Amiga PiStorm - Retro Power on a Budget - Tech Nibble
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 พ.ค. 2024
- A Pi Storm is coming! This Raspberry Pi based retro accelerator for the Commodore Amiga promises to deliver everything you could possibly want. Acceleration, SCSI hard disk emulation, RTG, RAM and a lot more all for the low price of a Pi and the PiStorm PCB. But does it live up to the promises? Here's my first impression of the new project.
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●Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:30 MonsterJoysticks.com 1ClipPrint.com
02:55 The PiStorm PCB
05:45 Preparing the PiStorm
06:32 Choosing an Amiga for the PiStorm
07:30 Problems with the PiStorm
09:29 Using the PiStorm
12:00 Speed Testing the PiStorm
17:45 Doom will never run on an Amiga
18:50 Conclusion on the PiStorm
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"Far too many of them"? NEVER can you have too many Raspberry Pis! Never. Yes, this is a hill I am going to die on.
True. I always find use for those things. I have plenty, and just ran out because I built another Pi1541 that I intended to use for a Octoprint server. Have to buy more!
Uh, I have a confession to make - I don't even know how many Pis I have. I've lost count. It's not a problem though, I could quit any time! I just uhhhh.. choose not to!
I swear the next alien film will have Ripley in it, and she'll get an xray and find a raspberry pi inside her and break down screaming :D
Lol.
Made my day!
@@Oldsmobile69 Supercool comment. :D
Haha! Oh, Andrew, this is a hilarious! :D
Thanks for taking the time to watch, I'm really excited to see this project progress. You can find a link to the Discord server for PiStorm in the video description, and while you're there why not give this channel a sub!
Neil - RMC
You need to check out the Pitrex for the Vectrex - it is using.a pizero in a similar way. It is supporting playing arcade vector games (eg. Star Wars and Asteroids etc) using emulator running on the pi and it is driving the Vectrex's hardware directly..
hi mum! lol
Thanks for the video.
As for using a Raspberry Pi 4B, I would suggest they focus on the Compute Module 4. It would have the power, with none of the ports, and be more snug fitting.
@RMC did you know that Monkey Island on stock A500 don't have moving clouds on title screen, but when you change to 020 you get them? MI is running on CPU no hardware acceleration this is bad :/
@@vardekpetrovic9716 The USB ports have to be removed, because they get in the way of things fitting properly.
Hence the 3A+ being the ideal one. Frankly, I would argue the Comute Module 4 is the best option, as you don't have to unsolder anything, and will fit better.
Nice to see John Romero still hanging around. Always good to see him speak.
And he was right, the Amiga wasn't good enough. I loved the Amiga and still have 2, but I moved to the PC with everyone else because the Amiga had not kept up with the advances in technology.
Frontier intro still gives me shivers.
I tried the Amiga version, dosbox and a real MT-32 is still the best way to play this masterpiece for me though...
seen the Elite Dangerous remake of the the frontier intro? it's pretty cool. also a making of to go with it...
PC/VGA > Amiga 1200 > Atari ST w/MIDI > Amiga 500 stock IMHO. The initial ST version was FAST and with built-in MIDI, well...
'Pie Storm' is what they call me at the local chippie.
i hope you run to the shop long way round and short way back home, the calories need defeating.
This is the dream, revive my old Amiga 500 with modern parts for less than £100 up to an 020/30 speed, like you I just want to play Frontier the way my brain remembers it not the way it was :) also I'm planning on jazzing up my old beige case with some funky metallic paint scheme, New look exterior with genuine old school engine parts with a bit of modern help.
Can't wait to see what the guys behind this come up with next.
Imagine if somewone in 1990 would have said that the Amiga not only would be alive and kicking in 2021, but there would be tons of new expansions and wizardry like this for sale for it...
HOnestly its probably doing better in modern day even here in North america than when these where being made and sold decades ago XD
I sure am glad I kept my old amigas. 2x500 and 2x600 :D
@@cyrus3055 For some strange reason I have a whole bunch of them today. I have no idea of how that happened. 🤷
in 1990 i bet they though that amiga would not have been dead after 4 years...
