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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

Vampire 500 V2+ Issue (vague Descriptions Inside!)

S. Snigelson

Posts 2
23 Mar 2022 15:09


I bought a Vampire 500 V2+ in 2017. It worked fine, I used it for a while, but then put my Amiga away until late last year. Then it worked for a while, but suddenly stopped booting. Changing to a 68000 the Amiga works perfectly fine.

Composite video stays black (but outputs sync), DIGITAL-VIDEO has no output at all. ACT led on the Vampire stays on for like half a second, then turns off (I have no clue if it's supposed to stay lit or not). Power LED comes on and it sounds like it's trying to boot from the floppy, but it sounds very weird (don't know how to describe it, but not how it usually sounds). No reaction on the caps lock key.

I've measured some voltages and there is 1.2 V, 2.5 V and 3.3 V. I've tried flashing some different cores (2.12 x10 and x12, 2.13 x11 and 2.14) but no change.

The Amiga and PSU are both recapped. Motherboard revision 5.

Any ideas welcome.


S. Snigelson

Posts 2
30 Sep 2022 17:43


For anyone interested, or to anyone happening upon this post in the future... hi!

My Vampire now works again. I decided to have another look a few weeks ago and noticed one of the four level shifters (U1-U4, LVCH162245A, 16-way bus transceiver) was getting a lot hotter than the others.

So I bought a new one for €0.9 (and a few extra ones in case I were to screw it up), mustered all my hot air soldering skills and replaced it.

Plugged the Vampire in, crossed my fingers, turned the Amiga on, and now it's back to life :)

posts 2