PiStorm

[Harrison]

Has anyone seen this?

https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/pistorm-brings-modern-muscle-to-the-amiga/

For just £38 (RPi 3 at £23 plus custom cable at £15) you can have a real Amiga running a very nice setup.

Someone has developed the ability to utilise a Pi3 connected to an A500/+ using a $15 custom cable. The PiStorm software then emulates an 030/040 up to 75-80Mhz, as well as emulating RTG, SCSI disk enulation (allowing you to connect any USB hard drive to the Pis USB port and run HDF files. And you can emulate any kickstart rom.

I've not bothered needing adding with real Amiga hardware for years, other than using my existing setups. But the ability to do this at such ac price is really tempting me to dig one of my spare A500 Plus out.

This could be a wake up call to expensive accelerator developers.

 

[alexh]

FYI it is not a cable it is an adapter board.

The problem today is that no-one is selling the adapter boards in big numbers. There are one or two runs of 10-15 boards being done on the PiSTorm Discord channel but very few resellers.

 

[Harrison]

Is the adapter board open source for others to manufacture?

 

[salaxi54]

Is the adapter board open source for others to manufacture?

Yup! https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm

 

[HanJammer]

Has anyone seen this?

https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/pistorm-brings-modern-muscle-to-the-amiga/

"The Amiga, well known as the best and greatest computer ever designed" - LOL, first few words at this page and a lie already...

Also this project makes absolutely no sense to me - if one is going to install a complete single board computer just to emulate a mere 68k series CPU, then why not to just run emulator on something like Pi 400... Without original motorola inside it's no longer an Amiga to me.

 

[TheoryBoy]

Has anyone seen this?

https://hackaday.com/2021/04/19/pistorm-brings-modern-muscle-to-the-amiga/

"The Amiga, well known as the best and greatest computer ever designed" - LOL, first few words at this page and a lie already...

Also this project makes absolutely no sense to me - if one is going to install a complete single board computer just to emulate a mere 68k series CPU, then why not to just run emulator on something like Pi 400... Without original motorola inside it's no longer an Amiga to me.

This takes nothing away from anyone, and adds an accelerator option instead of vampire, and you get to keep your peripherals, and your own Amiga feel, fully reversible. Any peripheral like this should only be encouraged not disparaged.

 

[Sardine]

this to me is also a strange solution...

yes cheaper than vampire but its not bare metal ?? so you have to wait for the pi to boot ??

there is a better solution but still beta ??


here
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=100729&page=24

and not dead see latest posts from mkstr

and
https://www.mike-stirling.com/2020/02/fpga-accelerator-for-the-amiga-500/
https://www.mike-stirling.com/2020/03/amiga-a500-accelerator-boots-from-sd-card/

with AIBB’s integer maths test running at more than double the speed of a 25 MHz 68040 A4000.

photos from prototype but much has changed
https://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?threads/72081/

1 picture 1000 words: Key features: Artix7 - FPGA (XC7A100T = 101k Logic Cells) 64MB SD-RAM (32Bit Bus) 16MB FlashROM Micro-SD-Card Slot SPI-BUS This is how it looks built in: This hardware is not mine but from a professional board designer here in the forum! I "only" adjusted the core ... Which core? A tg68 core from the MIST project runs on it at 50MHz: There is still room for improvement: At the moment the RAM only runs with a 16-bit width. The 32-bit bus width alone should boost performance. But not bad at all for the first successful boot WITH RAM ...

 

[Harrison]

Compared to completely custom hardware projects the real advantage of this is the utilisation of very cheap off the shelf hardware that's very easy to obtain and it's features can be upgraded easily just by updating the OS/firmware on the SDcard. No it's not native original hardware and is emulating it to trick the Amiga into thinking its real, but so what? You can't get RTG and a fast CPU for this kind of money any other way.

 

[HanJammer]

OK. So essentially this project should be called: PiStorm: an overgrown enclosure for Raspberry Pi 3

PS: I'm not a big fan of FPGA emulation either (no, it's not true hardware and true silicone to me). I would take terrible fire over a vampire anytime. One time I bought FPGA/CPLD based thing was Indivision ECS v2 and wow... what a horrible thing it is...

 

[User4703]

Can't stand the slow loading times on these board devices. That and the equally drawn out shut down procedure. Might've flown back in the days when disk drives were making sweet passionate love for 10 minutes to load a game (or tapes squealing in joy as seizure inducing streams rolled across the screen for the older and greyer) but we pick up and play now.

 

[marksealey]

Ive been running a Pistorm for a few months now....with RTG......pi-scsi devuce gives me 270mb/sec .hdf transfer speeds....RTG that is Faster than my ZZ9000 !!!!

Almost 15mips or about 60mhz 030/mmu with a 200mhz fpu

 

[Sardine]

Compared to real hardware what is the boot process and how long for example booting to the kickstart screen from flipping the Amiga psu

do you need to interact with the pi or can you just switch the Amiga on?

 

[cugar124]

interesting start to a thread this one!
This is a vast improvement on the Vampire once the Chips that are the problem to get are freely available, again they will be easier to get just like the HDMI Pi is. The best place to read up on this is the discord channel for it, the Vampire is very expensive and although it does have some nice features it is still way off even the warp1260 in features such as wifi USB just to name two that have been around for Ohh let's see 15 20 years LOL. Before the Vamp owners chip in I have my V2 and I love it but am open to any new kit for the amiga. This is a cheap interesting yes Pi3 enclosure that allows those that don't have ever-deepening pockets to experience the A500 as she could never have been when those of us old enough bought them in 1988 and beyond got them first. Boot times really are what they are if you use a PC or god forbid a Mac you will experience those and even a A4000 with 3.9 or 3.1.4 have those too maybe not as long but hey go away do something for a min or two and away you go. this software is beta driven so will improve over time. for those that are into it as Sardine said the Buffee is a lovely idea and will be amazingly fast to well hopefully anyway.

link for Discord hope it works: https://discord.com/channels/784428461330530305/832885633189543946

God this means I will now have 5 FPGA systems against 3 real amigas Ohh time to look for the A1000 again LOL

 

[britlord]

I was interested in buying one. But they are not taking anymore orders because not enough stock...

 

[Sardine]

ok this project has movement

this is exciting and open source

Buffee Accelerator drop in A500 68000 cpu gives 68040 @ 400mhz performance with 512mb ram

current price $140

move over pistorm,, all that's missing is an IDE interface.

I believe its an ARM Cortex A8 using emulation so very fast using jit.

https://www.buffee.ca/

https://oshwlab.com/Renee/buffee-ac...yRhlNMsCTZSEN5oZUKhPV6Kk3IGDG9Cm7Rl70NfVhxPm8

 

[helcost]

Options are nice. Everyone will have different opinions over what, to them, constitutes an Amiga. To me the Vampire was too much in the end. Anytime something didn't work I wondered if it me configuring/doing something wrong or if the vampire was incompatible so I went back to an accelerated A600 with an Indivision V2 flicker fixer (which I think is great). Then I got a MiSTer and am now debating whether that, connected to an Acorn MultiSync CRT is Amiga enough for me. The non-Amiga Keyboard is the only real struggle I'm having.