PiStorm: Turbo Boost Amiga 500 With Raspberry Pi

uh the humble amiga 500 by far the most popular model of the amiga range and it is quite hard to track down exact sales figures but it is estimated on the lower end that around 1.5 million of these were sold and on the high end around four and a half million either way every kid at my school had an amiga 500 back in the early 90s and for most people it is the first machine they think of when you talk about the amiga and in recent years we've had lots of options for speeding up and hugely upgrading the amiga machines from fpga solutions like the vampire which i did demo on the amiga 600 on this channel a few years ago and is now available in standalone form and for other amigas as well like the a500 and the a1200 and recently i did a video on the high-end warp 1260 accelerator for the amiga 1200 again another high-end really powerful and incredible card but these expansions do come in at quite a big cost now don't get me wrong i think for you know the small run of these cards that they do and the power they pack in they are actually worth the price but obviously it does put it out of reach of many hobbyists and people that haven't got you know insane amounts of money to throw at 30 year old hardware but today we're going to be looking at a powerful amiga accelerator with the equivalent performance of around a 70 to 80 megahertz of 30 with heaps of ram and better graphics that will set you back around 11 pounds seriously and this of course is made possible using the raspberry pi now amiga fan cloud schwarz has come up with this ingenious open source project which enables you to harness the power on board a raspberry pi and give the amiga access to its resources by replacing the amiga 500 cpu and at the time of recording this video at the end of april 2021 the pi storm only currently works with the amiga 500 and the a2000 possibly the cd tv as well i might have to give that a try but there are people working on adapting the pie storm to work with other models as well now i've got to give a big shout to lamaru who was kind enough to send me this assembled pie storm and i know he's currently working on trying to get this running on an amiga 600. so how does it work exactly well the instructions for making your own pie storm can be found on their github so that means you can use a pcb manufacturer for example our sponsor pcb way or you can join one of their group buys on their discord server when they become available now unfortunately at the time recording this there is a global chip shortage and that means the main chip on board of the pie storm is proving quite hard to find but i'd suggest you jump onto their discord keep an eye on there fill in their form to become part of one of the group buys and then when things become available again you'll be the first to find out and it looks like they're trying to sort out builders from different regions and you know being an open source project i'm sure before long they're going to be people selling these at cost on places like amibay but obviously nip onto their discord i'll link that up in the video description and just before we take a closer look and get the pie storm set up and installed i wanted to take just a moment to give a big thank you to this video sponsor my wonderful friends at pcb way now if after watching this video you want to get your own pie storm board made or a board for another project you're working on give them a try they offer a full feature custom pcb prototype service with more than a decade in the field offering low-cost fast turnaround quality boards and they are massive supporters of the retro community so check them out at pcby.com and a big thank you to pcby for supporting my channel now as well as a pie storm you're also going to need a raspberry pi now currently the project is only designed to work on a specific model and that is the raspberry pi 3 a plus which i don't actually have i did order one of amazon but unfortunately it hasn't arrived in time for this video but i do have a 3b which actually won't work as if you look here it fits on this way because of the usb ports it physically will not fit onto the raspberry pi 3b but you can use a gpio port riser and i've got one here this set me back around eight pounds off amazon so then if we just connect that to the gpio port there and as you can see that actually gives me um quite a few gpio ports we only need one of them but then i can connect the pi storm to the top one here and it will fit just fine admittedly this combination is quite tall so that does mean i'm not going to be able to close the amiga 500 case um but obviously if you get a 3a that will fit fine inside and the whole thing will be a lot tidier and the pie storm itself is actually a very tidy and compact design now as i showed then you've got the gpio connector to connect up to the raspberry pi the main component on the board is this intel altera max 2 complex programmable logic device a cpld which is non-volatile and that means you can save data to it which is retained after power off which is obviously important for a cpu replacement as you don't have to reprogram it every time you turn off your amiga and then on the bottom we have the pins there that will plug straight into the cpu socket on the amiga 500 now there are several guides online with various different ways of doing this you can do it via ssh on a headless raspberry pi for example but i've got a keyboard and a second monitor so it's going to be a bit easier to show on video by connecting the raspberry pi up to its own screen so then we can see what's going on so i've got a usb keyboard a nice sun branded one why not i've also got an ethernet cable as well you could obviously configure this using wi-fi but i've got you know anything important nearby and i've got my a500 plus open on the desk and i've removed the 68k cpu so we can plug the pi storm straight into the amiga before we power anything on now obviously we need to make sure that we get the orientation right and you can see there is a little notch on the end of the pie storm which lies up with the socket notch on the motherboard and we don't need a power supply as the raspberry pi will actually take its power directly from the amiga and of course we're going to need an sd card now it is suggested that you use the light version of raspberry pi os as the windowing system on the full version adds system load which will then slow down performance and you can download the official raspberry pi imager