I finally got my Vampire. Gave up waiting for a V1200 and ordered the v4 (That waiting list must be great selling point for the v4). As probably many have done, I've been reading quite alot of posts here on the forum. So I had prepared myself with V4BL. Just to be on the safe side, and I love choices :) But first I booted ApolloOS that came inside the Vampire when it was delivered. It seemed nice enough and seemed to work, but then crash. It really seems to crash for almost no reason very often. Functionality can stop working for some reason. Like suddenly I was unable to double click (how odd is that?). I had to do so many reboots that I got tired and put in the V4BL prepared CF card. Going into Coffin or AmiKit really was much better for now. It's so much more stable and usable for now. ApolloOS is not really ready for primetime just yet in my opinion. It will eventually get there, but there is still some way to go. So what's the first thing to do with my shiny new Amiga? I'm a music man so I really wanted to re-listen all of my old tunes. Have a nice sorted collection of mod-filen and all strange formats you can think of. Kicked up HippoPlayer which is my old favorite (even have my own key from back in the day). Damn it sounded awful. Crackles and pops at the end of almost every sample. This was not how I imagined it would be. I noticed it was AHI enabled per default, but that should not be a problem. Worked fine on my old Amiga. Anyhow I decided to turn off AHI playback and go for direct Paula (Arne) playback. It was still horrible and if anything it was even worse. I played around with the settings and after setting the PT replayer to normal it worked like I wanted. There is still the occasional little crackle, but it's hardly noticeable. The fastram player is just so horrible, and is just unusable. Trying Delitracker II I seemed to come to the same conclusion. When using any noteplayer but the Paula-Noteplayer the result was all but good. Can it be that the other noteplayers work with fastmem? Seems far fetched that the Vampire would have problem with using fastmem coupled to playing sounds? That is the feeling from my not so deep tests. But then ain't chip and fast the same on the V4? After this I turned to demos. As an old scener this is my thing. Started up Desert Dream by Kefrens, which happens to be my all time favorite. It seemed to work fine but then... the "jelly" Desert Dream sign looks all wrong. Then when it starts rotating it's totally wrong. The zoom scroller is glitching and then the end of part one also glitches bad. This demo has undergone some heavy fixing with whdload, so was really expecting it to work well. Many demos seems to work perfectly well, but some not so well at all. It's a bit hit and miss at the moment, so still seems to need some work to be fully compatible. An extra funny thing is that there are few whdload demos that came with ApolloOS. One thought that those would be examples of those who works extra well. Sorry to say that it was not so. I even upgraded with 5B hoping for something, but I guess that was for fixing something else :) So in the end my first impressions are mixed. It's fast and have the RTG which I always missed on the Amiga. The quick and colorful workbench really is something to behold. The sound output seems to be nice when it works but anything but direct paula playback (and then seems to prefeer chip mem). The (S)AGA output seems to work fine for system things, but still has kinks when banging on the hardware it seems. Oh well, it's still under development so it will become better with time. For now though the development seems to focus on things getting quicker and not more compatible. Only time will tell if the V4 will ever replace my A1200. We'll see how far things have come when I finally get my V1200.
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