[mark_round]

Sure! Sorry, I was typing on a phone and it turned into a real word salad/jargon mess :)

I was replying to someone asking how I got my "classic" 1990s-era Amiga screenshots to look so fancy. The built in Amiga AGA chipset is pretty limited by today's standards and gets slower/uses more memory the higher you push the resolution and colour depth. Most classic Amigas run on low-res limited colour screens - the default is 640x256 in 4 colours. On an 68030-accelerated Amiga I could just about push it to 800x600 in 256 colours, but it was very sluggish.

I now have a Vampire Accelerator card[1] which adds a much faster CPU core, along with an embedded graphics chipset, HDMI output, networking, SD card interface and other nice things. The Vampire "graphics card" is driven through the AmigaOS's support for "ReTargetable Graphics" (RTG). You can read about the setup and installation on my site[2].

My vintage 1992 A1200 is running a hacked together OS, using a base of "CoffinOS" which is a distribution of AmigaOS favoured by Vampire accelerator users. It consists of a classic AmigaOS 3.x installation along with all the Vampire-specific drivers, utilities, games and other things all ready to go out of the box. Because it ships copyrighted AmigaOS binaries and other things that may not be 100% legal to redistribute (and the Amiga scene in general is a litigious mess), I won't link to it but it's easy enough to find[3].

On top of this, I have installed various components from Hyperion's AmigaOS 3.2, so it's a sort of mash-up of two different distributions of AmigaOS. To get my fancy looking icons, I used the "Faenza" icon set in PNG format.

Hope that clears it up a bit!

[1] There are loads of accelerator options now for classic Amigas that add faster processors, networking, graphics and other cool things. There are some others mentioned in this thread like the TerribleFire series of accelerators, and the PiStorm accelerator based around a Raspberry PI is also proving a very popular and full-featured option.

[2] https://www.markround.com/blog/2020/07/21/apollo-vampire-ami...

[3] Side note - Apollo Accelerators (the makers of the Vampire) are working on ApolloOS which is a legally clean distribution of the open-source AmigaOS clone, AROS. This is what you'll get (and is officially supported) if you buy a new Vampire card or stand-alone Vampire V4 system although CoffinOS is still being developed and distributed by a mystery team.

[harel]

You risk almost losing the "retro" label when you push that machine to that extreme :-)

[rsync]

Thanks!