This is a project that was making a bit of a stir about 2 or 3 years ago.
PiStorm turbocharges vintage Amigas with the Raspberry Pi
The PiStorm is an ingenious way to make real vintage Commodore Amiga hardware not only run again, but do it over three orders of magnitude faster – using cheap, open source hardware and software. The PiStorm project has gone through several iterations, and Andrew Hutchings demonstrated and talked about two recent developments …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 13th February 2024 17:19 GMT Michael Strorm
Warning for Amiga 500 and 500 Plus owners while we're here
Speaking of leaking batteries, and since we're on about the Amiga, a warning for A500 Plus owners; the real-time clock is backed by a NiCd battery that's soldered to the motherboard that can- and quite likely will- leak.
If that hasn't already leaked and damaged the board after thirty years, consider yourself lucky- mine did a few years back (might or might not be repairable if the tracks can be fixed).
I'd remove the NiCd cell from the board as a precaution regardless. (Though you're probably better checking from more knowledgeable and reliable sources than myself on how to do this safely).
Though the original A500 doesn't have the RTC (and hence NiCd battery) built in, these were typically added as part of a "trapdoor" RAM expansion. I suspect that reduces the risk of a leak damaging the motherboard itself (though not the RAM expansion) but there's still the risk of it happening.
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Monday 12th February 2024 12:51 GMT Nick L
Somewhat likely. The chances are that the capacitors will have leaked, Abe is they haven’t then they’re likely to soon after powering up. A fishy smell is the telltale sign. If they have leaked, you might find issues with the audio, or keyboard or generally just not working.
There’s a few people around that repair them now. I think it’s worth it: you’d be surprised what they sell for on eBay!
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Monday 12th February 2024 17:32 GMT ShortLegs
Re: a totally non-Unix-like system
"I seem to remember Amiga being at least inspired by UNIX. It certainly wasn't POSIX or anything, but commands, libraries, and startup scripts, and configs were all just directories in the root of the filesystem."
AmigaDOS was based on TRIPOS, no relation to Unix at all. It had a command line interface, but this was not a shell. That said, within a couple of years there were numerous *nix shell-like shells for the Amiga, Bourne Shell, csh, ksh, all can be found on the early Fred Fish disks.
C= released a SVR4 Unix for the A3000 - or the A3000UX to give it it's marketing name. I never used it.
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Tuesday 13th February 2024 17:26 GMT phuzz
Re: a totally non-Unix-like system
The Amiga had my favourite case sensitivity in it's shell, which was, 'some'.
If you wanted to, you could have
FILE
andfile
in the same directory (or any combination of cases)*, but assuming that justFile
existed, then you could use any combination of case to refer to it and the command line would just interpret what you meant.* I've yet to find a case when I'd want to have both
FILE
andfile
as separate files, but apparently it's important to *nix.
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Monday 12th February 2024 14:56 GMT Chewi
Distractions
I have had PiStorm32-Lite since December, but I'm yet to actually try it. WHAT!? How could I resist!? Well, I'm a notorious tinkerer and perfectionist, and I've got too sidetracked trying to prepare my own unique Gentoo-based setup. Also I have young kids. I am getting closer though.
Although a lot of the interest is in the bare-metal Emu68 now, I'm actually more curious about Musashi. I owe my software engineering career to the Amiga, but I've been a penguin-head for far longer, and I would love to mix the two in weird and wonderful ways.
The first idea I've been working towards is using Sunshine to stream video from the Pi wirelessly, so that you can use the Amiga from anywhere simply by providing it with power. I have had Sunshine running on the Pi already, but it's currently far too slow. Convincing it to use hardware encoding is the first step.
I will try Emu68 too though. Running the two from the SD card is currently considered to be a boss level procedure. I think I can some up with something easier. In fact, I have already prototyped a tri-boot solution where the Amiga can boot directly from the SD card without a Pi at all.
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Monday 12th February 2024 16:03 GMT Dan 55
Re: OK, now the next logical step...
Already done...
Pimiga 4 - The Amiga tribute for Intel or AMD pc, Intel Mac, or RPI4/400
Download link in the description.
The best form factor is the wedge-shaped Pi 400.
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Monday 12th February 2024 21:18 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: OK, now the next logical step...
Ditto by installing FS-UAE (multi-platform) or WinUAE (well, obv, Windows only) on whatever hardware one happens to have available. It's also useful to have FS-UAE in a desktop/laptop anyway, since you can build your Amiga HDD image on it with all the convenience that comes with it, then write the HDD image to the SD card prepped and ready to boot your real Amiga using an IDE to SD card interface as the Amigas local HDD.
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Wednesday 14th February 2024 13:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: OK, now the next logical step...
UAE and it's derivatives are pretty amazing. Fired up Another World a couple of days ago; and found out the hard way that RAM expansions weren't very compatible with it. The temptation to max out the options "because you can" isn't necessarily a good one!
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Tuesday 13th February 2024 09:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
I've been curious about the PiStorm for some time; though some of the demos I've seen have generally involved two video outs depending on what video is in service at a time.
The performance is appealing, but I am slightly more inclined I think to look at the TerribleFire accelerators for something slightly less frankenstein!
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Tuesday 13th February 2024 16:21 GMT ZXDunny
There's a lovely little parallel port hack that gets you both RGB and RTG on the same monitor - the Picasso96 video driver for the RTG holds pin13 on the parallel port active while it's working, and an HDMI switch attached to the parallel port automatically switches between both inputs.
It's a nice solution but requires some work. There's a new device in development (tentatively named "Mipidipidoo") that siphons the Amiga RGB signal off the relevant motherboard components and pipes it into the Pi's camera port where the videocore driver then composites it into the RTG display. That will only require one video cable to be connected; the one on the Pi.
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