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I had a GVP 68040 card in my old Amiga 2000 (ah those were the days). 25Mhz 68040, 16MB of RAM, SCSI controller to my 750 MB SCSI drive (if that was even 3200rpm I was probably lucky) and it was SO FAST.

GVP seemed to do a very good job of making Amiga add on hardware.

Do we know when they stopped manufacturing hardware at all? Are they still around?

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  • Welcome to Retrocomputing. This is an interesting question; I suspect that it was probably bankruptcy (you can't keep making great hardware forever without eventually going bust, unless you overprice it).
    – wizzwizz4 ♦
    Commented Jan 11, 2018 at 19:48
  • I have the same accelerator. Still working great. I think that Commodore and GVP made the best Amiga add-on boards, not accounting for the "amazing" Video Toaster. Supra made some good bargain boards too.
    – Brian H
    Commented Jan 12, 2018 at 0:23
  • @BrianH Can I come over and play with your toys? :)
    – geoffc
    Commented Jan 17, 2018 at 17:41

1 Answer 1

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Well this is embarrassing. I should have just looked at Wikipedia first.

According to the Pede, they liquidated July, 1995, and a company GVP-M took over the assets. Alas, the site shows a number of products, but reports as last being updated in 2003, and Buy Online links redirect to some Japanese sites.

There is a pretty cool Amiga Hardware Database, that has a list and images of GVP Products.

The specific product I remember so fondly is the GVP G-Force 040 for the Amiga 2000.

A2000 GVP G-Force 040

4 DIMM slots, had 16 MB. (Considering the 1MB my A2000 had previously, this was world changing). SCSI port, so hard drives became an option. Motorola 68040 at 25 Mhz (vs the 68000 at 8 Mhz).

Configured this way it was a multitasking beast. I sold it, alas, I wish I could power it up now, and see how it 'feels' compared to my work laptop, a 4 core Intel i7 at 2.4Ghz, and 16GB of RAM with an SSD drive.

  • 1024 times the RAM
  • 96 times the CPU (But X3 for the three extra cores, ignoring execution units, and ops per cycle)
  • Disk speed I cannot compare. 3600 rpm SCSI-1 vs SATA-II SSD.

And yet...

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  • 1
    Yes, the software was probably better written / coded : less bloatware compared to what we get now...
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Jan 11, 2018 at 20:42
  • @SolarMike Fewer toolkits/libraries, closer to the metal. I wonder, is the TPUG user group still around in toronto? Someone there must have a working Amiga still. :)
    – geoffc
    Commented Jan 11, 2018 at 20:58
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    TPUG still exists tpug.ca and lots people have working Amigas. Also I don't think 3200 RPM drives were ever a thing. 3600 RPM was the standard rotation speed until 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM drives came along.
    – user722
    Commented Jan 12, 2018 at 2:20
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    You'd probably be very, very disappointed with your "fast" Amiga vs. PC performance. Sometimes it's better to not even try and rather live with the memories ;) Even a Vampire Amiga which is probably the fastest you can have today is dead slow compared to a decent PC.
    – tofro
    Commented Jan 12, 2018 at 14:36
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    @tofro He could be disappointed if he tried to run bloatware (like, well, you know what bloatware we have now). But if you run software from the era on such hardware, it is as speedy as it was at the time, so no disappointment.
    – Stéphane Gourichon
    Commented Jan 12, 2018 at 21:14

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