Last year I started Vampire 500 project, FPGA accelerator for Amiga 500 but without keyboard, floppy disks or let's say complete Amiga 500 I needed to stop that project. Goal was to have fast accelerator with emulated core and support for IDE with Gayle emulation. Few days ago I received Amiga 500 keyboard from ShK and bunch of Amiga floppy disks so now I have everything to continue this project. SysInfo results and Gayle detection are shown in Read More, Pictures, Files... section of this article.

As you may noticed some very interesting things are happened regarding this project but news about that I didn't publish on this site. One Vampire 500 was sent to robinson5 from retroramblings.net and it was the one that I used for my testings. This is maybe most important thing happened to complete Vampire FPGA project because we are now in situation that we have opportunity to exchange codes and to point each other what might be a problem. We have already exchanged few mails and codes and it is very interesting to me that we solved few problems but using different approach. It is normal that two people can think different and coding in VHDL is something that is easier to create than to understand what someone wanted to do with specific part of the code. Another great discovery from robinson5 was bad solder joint on A16 trace of Vampire 500 and that was the reason why my code didn't worked. Earlier I have discovered that there was problem with one resistor placed on 7Mhz clk trace so after solving those hardware barriers everything regarding code should not be such problem. From the start of this project people on various forums are again against my projects talking that Amiga 500 uses MC68K to the max and that I will never be able to create something that is done for Amiga 600. What can I say about that, only few lines of code were needed to be implemented in old code and everything worked. Now we have 3 versions of the code and all of them are working fine and main differences are in solving accesses to MC68000 peripherals.

Board, received, assembled, hardware part tested and it is working correctly, now let's do little coding :)

After about 8 hours work on my regular job I come home and I was so bored and decided to start another project. So at 10:30PM VAMPIRE 500 project is started and after just half an hour I have done most of the work :) Yes it was so easy to adapt hardware part but in software part I will have to create some additional signals but that should not be a problem. Few minutes ago I ordered Amiga 500 motherboard because I have the privilege to see Amiga 500 just once around 1999 for about 15 minutes. Why I started another project and didn't finish VAMPIRE 600? In the process of waiting for new PCBs to arrive I have nothing to do. Another reason why I started this is because I m tired of waiting of some people to finish their project constantly changing designs and again trying to make a living from Amiga name. Those days I m moving to much bigger room and there I could get all needed space for my equipment. So now it is the time to push myself to the max.
UPDATE: April 17, 2013
After publishing this new project I received lot of mails to include IDE on this board. I don't understand this demand for such thing because I was thinking to replace it with MicroSD. Then again what could I know what is important for Amiga scene after all I m new here. So since I have never looked at IDE schematics it took me two days to understand complete thing so I implement it but also decided to keep MicroSD socket. For now it is purely in theory that IDE will work. So implementing this delayed my production but It will take only few hours more to verify PCB. Orders regarding components are placed and most of them are on my table so at the end of this week PCB production will start.
UPDATE: April 18, 2013
PCB in production :)