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by cable2600·6y ago·view on hn ↗
Yes Commodore fans tend to buy several Amiga systems so if one fails they can use another.

There are several projects to restore Amiga systems like Checkmate 1500: https://www.checkmate1500plus.com/ It is an Amiga 1000 type case an Amiga 500 or ATX motherboard etc can be put into.

There is this Vampire chip that plugs into the 68K Socket to turbocharge the Amiga. A PowerPC adapter to run the latest Amiga One software on the 500, SDcards to emulate floppy and hard drives.

1 comments
The Vampire is now also standalone, so you can buy a new Amiga with superior specs.
There are two kinds of vampire cards, the new standalone and the older ones that piggyback off of an existing Amiga.

The Vampire standalone is not really "a new Amiga with superior specs". It has a lot of compatibility issues and it comes with AROS firmware by default which is not Amiga OS but an extremely buggy OS reimplementation by volunteers that's still far from being complete. The main issue with standalone Vampire is that it tries to do too much and is basically a closed-source incomplete (e.g. it still doesn't do AGA properly) FPGA reimplementation of classic Amiga hardware. The Mister FPGA does similar things but is opensource and is a much better proposition in my view.

The vampire cards that slot into existing Amiga machines are basically CPU accelerators with a lot of memory and a graphics card built-in. Again, I find them a lot better than the standalone vampire. It's too bad that the Apollo team (creators of Vampire) keep biting off more than they can chew by branching into side-projects all the time and not honoring promises they made in the past (e.g. Gold 3 core for Vampire 600).

I'd suggest the miSTer instead. OSHW cores. Vampire might be somewhat faster, but it is very closed.
It would be cool if someone made a miSTer 68k CPU replacement, like how Vampire can accelerate an original Amiga.
The 68k cpu implementation used in the minimig miSTer code is tg68k.

I agree it would be cool.