I have been using previous Vampire boards for very long time, and also I was waiting for Vampire 1200 V2 for more than two years.

I am one of those people who never received Vampire 1200 V2, even when I had it preordered nearly since it's announcement.

As person who knows a bit about product development and about what it takes to create, manage, and support such project, including inevitable dealing with after sales and customer support, I can share couple of personal thoughts about the Icedrake I have at hands now.

The board build quality is awesome. Seriously, that thing is a professional quality build piece of electronics. Not a cheap, DYI level of electronics. Getting any HW product to this level of quality could not been easy, even if was a mainstream or common thing suitable for manufacture on big production lines. Honestly I did not expected such improvement in build quality since what V600 was at, but it's there.

The features which this thing already has are mostly far beyond what any of Amiga accelerators producers managed to offer so far, including manufacturers backed up by somewhat big industry companies like Phase5, DCE, etc. And that's apparently not even remotely everything yet.

From main events what I was following from early Vampire builds era until now, I must admit that the actual results of every single "date push back again and again" lead to the real, significant and clearly visible improvements to the product itself or it's support. None of those push backs were some "generic bullshits" and that kind. Actually all were based on real and reasonable needs to adapt to real world situations (components lifecycles or shortage, Covid restrictions, build and dispatch delays etc.), which are often simply to far away from sphere of influence of Apollo team members. This is how real world is about, when you do something big enough. This is something what is inevitable in such large projects like this one. Even bigger companies (like HPE, Supermicro, Nvidia, Raspberry Pi Foundation, etc.) are struggling with these, although they have hundreds of full time employees and dedicated people to handle such things.

Seriously, come on, what were the real waiting times for already manufactured and by many people ordered things like NVIDIA GFXs or Raspberry Pis? Also several months. It's obvious that those delays on Vampware are not about to screw up the people, but rather about to not screw up the product.

Firstly I want to sincerely thank to every single Apollo team member. I really have to thank deeply to every single one of you for all your efforts and approach.

The resulting products which are slowly but surely going out from your hands now clearly are way off what usual Amiga community market has at it's disposal. These products have truly impressive amounts of effort and love put right into them. It's amazing, because you are amazing.

Although not being seen very often, there are people in the community who do understand how much this must have been difficult and exhausting to get it there, in a way you did. With everything being done in personal free time with all that usual shit going against, you made it. You made it your way, and I have received a physical proof that you made it in the right way. Even when many people does not (or does not bother to) understand it fully, you undoubtedly have the actual and very nice results.

For the rest of the community: Wait for it. It's not a "Made in PCR" iPhone accessory crap available as prize on random GAS station lottery. I am one of those guys who during his impatient waits spend a tons of money to various things because there simply wasn’t anything better. Same guy who waited for several years with other weirdos. That same guy was also wondering if it is worth of the waits, but eventually received an order with Icedrake board (#10492), and is now telling you:

"It was worth of the waits back then, it is worth of the waits now, and probably will be worth of the waits even in future".

I know that this might be yet another shitty post. But I had to.