Imagine telling them they could get an accelerator for $15 by combining it with a $20 credit card sized computer we all probably have just sitting around.
Hi Neil from Germany :-) !!
Thank you for showing the PiStorm and also thank you for your (always) great content!
My PiStorm pcb is currently being created (I seriously just ordered it 3h ago :-)) and the parts are also (hopefully) on their way... I hope to create one of those within the next weeks.
Greetings,
Nils
Nice one Nils, I hope you have fun with it!
@@RMCRetro thanks :-)
@@drphilxr I ordered the pcbs from a pcb manufacturing company and I also ordered the parts. I will assemble it on my own :-)
In the discord server, they are right now beyond the 400 orders for an assembled one (or at least they were the last time I had a look). So I thought it is faster to create my own :-)
@@NilsRetroHobbyRoom what sort of kit are yuo using to make it, do you have links to the part needed to make one or two?
@@dh2032 You get the gerber files and the bom from the PiStorm GitHub page: github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm
wow.. I am just a owner of Amiga 500 without any mod and now i am drooling over this project. it is so fantastic for me because I always have thought about upgrading to get hard drive support for Amiga 500 - I think this is far more cheaper & practical way to do it.
Thanks for very good info!!
The Buffy? Gee, I wonder which upgrade that one is looking to... slay, one might say.
Buffee the Nosferatu Killer
Buffy the pi eater?
High quality content created with careful consideration, as usual. Would love to visit the cave someday but I'm a long way away. A man can dream.
I can't believe how well that Frontier intro runs on the Pi-Storm. Amazing.
OMFG! I just realized the Buffy reference!
I a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but i must that part, because i do not know what your talking about?
@@AmigaWolf one of the biggest accelerators for the Amiga is the Vampire...
@@DarenPage Ok, Vampire, now i get it, thanks.
Fascinating mix of HW and SW interfacing and emulation, shows some of the strengths and weaknesses of different ways of handling it.
Really nice to see the A500 vs. Vampire vs. Pi-Storm comparisons side by side, thanks a lot for showcasing it all, Neil!
I was happy to see this as well. For some odd reason I have never really liked the concept of the vampire accelerators. They seemed inauthentic somehow and just rob too much of the amiga magic. (just my opinion of course). But oddly I can get behind this one. Even though its total emulation, the open source community nature about it is somehow perfectly in line with one of the original principals of the amiga's ability to be adapted and enhanced with all kinds of tweaks. I really like the idea of this one. I also really love what Terrible Fire is doing too.
Great video.. Nice to see all the uses for the Pi boards.
Great video, great product and finally the video quality is excellent!!!! Good job sir!
Two of my most loved systems combined. Beautiful...
Thank you for this beautiful video, subscribed. I enjoyed this so much, I grew up an 80s baby playing many of the games you have shown here
Neil, you are still the genius I remember employing all those years ago (twice) Really enjoyed this episode 👊👊
Haha thanks mate!
Fantastic overview Neil. Love the snot green A500! Interesting that Damocles ran slower, I wonder if it runs like that on a real 030. Those disk speed benchmarks are crazy fast.
My theory: the 030 has an MMU; the 020 does not. For some reason, Damocles is using the MMU (or it is enabled by a debug tool such as Enforcer) and the Pi is incurring more overhead doing the page table walks.
Each time I watch one of your Amiga videos my eBay purchase inhibitors melt away, soon I’ll give in and get me another a500! Awesome video mate
Do it...dooooo it :D
bloody hell hello winston :) ADV fan and avid retrohead here :)
Maybe the best PiStorm video to date, great work!
Great presentation. This project looks amazing. I must get one of those :)
Nice preview of Stephen's vampire mounting plate for the A1500 mini :D
These videos are awesome. Thank you !