from their website which again i'll link up in the description select the light version and then write that to your sd card then we can transplant the sd card into the raspberry pi and power on the amiga now you will see that the raspberry pi will come to life but at this stage the amiga won't and that's fine that's completely normal first we need to configure the raspberry pi to run the cpu emulation software now it will take a bit longer on the first boot of the raspberry pi to resize the file system but after that you'll be greeted with the login now the default username is pi and the password will be raspberry now of course the first thing that you always do with any project on the raspberry pi is to make sure that everything is up to date so we'll type in sudo apt get update and that will then make sure that all our system files are the latest versions and this might take a couple of minutes but after it's done we'll then need to install the direct media layer development files now it's not important that you know what's going on here i will actually put all of these commands and the full instructions in the video description you can just follow them one by one and then it will get to the stage where you can run this so again all these instructions one by one you can copy and paste some straight from the the video description but essentially we're installing the direct media layer development files and then we're going to do a git clone of the pi storm project and then we're going to make that now that we've done that the next stage is to do the fpga bitstream update now again you don't need to know what's going on here just copy the commands and we need to install the on-chip debugger so we get that by doing sudo apt-get install openocd and then there are some shell scripts in here we need to change the protection bits on those to make them executable again just copy these commands and they will work and then depending on which version of the pi storm board you have you will either do um sudo nprog.sh or nprog240 if you've got a revision b and which i have so again i mean if one doesn't work the other one probably will run these commands and then if no errors are displayed on the screen you'll see a message saying shutdown command invoked and that means that the cpld has been programmed successfully and we should be ready to give this a try in its most basic configuration so now we can type in sudo dot slash emulator hit return and you will see the amiga comes to life and we have successfully got the pie storm up and running now obviously we're booted into the most basic pie storm configuration here but i thought i'd just quickly boot up the amiga workbench from floppy and launch sis info as i know everyone's going to be asking to see it in the comments even though yeah it's not the most accurate benchmarking tool i will run something a bit more thorough for those who love a bit of benchmarking pawn at the end but for now let's just launch sis info from this floppy disk i've got here and bearing in mind we're only emulating i know 20 at the moment i can beef that up to know 30 in just a bit and as you can see the the o20 is recognized there um and it reckons that we have yeah these stats are probably not very accurate uh let's just go down and click on the speed test here and see what it reports and there you go now the red bar at the top is this machine and as you can see for a comparison at the moment it reckons that we are running around 26.2 times faster than a stock amiga 500 600 as it showed has on here um and almost up to the speed of an a4 000 um a bit quicker than the a3 000 actually quite a bit quicker nearly three times faster um i'd ignore these figures over here the records were running at 396 megahertz that is blatantly false um but as you can see you know this gives a very nice speed boost um 26 times quicker than stock for you know an adapter that's going to set you back around 11 pounds and if we quit here as well in workbench you can see all that lovely ram and it's available at the top of the screen there um 134 megabytes of memory free and the 1.5 chip ram that i've got inside this omega 500 plus so already you know it's most basic for the price you know not factoring in the raspberry pi which again you can pick up for around 25 pounds this gives you a great little increase in power on your amiga 500 for a very low price now of course the downside to this is when i power off the amiga and then turn it back on the raspberry pi is also going to reboot and we have to go through the entire launching the emulator process from scratch so right now we're going to jump back onto the raspberry pi and automate that because the goal of this is i want the board to be inside the amiga and then when i turn the a500 on the raspberry pi comes on automatically boots up into the emulator and then the amiga starts around 30 seconds later so let's get that configured now okay so we're back at the raspberry pi login screen now i'm going to log in using the same credentials pi and raspberry and now we want to run the configuration tool so we don't have to log in each time we wanted to do it on its own so we'll use sudo did that wrong sudo raspy config and there we go we can see some system options here so we're going to system options boot auto login so we want to automatically log in as the pi user with the text console we'll select that there we go we can also put the display down to um something a bit more manageable maybe like 720p um which might screw up my capture card so i won't do it here but yeah if you want a bit more performance at your pi you could do that and you can also set up your networking here as well now apparently they are working on networking support for um pi storm but it's not enabled as yet so i mean i've got an ethernet cable in here for now i should probably enable that though because i want to put ssh enabled too so that will mean i can then transfer files over wi-fi to the sd card inside the raspberry pi when the machine's all closed up so we'll go into interface options there we go ssh we want to enable that yep enable that there we go then we can ssh into whatever the network now we also need to set the wireless country settings as well so it will uh find the correct wi-fi channels so i'll go down and do that quickly in here so always hard when you live in the uk is it going to be gb uk there we go okay and now i should be able to enter my wi-fi network ssid which is paris and there we go now if we do a reboot