Vampire 600 V2 Accelerator on Amiga 600

I finally took delivery of my new Vampire 600 68080 accelerator, which I couldn't wait to get up and running on my Amiga 600!

For those who follow my blog regularly, you will know that my Amiga 600 was featured in a "from scratch" build series of blog posts, covering all the various upgrades and OS build on it. You can do some catch up reading on the articles below if you want to know more about the hardware in this Amiga!

My Amiga 600 has arrived!

Cleaning the Amiga 600!

Installing Kickstart switcher A604 and Indivision …

Installing Accelerator and Hard disk into the A600…

Installing Subway USB into A600

Installing MAS Player Evolution on A600

Wireless Network card on A600

http://amigax1000.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/amiga-600-cf-amigaos-setup-part-1.html

http://amigax1000.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/amiga-600-cf-amigaos-setup-part-2.html

http://amigax1000.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/amiga-600-cf-amigaos-setup-part-3.html

http://amigax1000.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/amiga-600-cf-amigaos-setup-part-4.html

Gotek Floppy Drive Emulator in Amiga 600

https://amigax1000.blogspot.com/2016/06/rf-to-vga-out-conversion-on-amiga-600.html

This machine has had a lot done to it since I got it in 2014!

With that, I fished out my Amiga 600 from storage (I don't have enough room to have all systems set up unfortunately), and hooked it up to make sure it still works. I am pleased to see all is well!

I also connected up 3 "new" external floppy drives I bought recently from Ebay as I only had one Amiga 1000 era 1010 external floppy drive left that worked! I am pleased to say the "new" drives all work perfectly so now I have 4 working external floppy drives. :-)

Next I pulled the Amiga 600 apart in preparation for the Vampire 600 accelerator installation. As you can the Amiga 600 is already heavily upgraded internally. Please check my earlier blog post linked at the top of this post for all the details on these upgrades.

Unfortunately as nice and neat as this is, I have to rip everything out, even the motherboard....

So now I turn my attention to the Amiga 600 ultimate upgrade - the Vampire 600!

You can read a lot more about the specs of the Vampire 600 V2 here on the official site:

http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/files/Apollo_datasheet.pdf

Here is some close up shots of the Vampire 600 V2, Revision 2.1:

Above, you can see the power and activity leds, fpga, hdmi port, micro-sd card slot, and expansion port.

In the shot below you can see the connector that sits over the top of the 68000 CPU that is surface mounted on the Amiga 600 motherboard. This board was made in 2018 so pretty new :-)

Some more closer views from different angles for those who want more detailed look. You can click on the images to supersize them to the original size.

As a comparison, you can see the size difference between the Vampire 600 II and the Vampire 500 V2 boards below:

You can read my Vampire V500 blog entries here:

https://amigax1000.blogspot.com/2016/12/vampire-500-v2-part-1.html
https://amigax1000.blogspot.com/2016/12/vampire-500-v2-part-2.html

For the Vampire 600 build on my Amiga 600, I also bought some IDE to SD card converters from Ebay to allow me to use much more common SD cards on my Amiga 600, rather than the more expensive CF cards.

Next I have my new 32GB SanDisk card to use in the adapter, which I will connect to the Amiga 600 IDE connector. Here is the final setup:

I used my Windows 10 PC to download CoffinOS R51 (google for the link) which is designed to fit on a 32GB SD/CF card. I used Win32DiskImager to write the image to the MicroSD Card. It is Vampire ready setup of AmigaOS, with everything needed already installed and setup ready to use!

As mentioned earlier, it is necessary to completely disassemble the Amiga 600, including removing the bottom protective tray. This takes a while to do, and is quickly fiddly:

Removing these screws from the ports on the back of the Amiga 600 is a real pain...but I got there.

With that done, you can now see the naked Amiga 600 board, top and underside views:

The reason we have to remove the board from the Amiga 600 is because the Vampire 600 is fitted over the 68000 surface mounted CPU, which is not a very snug connection, and can easily fall off with the A600 being moved around, etc. To eliminate this issue, the Vampire 600 includes two screws that need to be install into two holes in the board that line up with two holes in the Vampire 600 board:

Here is a view of the two holes in the board, centre left and right:

The nuts on the screws are really tiny and fiddly to get off/on:

Here is the first screw installed from the bottom with the head on the bottom of the boards, with main shaft of the screw peeking through the board as below:

I then installed the second screw in the second hole...

With that done, you can now see the two screw poking up on the top of the board:

We then attached the long spacer on the screws, which is what the Vampire 600 board rests on.

I then push the Vampire 600 board onto the 68000 CPU, and make sure the screws poke through the holes on the Vampire 600 board:

With that done, I have to put the tiny nuts on the ends of the two screws to secure the Vampire 600 to it's final position.

