Hi everyone,

Stephen Jones has released a new video and very interesting video about the Apollo Vampire. It’s about 1 hour long and contains a lot of interesting information concerning card and the Amiga 2000 it is installed in.

Please read on for more information:

This is a subject that is causing the uninformed much confusion and something I feel needs explaining. The vampire at its core has an FPGA chip and supporting circuitry and memory with IO to make contact with the outside world.

FPGA is a chip that can have its design re-configured by software at any point in other words it can be upgraded as the chip design improves, and it remembers the new design after it is powered down. Its strength is that changes can be made down the road and the circuitry on the chip can be re configured once shipped to a customer as lessons are learned and designs are improved. Ultimately once the design is not going to change and if you want to reduce the cost then the design can be made into a normal silicon chip that is cheaper to produce in massive numbers. so basically the FPGA is still a computer chip but incredibly flexible. They also come in a number of sizes and performance, the vampire FPGA is a mid range one to keep cost down, but more expensive versions with more design space and performance are available but not practical in this market.