That 1081 makes me really nostalgic. Granted my A500 came with a 1084, but the looks are just so iconic. Thank you for all the lovely videos about all the systems!
Neil, given that 700+ MB/sec speed is far greater than what an SD card is capable of, what you're seeing there is the virtue of the Linux VFS caching the hdf file in RAM.
Ah now that makes sense, thank you Linux!
That is a great use of the untapped RAM that the OS and emulator aren't using.
@@shadowtheimpure Doesn't the pistorm use the Pi's RAM to make up the 128 MB? Or is there 128 MB soldered onto the pistorm?
@@Rocky1138 It uses the Pi's RAM, but that still leaves a lot of memory unused since the OS and emulator are very lightweight.
That's high quality content. Great preview.
I so appreciate your care and devotion to breathing life into an Amiga 500, a computer I was pleased to own all those years ago. Thanks.
I love these amiga videos 👍
Every now and than I see a video where they play around with a Spectrum or an Amiga and run one of the games I remember fondly. And every time I get surprised that the graphics was that rudimentary and the frame rates that low. It's amazing how hard the brain will work to fill in those deficiencies. Talk about a free scan doubler, and I didn't have to mod a thing!
Pro tip: Put the header pins in the socket, put the pcb on the header pins while in the socket, solder the corners and for something this large a few pins in the middle, then remove the board and solder the rest of the pins outside of the computer. Should work fine then..
Brilliant episode Neil, I've been eagerly awaiting you to review the pistorm! Please stick with the A 500 initially. It's the machine that is the most impressive when given a 'boost'. Would also be really good to do a full install tutorial episode once the development has calmed down a bit.
Looks like I have quite a wait for mine, but I do have the the Pi + ready and waiting. Really enjoy all your videos and you have been a godsend through all the lockdowns.
Take care and thanks again.
Such an exciting project!
The green Amiga is a beaut! 😍 amazing that people are still making upgrades to these computers
Nostalgia is strong with this one. Indeed
22:46 - My goodness, Lander.....I played that game a lot on my Acorn 3000 as a child, good memories ❤
Very good episode. Finally! Something practical that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, haha. :) Good presentation of the device, RMC. Thanks!
Awesome video! Especially love the inclusion of Hunter. Probably one of my all-time favourites. I spent entire summers playing it.
Great video and a really great device. I am curious what will come next.
Greetings, Doc64!
15 months later and waiting for an update young man!!
I'd love to see an update on this, I recently purchased the PiStorm and was hoping your video would be a nice setup guide, as a trusted youtuber! :D
Awesome stuff! Thanks for the video :-)
Nice review 👍👍
There are some interesting possibilities for these modules far beyond gaming. The 68000 series are used in many pieces of test equipment from the era. It would be interesting to try this upgrade out next time I have a repair to do!
I'd love to see something like this for the Amstrad CPC machines.
Maybe not the speed boost.
But something that could add a hard drive type capability would be awesome.
Or perhaps something that could emulate a DD1 interface for a CPC 464.
It's amazing how many of these types of things exist for old 1980's home computers. I've been playing with XRoar a Dragon 32 emulator for the PC. There is an FPGA upgrade for the CoCo3, similar to the Dragon.
Nice bit of kit mate looks sick
Well it is green, so your right maybe it isn't feeling that well! 🤣🤣🤣😇
That is so Cool, i will test it on my 500 . THX for this video
I discovered Damocles (Mercenary II) one night when checking out disks on an Atari ST my parents bought for me. I'd never seen anything like it and sunk many hours into it. I never did anything successfully but exploring the vast worlds was amazing for 12-year-old me. Mercenary III improved on it in some ways and had living worlds but soon after I moved to a PlayStation and onward to PC gaming. I still look back at the series in awe though. Same with Millenium - the game where Earth is dead and you start on the Moon base.