this should automatically log in and if we quickly jump onto my windows pc you can see that i've been setting up a very basic hard disk image using win uae the amiga emulator for windows and big shout out to mark seeley for his help with this bit of the process and actually doing it is quite simple there are lots of guides online to making hard disk files in win uae it's a bit beyond the scope of this video but you know do a youtube search and you'll find it so what i've got here is a basic workbench 3.1 install and i've installed whd load and a couple of games here as well so we can play them directly from the hard disk and actually doing this inside and win uae is really straightforward and actually a lot easier than doing unreal amiga because anything you download from the internet you can literally just drag and drop the zip files into the window and it will mount them on the amiga so that means you can then just drag and drop and copy them over a lot easier than you know trying to do on a real system so now that i've got that hard disk image file we need to copy that over to the raspberry pi so i'm going to close that there and we're going to be using a program called win scp so if i double click this here and then we need to select the scp protocol and the host name will be the ip address of the raspberry pi so mine obviously it'll be different for you mine is 192.168.86.54 and then username and password same as on the pi so it's pi and raspberry and then if we log in we should be able to connect to the pi and there we are it's actually dropped me into the home slash pi directory um so then that's the file there pi minus pi zero to hdf with a lowercase i it's important you remember the uh the case as well because that is important go over to there and then i can just drag and drop it into the pi storm window we'll overwrite the one i made before this will take a couple of minutes to copy over depending on your network speed i mean the uh the raspberry pi's wi-fi isn't the quickest so give it a couple of minutes and then we should be able to get it up and running on the amiga okay in a minute or so later the file has copied over the network and should now be on the raspberry pi so let's make sure we're in the right directory we'll do cd home slash pi slash pi storm and we'll type ls to do a directory listing and there we can see it there near the end pi zero.htf which is what we need now we need to quickly edit the config file to enable the virtual scuzzy device and also to point it towards that hard disk image file so we'll type in nano which is the editor program that we'll use for this and then we want to edit the default.cf file so if you type in def then hit tab it should find it and while we're in here actually we can change the cpu from the config file so as you can see at the moment it is set to be no 20 we could even put it up to an 040 or a i know 60. um i think that will stick with an o30 so bump it up a little bit and that really is you know the sweet spot for playing games on the amiga i find um you know that is if you want to play games they're a bit more advanced than just standard amiga 500 games then if we scroll down we want to use this here uh the pi scuzzy so we need to just uncomment that by removing the hash at the start and then we'll remove the one here where it says set their um pi scz zero we need to change by default it's p i zero with a capital i but i've actually given mine a lowercase like i said it's case sensitive so that should find it now then we'll press ctrl and x and that will save it we'll say yes and now that should all be set up so we will run the emulator again and the amiga should come to life and hopefully boot from the hard disk image there you go simple as that now that's not to say that the pie storm is flawless at the moment obviously this is still very early development and the team are constantly working on improving this and just checking out their discord today i mean so many ideas are flowing in there on ways they can add new features and improve bugs and there is actually one um i'd say quite a major bug that i've found so far and that is the fact that most games of floppy disk don't seem to work using the pie storm for example i've got three games here that just came with my amiga 500 plus in the cartoon classics pack um if i insert that into the disk drive and give the machine a reboot and try to load lemmings um i was a bit confused because the game started to load kind of got towards a bit when it was going to load the menu and then the machine just hangs so i thought maybe it's something to do with you know not working with an o20 or an o30 but then i got this disk booting fine on my amiga 3000 my a4000 that expect a lot higher than this machine here and i thought maybe it's a problem with the disc i made another adf file tried the original and a copy again both did the same thing as you'll see here when it gets past the dma design logo it should then attempt to load the lemmings menu to let you get into the game but instead we get a black screen and the system just completely hangs and i wonder whether it was some issue with you know track disc loaders because another game we've got here captain planet and i have left this for like you know half an hour before it's not me being hasty and quick here but for the purposes of a video this is as far as it gets trust me and to prove it's not just lemmings i put captain planet in there as well and again it will start to load we can see the the board is there in dark blue and now the machine is hung same with bob versus the space mutants it's the same with this and pretty much all the track disc games i've tried to load on there um yeah that just ticked once and now black screen i've mentioned this in the discord and they are aware of this problem and apparently it's something to do with them the machine currently thinking it's got several floppy drives attached to it rather than just one um so they haven't really had a chance to look into that properly yet but they are aware of it but just a little heads up if your main idea with getting a pie storm was to play amiga floppy disk games at the moment they don't tend to work very well at all in my experience but obviously i mean if you've got this solution most people will use whd load which every game i've tried on there so far has worked flawlessly and i know the team are looking into this so hopefully it will be a bug that they can uh track down and fix very soon but i thought you know it was important