And here it is, fully installed:

I next have to put the whole Amiga 600 back together....

Almost there, you can see the new IDE to SD card converter board is installed now too.

Ok, finally done.

I put the case back on and connected the HDMI port with a HDMI cable to connect the Vampire's Picasso96 RTG board (SAGA driver) to my screen and connect the Indivision ECS VGA output to the same display (I have both VGA and HDMI inputs.

The HDMI cable fit is REALLY tight with the subway USB board installed:

I need a HDMI cable with a much smaller connector I think - I can see this would potentially lift the Vampire board from the socket if the cable is moved around too much:

When I power on, the CoffinOS R51 boots up from the SD card and prompts me to immediately update the firmware on the Vampire to the latest version.

I proceed with the V600 upgrade to the Gold release v2.9, the minimum needed for this build of CoffinOS. I was surprised the board didn't come with the latest release, but not a problem.

All done!

Next I rebooted the Amiga 600 and greeted with a black and white boot screen. This is a good sign since it means the Vampire RTG is working and booting up, but unfortunately means that my specific Vampire 600 board needs a newer version of the firmware which has my registered Vampire serial number included in it.

The CoffinOS desktop soon appears, and all appears good:

I soon had music playing on the system:

With AmigaAMP and Eagleplayer music players on the CoffinOS base build, there is plenty of options for audio enjoyment out of the box!

The default resolution is 800x600x16bit, but you can of course bump that up to 720p if you desire.

I note that the Trident (Poseidon USB) setup under CoffinOS does not have the required driver for my Subway USB card connected with the A604n expansion board. I will need to load the correct driver from icomp.de support site.

The Vampire 600 has 128MB onboard memory, and combined with the A604N memory means I have 2MB Chip memory, and 128MB fast, which is great.

I tested some RTG demos like Swansong which was included on the CoffinOS 32GB image, which previously I could only run on my Amiga 4000D/T with AGA chipset and 060 board. Runs very well indeed on the Amiga 600 now!

As mentioned, I need to upgrade the firmware on the Vampire to a newer version - Vampire purposely reduces the display output to black and white for unregistered boards to fight counterfeit boards and people running unsupported/beta versions of the Vampire firmware.

As you probably are aware, getting the updated firmware onto the Amiga 600 turned out to be trickier than I initially expected, since I couldn't use the USB driver, even with the correct drivers installed from floppy disk...

So I had to come up with another solution. I turned to my AmigaOne X1000, with it's catweasel X1000 hardware installed, which allows me to read/write native Amiga floppy disks under AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition.

However the firmware archive for the Vampire is much bigger than a standard 880k Amiga floppy disk.

So, I downloaded fsplit from AmiNet, which is an OS3.x tool that runs perfectly fine natively on AmigaOS 4.1.

I then downloaded the latest Gold V2.10 firmware from the official Apollo Accelerator support page using my AmigaOne X1000, and used fsplit as below on the archive, which by default splits the file in two. The resulting two files can each fit on a single floppy disk, so I copied each file to a floppy disk, and then copied them onto the Amiga 600 hard disk!

I then use the standard join command on the Amiga 600 to join together the two split files into one archive file. Here are the commands I ran and the files on the Amiga 600 after this is done:

I then extracted the lha archive as below:

I read the instructions on how to flash the Vampire from the Amiga Shell, which is quite easy, just run the flashromkickV3_c_5633_11x_c7g command:

I ran the required command to flash the firmware, and it finished quickly and succesfully:

After another reboot, I now have an updated Gold V2.10 and more importantly, colour!

After seeing everything in black and white for a few hours, it is great to use in colour finally!

I change the backdrop quickly, as I don't like it to be honest. I also changed the theme to use a more traditional AmigaOS window frame set:

I could then enjoy more RTG demos that normally need an 060 AGA Amiga on my little Amiga 600, all thanks to the Vampire 600 accelerator!

I also updated the SAGA RTG drivers to the latest version, again using the fsplit method on my AmigaOne X1000 to get the files across using floppy disks. I really need USB and network support soon...

That concludes my build for now. Clearly there is a lot more to do, but it is exciting to finally have a Vampirized Amiga 600 here!

Replacement Amiga 500 has arrived

On Monday this week, my replacement Amiga 500 system arrived, purchased untested from Ebay!

I was worried if it would even work given the seller hadn't tested it (no power supply), but the condition was good, no yellowing, no upgrades done and warranty seal intact so I was hopeful. It was a gamble though...

The packaging left a lot to be desired with no padding around the system at all, just the box itself. Very luckily it survived and doesn't appear to have any case damage.

Here is a view of the rear ports:

The build and Serial information on the bottom. Interesting that the Commodore text is in capitals rather than lower case as on my old Amiga 500.

