Apollo Accelerators

Hi there,

I received my Vampire 600 V2 a few weeks ago from Brian. I firstly tested without screwing it to the mainboard. The Vampire board powered up, emitted a boot sound, and I was able to see the boot screen with the correct provided 3.1 Kickstart version. Everything seemed fine, but then I picked one of the few floppies I still preserve from the Amiga (the famous Space Ball demo), and the demo stopped after a few seconds with a constant sound. This floppy disk works just fine when I remove the Vampire V600. I tried a few other floppies with games, and I had similar issues, with the Amiga stopping its work at different moments of time. The only one that I was able to load successfully was a Workbench 1.3.3 disk.

After trying to figure out what was I doing wrong, and reading some cases from other people here at the forum, it seems typical that the installed Kickstart rom conflicts with the provided with the Vampire, and the recommendation was always to remove it. This made sense to me, specially when my Kickstart rom chip was a completely different version. So I removed it. It took me a while, because this chip was soldered into the mainboard, it wasn't installed at a 40 pin socket. I purchased some desoldering braid, and removed it with a lot of patience. I reinstalled the Vampire, checked that still boots fine, took the time to screwed it to the mainboard to ensure good connection, and I started to repeat my tests. But nothing seemed to have changed, the same problems arise.

I also wasn't able to load the system I had installed on a compact flash, which used to work fine, but I'm not completely sure this was a problem with the Vampire because I had to replace the CF adapter by another one which uses a cable, since my previous adapter didn't fit with the Vampire (it was one of those compact adapters with the connector soldered to the board). Unfortunately, I can't test this anymore if the new adapter works without the Vampire, since I already removed my Kickstart rom chip from the Amiga, and obviously I don't want to spend time soldering it back again just for this (although I plan to look for some socket that I can solder to the board instead for future easy removals / installations of the original rom chips).

Does any of this sound familiar to you? Do you think that my Vampire has some issue? I honestly couldn't enjoy its power yet, since I couldn't barely boot from simple floppies (no mention to the requirement these days of being able to boot from the compact flash so I can continue using the Amiga in a comfortable way). I ask you here at the same time that I ask Brian directly, but since he is typically super busy I have some hope that you can enlighten me. Any ideas? Thanks.

It seems your vampire is working just fine.
Problem is with these old games and demos is that they cannot handle a really fast 68K such as the vamprire.
Most old games/demos also do not run out of the box on a 040 or 060 because of the same problem.
For this WHDload was invented
But also WHDload does not provide 100% compatibility with old games and demos, but most of them will work.

That makes perfect sense, thanks for the explanation. I wish then that the Classic Workbench I installed then on the Compact Flash (which also contains WHDload among other stuff), that I was using to boot the Amiga 600 before the Vampire, ends up working again. The only reason why it might not be booting from there I guess is that the new adapter I had to purchase doesn't work well, right? Or do I need some special version of Classic Workbench as well in order for the Amiga to boot from the CF using the Vampire?

In case it helps (which I doubt it), my previous working adapter was like this:

https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/8 ... s-l225.jpg

but obviously this one didn't fit well with the Vampire in place, so I purchased one like this:

http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/r~AAAOSwR ... -l1600.jpg

I received a replacement for the Compact Flash adapter, and it was that. Now the A600 with the Vampire boots perfectly from it