbled graphics in the intro, distorted sound, crashes at the helicopter scene)
Tint by TBL (blatant graphics issues on V4SA, haven't tried on the V2 yet)

Did some testing on V4SA+:
- D.O.S. did not work (black screen)
- Desert Dream looked good in general, need to compare with other hardware (or YouTube video) to check about artifacts
- Guardian Dragon 2 stopped (black screen) after helicopter landed
- Tint had weird, shifted and multiplied graphics.

 

[miggygossip]

I have an Icedrake and it's glitchy mainly as it's engineered to be technically astute but not really supported. I've had freezes and failure to load the CF OS. It also won't allow a df1: drive or PCMCIA iirc. Great card though for multimedia and rtg games.
With the RTG games one issue I had, was MiniSlug would only open in a window unless I lowered the display from 32 bit to 24 bit.

 

[Feliksas]

I've also recently had the chance to test the aforementioned content (+ some more late CPU-intensive AGA demos) on the same system with the same OS, but on a real 68060 (TF1260), and even despite some missing instructions in the '060 core, every single demo or game I tried - worked just perfectly. So, the FPGA core implementation most assuredly still has issues, unfortunately.

 

[Ban1128]

I didn't play many games on the V4SA, but I found that after adjusting the CF speed and installing the correct patches, it performed better. However, it was still a little too unstable for me to do any productive work. There were often issues with the machine freezing or rebooting when I was working in art packages like Brilliance or editing text in Protext. It is an amazing machine but in regards to being used as a creative machine work still needs to be done.

Have to agree it is amazing but needs work!

 

[amifan]

However I have recently updated to a new core and it has transformed my V4+SA into a new Amiga, it is very stable allowing me to do all my work in Brilliance, Lightwave, and Protext without crashes or issues. It has become my main machine after the update, so the progress they are making is quite significant.

 

[AMike]

Greetings, everyone,
I'm genuinely interested to know what experience you had with said accelerators in terms of compatibility with older software and WHDLoad stuff? I happen to own a V1200 for my Amiga 1200 and it's...well...it tends to have weird issues with running some demos thru WHDLoad - glitches, random crashes, etc. - which I don't have with a "dumb" 68030 accelerator on the same system and OS installation. Recently I got a V4 Standalone, and had an extremely awful experience with it - constant freezes, instabilities, garbled screen and sound in demos. And their support was...let's say, not very forthcoming in terms of helping me with these matters, so I've decided to send it back. It would seem that the real state of things is being covered up to the point of simply deleting messages with negative feedback. What was your experience with their products?

Have you ever tried the apollocontrol settings? You can degrade the speed of the V1200/V4 in different ways:
A500 speed
apollocontrol TU=1
A1200 Speed /030
apollocontrol TU=2
Superscalar off 060 speed
apollocontrol SS=0

Sometimes it helps to combine SS=0 with one of the turtle modes.

 

[attic636]

However I have recently updated to a new core and it has transformed my V4+SA into a new Amiga, it is very stable allowing me to do all my work in Brilliance, Lightwave, and Protext without crashes or issues. It has become my main machine after the update, so the progress they are making is quite significant.

This sounds good. Which core version are using now with your V4+SA?

 

[amifan]

I was using 99xxx alpha core which was pretty stable but now the 10000 stable core and that is working very nicely. I have not encountered any issues with it yet, aside from the occasional scrambled display when loading a laced screen mode, but this is fixed by a quick reboot.

 

[Cooldude0177]

Possibly not the place for this question but here goes, I'm about to fit a vampire v2 in my towered 1200. Can I use an elbox 4xeide buffered interface on the ide port or the eyetech version?? I presume I can.

 

[atomontage]

Vampire was always glitchy trash. Once that became clear to me, I quickly sold what I had at a loss at the time, and moved on to 68060 and later PiStorm. The PiStorm especially should be the doom of Vampire. Why would anyone invest in a proprietary system with a bad history of one debacle after another (Von Boehn's wildly exaggerated claims, the "licensing" drama with Majsta, the empty promises, deleting messages with bugs and criticism from their forum, later moving to discord which isn't indexed by search engines and which ofc they censor etc) when PiStorm runs circles around it, is more stable and is fully open?

After decades as an Amiga user, when there's choice and alternatives, I'm done supporting new proprietary dead-end platforms that promote vendor lock-in. Moreover, the Amiga community at large has largely ignored them. For example, the Amiga demoscene did not embrace them, going for Terrible Fire instead. All in all, another niche project that is going nowhere.