I bought this Amiga 500 to replace an existing Amiga 500 I have since 2016 which no longer works after trying and failing to install the Vampire 500V2 in it at the end of 2016. I covered my initial Amiga 500 setup and upgrade of the older Amiga 500 in this blog here, here and here, and my attempts to fix it with new chips, etc.

I decided life is too short to screw around with the broken Amiga any more, so after a year or so of trying to fix it, I decided to source another one from Ebay, and I managed to get it for $150 which I think is not too bad. I will keep the non-working Amiga for spare parts.

I quickly hooked up a spare Amiga 500 power supply I have, along with my 2017 acquired 15Hz compatible TFT screen and recently acquired AmiVGA adapter (from Ebay) to check it is working.

Success! It works! I get the Workbench 1.3 insert disk screen as below:

As this is a unexpanded Amiga 500, I had to track down some 512k compatible demos to try on it to test the internal floppy drive.

I am pleased to report that the floppy drive and sound output works perfectly too:

I booted up the Workbench 1.3 disk I have to test the mouse function, which appears to be fine.

I plan to add the expansions I originally installed on the non-working Amiga 500 onto this new system. (see the blog entries I linked at the top of this article for more information on these). Given my experiences with the Vampire 500V2 installation on the Amiga 500 breaking it, I am not keen to put it on this one, but part of me does want to get it working so watch this space!

Given this is the middle of the week I decided to quickly install my 512k ram expansion from the old Amiga 500 since it is an easy thing to install and doesn't need me to open up the case yet.

As you can see above, the warranty seal on the Amiga 500 is still intact.

After installing the expansion, I booted it up again and now I have 1MB memory (512k Chip and 512k Fast).

Closer screenshot showing the extra memory.

Given this is the middle of the week I don't have much time to do much else with it upgrade-wise or to check the internals, but hopefully I will find time here and there during the week or next to transfer the upgrades from the non-working Amiga 500 as a starting point.

Not sure if I need the Indivision ECS installed on this Amiga 500 since I can display native 15hz now on my Acer TFT screen, but might add it later since it will de-interlace screens, etc.

Also debating the Gotek internal installation from my old Amiga 500...might keep it external and use the df0 selector upgrade..or maybe not! Maybe an internal gotek and external gotek and go floppy free? :-)

For now though, time to end this blog post as many ECS Amiga demos and games await my attention on the Amiga 500 and writing this is holding me up! More updates on this setup soon :-)

MorphOS 3.11 released!

I was surprised to learn this morning of the release of MorphOS 3.11 this week. Naturally I quickly setup my Apple 17" Powerbook G4 that I have been building 3.10 from scratch on this year (covered in this blog recently in Part 1 and Part 2) to upgrade it to the latest release!

Traditionally MorphOS releases a bug fix update a couple of months after a major upgrade. 3.10 was a major upgrade, and 3.11 is the bug fixed update of that.

So don't expect new features in this release. Nonetheless plenty of changes have been made and are detailed well by the MorphOS team in their 3.11 release notes here.

I downloaded the ISO from the official MorphOS downloads page here and burnt it to a CD-R ready to boot from my 17" Powerbook G4.

Here is MorphOS 3.11 booting from the CD on the Powerbook G4. Just have to press and hold 'C' key on power on to boot from the CD.

Once booted up and selected English as the language, I am presented with the First Flight installer:

I note that they have fixed up the graphics on this version, which mysteriously went missing in the 3.10 release. Glad to see them back, and new ones at that:

As I already have a fully registered MorphOS 3.10 installation on my Powerbook G4 (see my Part 1 and Part 2 blog posts on the build process from scratch), I can select upgrade installation.

That done, it then detects my current 3.10 installation and gives me the option to Update.

The install is now underway. Time for a coffee:

Install is all done!

After the reboot I got a error message that my backdrop couldn't be found.

I guess MorphOS wipes the sys drive clean of non-standard additions during the upgrade. I had it backed up on the Work partition for just this kind of situation, so I simply copied it back to the original spot and all good, I have my normal Anime girly backdrop again!

Close up of the new MorphOS 3.11 version information. July 2018 and we still have ongoing Next Generation Amiga operating system development. It's great isn't it!

 The release notes on the boot CD explain the installation instructions and details on support graphics cards, which is very relevant if using an X5000, PowerMac G4 or PwerMac G5 which are supported by MorphOS.

I fired up Delitracker which still works well under MorphOS 3.11 and also the bug fixed Odyssey web browser:

I watched a YouTube video on the rare Commodore 65, which worked well:

I intend to do a lot more playing around with MorphOS 3.11, but as I only have a limited time this weekend to muck around with computers, I wanted to squeeze out a short blog post today given the importance of another new Amiga operating system release in 2018.

Thanks to the MorphOS Team for keeping the development of MorphOS going in 2018 and I look forward to keeping a close eye on where MorphOS is going in the future too!