Likewise I spent so much time exploring. Frustratingly there was a PC and PlayStation version in development and screenshots exist showing lovely texture mapped world's....but it was cancelled
The voice over the 1clickprint advert reminded me so much of Bullseye. “Picnics will never be the same again” etc etc 🤣
Loving the Snotstorm 500! Looks more like an Amiga-cado to me 😅
The performance boost is awesome to see, particularly in Frontier. Every so often something like this comes along and you can tell it’s going to be a real game changer - if you pardon the pun...
Awesome! I need to get one of these :)
An impressive review!
Thanks Brian
Three months to go for the next pistorm update video!! I installed my pistorm yesterday and cant wait for the next video.
It's a two prong Front. the Vampire team and now the Pi Storm team are racing to get Universal HDMI support going. This makes the Amiga enhanced world exciting and on edge.
Fantastic bit of kit. Lovely that people have another option to accelerate their machine.
Very cool stuff.
Oh this looks perfect for me. I've got kids who would love to play with my A500, but the HDD and Floppies make them a bit uneasy. This would be a great drop in setup for them.
@thecouchtripper Do you know how easy it is to wreck an Amiga file system?
@@vresi Make Back ups to protect the OS? Use AmiDock to make their favourite games more accessible with a shorcut? Use iGame or similar WHDLoader?
@@bigd5090 Backups won't protect the OS from crashing from improper handling, it just makes a backup of it. And we're talking about kids, here. I know how to handle my OS from crashing but kids are a tiny, itty bit more reckless.
This is INSANE!!!!
Great episode Neil! I remember back in the day, I had a “turbo” patched version of Stunt Car Racer that made use of my A1200’s 030 accelerator and fast ram. Presumably it would also be effective on the PiStorm?
Soon time for the revisit :)
It's a great time to be an Amiga enthusiast :)
Vampire is facing some stiff competition now. It makes more sense to use FPGA to recreate the classic chipset and use a cheap ARM CPU to do the number crunching
and it has hdmi out, saw it working on another channel, nice
It is amazing what developers are coming up with and able to do it at a reasonable price. We have the PiStorm for the Amiga, and Apple II have the Apple II pi, Commodore utilizes a pi as an accurate emulator for the 1541 floppy drive, and over in the microcontroller field the ESP32 is used in the FujiNet that greatly enhances the Atari 8-bit line. I wonder what this could do on a Macintosh.
you have nice: show, room, game choice, green
This is so freaking cool, especially if you're the double whammy of an Amiga fan and a Linux person.
Man, that's sick.
Great stuff as usual!
Could it be the additional instructions on the 30-CPU that slows the Pi down compared to the 20?
For the 68030 slowdown issues, my only idea is that the '030 had a really flexible MMU with multiple page size options, which is a real pain to emulate correctly. The '040 has a simplified MMU, so as far as memory management is concerned, emulation can be much faster. If there's an option to disable the '030 MMU emulation, try that. Even if the MMU isn't being used by the OS, just having it enabled may slow things down a lot.
Give us the DIY Episode!!! I love them! Do more then 1 week a month.. Do 1 Month DIY! Love Your Channel
nice video, thanks
Very informative, Neil. You touched on several things I've not seen mentioned in other videos. I would be interested in knowing if you ran into any of the issues Dan did on loading game from disk with the PiStorm installed.
I saw that, Dan did a great video. This Amiga has a Gotek in and I didn't run into problems but I haven't tried Lemmings from it specifically, I should go back and try, although I will 99% be using it from the WHDLoad SCSI setup and I did load Lemmings from that with no problems.
I can tell your channel is truly taking off when you had John-freaking-Romero make a commentary! Gratsz!
Neil interviewed John and Brenda and if you come back next week you'll be able to watch it
I saw "Legends Of Valour" in your folder😊 My first 3D game, give it a try! As I remember, the view size had to be reduced a lot to run properly on a stock A500.
I remember buying a 030 25 MHZ upgrade for my Amiga back in the day with 4 MB of fast ram on board. It cost me $650 from what I remember (back in the 90's when $650 was a lot of money) . After plugging it in I noticed the substantial speed increase not to mention now having 5 MB of RAM
THAT LIME AMIGA IS A BEAUT.
