Please note if you have arrived here from the CoffinOS website I do not endorse them as a reseller, and direct you to the PiStorm official Discord chat group to find a trusted reseller in your region discord.com/invite/j6rPtzxaNW. Thank you, Neil - RMC
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..
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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!!
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
@@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 :-)
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.
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.
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!
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!
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
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..
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.
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...
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.
@@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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
yeah, just watch jeff Geering, for cm4 projects in general, does board reviews/tests, Cm4 runs hotter probably, but if the amiga internal shield could be connected what a heatsink. just look at what the pi400 has internally, a big shield and clocks at 1800 mhz
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.
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.
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.
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).
The PC laptop for configuration is similar to the 'management console' used by the large IBM mainframes and midrange systems, usually an IBM Thinkpad or a small xSeries is used for. That's what every Amiga needs and deserves.
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.
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.
This is such a cool project. Imagine using a Raspberry Pi to emulate other chips that are impossible to source these days. It bodes well for the future of these devices.
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 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!
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!
Besides the WSL addition, Windows 10 already has an SSH client included for the CMD and PowerShell commandline tools (out of the box). There is no need to use Putty anymore. If you want drag&drop file SCP transfer, you can use the free SSH client tool from Bitvise; it has many features, including a SOCKS 5 proxy server for tunneling the internet over the SSH connection.
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)
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.
I have an interest in one for my A1000 as its the only Amiga I have in my collection that is still in its original configuration all my other Amigas have accelerators that I am happy with. I will be one of the very few patient people who want one and wait until they become widely available and for a couple reasons. By the time they are widely available the development should be well matured and maybe the board will be revised several times. So being patient allows for a ton of testing and get most if not all the bugs resolved. Once I have one in my A1000 it will be nice to take the old girl out for a ride and some much needed attention.
the Amiga 500 MiniMe is looming in 2022 - which portends to be the "Amiga 500 for the rest of us" - just as the TheC64 became the "Commodore 64 for the rest of us"
I loved my 1084 monitors. They all crapped out after a long service life though. At the end I had to thump them on the side like Fonzie to get them to come on.
I really hope that the PiStorm team can sort out those interrupt/chipset timing issues so I can leave it installed for good. Being able to make all future changes by Wifi is such a treat. In the current state however PiStorm is not yet a viable replacement for classic accelerators, at least for me. That'll certainly change once my all time favourite games work ;-)