that i pointed that out to people just in case he did what i did and spent hours thinking have i set something up wrong just so you're reassured it doesn't work that well with floppy games at the moment and the final thing i want to try out on the pie storm is the rtg support now rtg which stands for retargetable graphics is usually limited to the big box amigas and it means you can get loads more colors higher screen resolutions and you can output the amiga display via the raspberry pi's hdmi port now to do this we need to copy a few files over to the amiga and there is a full in-depth guide on that github on the pi storm github that i will link to in the video description to talk you through it all and but really it's quite straightforward you need to download picasso 96 from amy net i then copied that onto my hard disk file and again loads of guides on setting up picasso 96 as well then we need the drivers for the pi storm and that is actually already in the package so we can just move that to the amiga and i can do that in win ui again and using you will find the driver's directory inside the platforms slash amiga slash rtg folder so the way i did it was by using winscp to copy that to my windows machine zip it up quickly drag it into win uae so it's on my hard disk image along with picasso 96 and then copy that new hard disk image back to the raspberry pi and then do the setup process on there and they're actually to make things easier picasso settings you can download from their discord server stickied into the main channel and there is a nice walkthrough on their github as well so then all you need to do is open the config file again uncomment out the rtg variable in there and you can even do this from winscp and save it directly as well and then on the amiga opening the screen modes you will see a new list of uh glorious high resolution screen modes when i click this one here you can see we've now got a lovely 720p workbench millions of colors available and i can display that via hdmi on my modern samsung monitor and they're actually working on an adapter to allow the amigas native modes to be output via the raspberry pi's hdmi as well so you won't need two monitors and also while i was doing this i've upgraded the rom to be kickstart 3.1 and that is again really simple all you do is copy the file rename it to kick.rom and drop that into the pi storm directory and um enable that in the config and the amiga boot up with an upgraded kickstart rom and this video actually took me a few days to make and in the meantime my raspberry pi 3a plus has arrived from amazon so we can swap out the 3b and we don't need that um gpio riser that will mean that there is room to put the keyboard on top of the raspberry pi and close the amigas case which we'll do in just a moment now obviously before we seal the amiga's case we want to make sure that the raspberry pi boots directly into the emulator on power on that means we can disconnect the keyboard and hdmi cable and close the amiga's case so to do that we can just add the emulator to the rc.local file now this practice is somewhat frowned upon in the linux community from what i know but you know it will work it is a quick and easy hack dead easy to do and obviously you can still ssh into the pi over wi-fi if you need to stop it or change anything and a big thank you to chris edwards for this tip in his recent pie storm video definitely worth checking that out so to do that dead easy um in the command line here we do cd slash etc and then in here sudo nano rc.local and this is a sequence of commands that are executed when the raspberry pi boots so before the exit command here we just need to do cd slash home slash pi slash pi storm to get us into the right directory and then we want to run the emulator says sudo dot slash emulator now we can do control and x we want to overwrite that y return and there we go and now we can reboot the raspberry pi and it should automatically load the emulator without us having to log in or type any commands and that will mean that i can uh disconnect the keyboard close the amiga's case and it should launch the emulator automatically so that's been a quick look at the pie storm as it stands now now obviously this is an ongoing open source effort so you can expect improvements over the coming months i know for example that they're currently working on getting the raspberry pi's networking to be available to the amiga so you can get the amiga online via the pi's wi-fi and allowing you to use the pi's usb ports for the amiga as well but already at this stage i mean for such an affordable price this is just mind-blowing you know if you were to buy all of these real components separately 128 megs of ram i know 30 accelerator a hard disk interface a kickstart upgrade rtg graphics and soon you know network and usb ports that would easily set you back over 1500 pounds and i know that because i've got all that in my maker 4000 and it wasn't cheap but getting this complete setup in an amiga 500 for under 50 pounds including the raspberry pi 3a i just think is incredible so hats off to the team who are working on the pie storm project really really exciting it's a great time to be an amiga fan at the moment so many incredible new developments coming out i can't wait to see what they do with this so if you've got any questions of course you can leave a video comment maybe you've got a pie storm and you've been trying it out i'd love to know what you think of it or um maybe any other upgrades that you've done through amigas recently so many options out there right now thank you very much for watching this video i will see you in the next one and just a quick reminder that i do a weekly retro gaming and technology podcast you can get it every friday new episodes featuring an industry legend on the show each week as well and you can download it from your favorite podcast client or from our website the retrohour.com and while you're here on youtube here are another couple of videos i think you might enjoy take care i will see you next time

Channel: Dan Wood

Views: 74,896

Rating: 4.9474378 out of 5

Keywords: pistorm, pistorm amiga, raspberry pi, use raspberry pi and amiga, cheap amiga ram, cheap amiga accelerator, amiga upgrades, amiga faster, commodore amiga, retro gaming, retro computing, old pc, motorola 68k, amiga 500, vintage, classic, retro, computer, hardware, 90s computers, 16-bit

Id: -CwVofNogDI

Length: 27min 15sec (1635 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021