Very Cool!
I can't help but wonder if the reason for the speed decrease when it's set as a 030 over an 020 is a result of it emulating the 030s data cache, while the 020 only has an instruction cache? That certainly would add a level of complexity I'd imagine.
I love this project, and I look forward to the day I can get one for my A600!
Finally a reasonable price for an A500 hdd an accelerator. Been waiting a long time for something like this
🎵It's raining Pi hallelujah...🎵
The GuacAmiga! xD
Excellent review of an interesting product for those who already own an Amiga. Sadly I don’t, and when I looked at current selling prices I realised I probably never will.
Guac-Amiga since it comes with chips 🥑
This is an excellent little project. Hopefully at some point they'll get it working on a 1200, as that is all I have currently.
Looking at it though, at some stage I think a compute 4 version might be a better option than the standard pi, though it would up the pcb cost, but as long as they don't change the pi compute 5 (or later version) format it would make it much more compact potentially.
Love my tf330 CD32
Some of these projects are as amazing as much as also thinking what Amiga owners think authentic - enough. In one hand, a purist says "that is just emulation on PI" but on other hand, that is kinda amazing. Having completely separate computer run emulated parts of the machine while communicating directly with other parts of the machine and being way more affordable than the more "genuine" upgrade kits. Bloke like me would start to ask when will you just emulate the games on your PC and get retro modern vibes by doing amiga on your PC but it was even explained in this video what does it good for RMC.
Damn I need this
*Still so amazed by this. I really want to get my Amigas back up and working just hope they are OK in the loft!*
depending on the model, maybe not... a A500 plus will need it's battery removing PRONTO. A600 and A1200's capacitors will probably be leaking and wild temperature swings won't be doing any of them any good. Disks will probably be getting mould on the surface (which can be cleaned until it destroys the surface)
Get them re-capped, batteries out...now! Or they may not survive...
@@cartayno I know, mate! it is scaring me to death about that! But im in Thailand and my Amigas are back in England! TT
I would like to have that right now. I have a couple of amiga 500 I need to upgrade asap!
Shouldn't that be be 'snot green' with envy at the end there, Neil? LOL.
One can never have enough Pi.
7:15 No, it's an Amiga Key Lime Pi!
You win!
looking forward to that RGB-over-HDMI video output solution
HI I miss Amiga 500 and My Amiga CD32 , I remember playing Speedball ,and shadow of the Beast for hours
Loved looking at your background computer collection , so much eye candy.. i hope i won't have too much issues running a Pi storm with a Rgb2hdmi , one would think having both would be a better solution with using less resources then a future output to hdmi from PiStorm having Storm do everything?
Reported as working but the RGB2HDMI is "passive", just reads the Amiga video and translates it. No effect on Amiga performance as such. There are plans for the RGB2HDMI to connect directly to Pistorm via the camera input, allowing both Native and RTG through the same HDMI connector. This isn't quite working yet though.
@@PATTHECATMCD ok awesome thanks for the information mate :)
Very impressive! I do wonder though, if so much is being emulated on the Pi, what do you need the Amiga for LOL 😆 ♥️
This is only emulating the CPU.
Dat Frontier Elite boost tho 👍
I still have an old Amiga 1000 with a sidecar expansion (can't remember how much RAM now) but it would be kind of cool to get it working with newer kickstart versions. I do wonder though if it would be better to just emulate the whole experience? I guess I may not miss the nostalgia of the original hardware as others out there...
Hey I have an A1000 as well, and just am getting ready to order a Parceiro accelerator for it. I'd love to build my software library further, maybe find some other local owners. Greetings from Seattle, USA!
The Pi Zero 2W is now supported. The new zero is essentially Pi 3A/B+ recreated in the Zero form factor. It has less RAM (512MB is not an issue for PiStorm) and a lower default clock speed (1GHz).