PiStorm32 Lite for Amiga 1200 - Installation guide and review

[Music] foreign [Music] hi I'm Doug from Dynamic Computing and welcome to episode 151 of 10 minute amiga retrocast now this week we're going to talk about something that I've done a video on before and you'll see a video here before about the awesome pie storm and the pie storm is fantastic basically in a nutshell what it is is it'll it's an interface that will allow you to use a Raspberry Pi like a 3A or a 3B or even now the raspberry 4. um and use that as kind of an accelerator for the Amiga it takes over all of the CPU functions and works incredibly fast taking over the CPU functions and then allows you to either use the onboard hard drive controller if you have it like an Amiga 1200 or an Amiga 600 or allows you to use the actual Pi Raspberry Pi as a hard drive interface now the way this worked on my last video that I just linked to is there would be these little hard drive files and it would kind of emulate an Amiga hard drive and it was wicked wicked fast it also had some additional features that were available like the ability to use the onboard networking of the Raspberry Pi to network your Amiga which is really cool and that is one particular branch of the pie storm and that's a perfectly valid way to go but today we're going to be talking about the the mu-68k branch of it which is faster and cooler in some ways and less powerful than others for example right now networking is not enabled on it but it is wicked fast when it comes to the CPU emulation and for all you people who think oh you're just running the Amiga on a Raspberry Pi no you're not no you're not you're not at all it's taking over the CPU functions and pretending it's like a 6840 CPU um you're still using your Paula chip just fine Paula still sings away you're still using your ECS or your AGA chipset no problems at all well yeah problems but uh but it still uses the onboard chipset your floppy drive you want to use your hard drive controller fine all works just great it takes over the CPU and it can offer really nice retargetable Graphics which we'll be covering today now my Raspberry Pi interface is the Raspberry Pi interface for the Amiga 1200 and this was a gracious gift from my friends at Amiga kit right here Matthew contacted me a couple of weeks ago and asked me if I wanted one for review absolutely but as you guys know just because somebody sends me apart for free to review does not automatically equal a glowing review there's been plenty of times I've received free things for review and I've given it a well my honest opinion and if it's got flaws it's got flaws I tell you about them but thank you Matthew you're the best and thanks Chris for helping me out with a few dumb little issues that I ran in into a few weeks ago I appreciate that but uh let's dig into what Amiga kit provides so this is the lovely little pie storm light for the Amiga 1200. why is it called the pi storm light well there's a lot of different explanations I can find for it online light makes it sound like it's a limited version and then there's a full version but there isn't so it's just an interesting name now on on board here we have a couple of control chips we've got the header for the gpio header and a nice connector for our Amiga 1200 now one would look at this and think oh I put the Raspberry Pi right here well Nae Nae you don't do that you flip the little guy over and you put it on the bottom and that's because of how everything mounts inside now this comes with a nice little thermal pad right here that works as a heat sink for your Raspberry Pi so when you take your Raspberry Pi now in this case I'm using a nice Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi model 3A plus it will also work with the 3B and it does fit in there and I do have one uh and what you do is you put this in the bottom of the pie storm okay not up here where you'd think you would flip it over put it in the bottom and then this little guy acts as a heat sink this rubber pad that comes with it has to go on top of the gpio gpio pins here that's going to keep the keyboard from shorting out so when you put this on here line up your little gpio pins push her right down now there are screws that go right here along with these little plastic bumpers there are one two three different screw holes that you're supposed to screw down some of them are I believe underneath here why do I only have two of these little rubber spacers yeah because I dropped one on the floor and now I can't find it why am I not using the little rubber spacers and screws on mine well because I take this thing apart and put together 52 different times during testing so you know I don't want to have to keep taking it apart when you put yours in permanently do yourself a favor use the little plastic spacers and tighten it down it spaces everything out properly for you so this is it this is the pi storm light right here and that's a nice Raspberry Pi and you can see that's substantially smaller than a lot of other accelerators that are available for the amiga 1200. for example this is currently replacing my blizzard 68040 with 64 Megs of RAM you can see there's quite a size difference here this thing installs in about half a second in your Amiga 1200 this one takes me about three and a half weeks to plug in because it's so big and bulky you have to squeeze it in and just barely tighten it in it's a pain in the butt but it's a great accelerator let's go ahead and plug it in now you are certainly one hundred percent able just to plug in the Raspberry Pi From the Bottom by just taking off the trapdoor because this is so compact it just slides right in I happen to already have my keyboard and everything off of here so I just thought I'd plug it in this way so we can just get it right under there and she just slots right in now of course with an Amiga 1200 it's often nice to move things out about half a millimeter now as is this is not going to do a single thing this is not going to function at all because we have not done anything to get the Amiga OS prepared to work with a Raspberry Pi that's what we're going to cover in today's video one of the complaints I had about the Raspberry Pi in my initial video a year or so ago is that you literally had to fight with three different computers and three different operating systems to get it to work you had to first set things up on your PC or your Mac and get your card all configured and copy some files over to your card then you had to boot up the actual Raspberry Pi itself and have like a keyboard and mouse connected to it and and download some things to it through the Linux on the Raspberry Pi and download some files and do some updates and it was a it was a hassle to be perfectly honest then you had to go in the Amiga and load some stuff there so we're talking three different operating systems to configure your Raspberry Pi was it hard not really it's kind of a pain sometimes you just want to plug and go now that's where this mu-68k is so delightful because it eliminates the most difficult part which is fighting with Linux and remember your pseudo and your commands and your young blah boring what we need the PC for is to initially format and set up an SD card and get it prepared to work in your Amiga super duper simple and we're going to go over that here in just a second then we just plug it into the Amiga in theory the Amiga will recognize everything and we can either install an operating system like we used to do from floppy disk or from a gotek or do the method that I'm going to show you which is copying your existing hard drive from your Amiga 1200 right onto the pi storm where it's going to run faster so what do we need for this we need an SD card and what we need is an itsy bitsy tiny little SD card any size is fine you're going to want you know a gig minimum you can even get away with 512 megabytes but that's boring because we're going to use a newer version of the Amiga OS that's going to support large drives so in this case this particular Drive is a 64 gig SD card gonna put it in my interface we're going to hook it up to my PC and I'm going to show you how to set this little guy up follow me now we're going to be using Windows to do all of our work here can you do this in a Mac yeah you could you could there's there's ways to do it on the Mac we're going to use Windows this will work in Windows 10 or Windows 11. first of all you want to launch a command prompt but you want to launch it with administrative rights because we're going to need full admin rights for this this system that we're going to run so run as administrator now we're going to launch the program disc part this is the disk partition utility this is a dangerous utility to run and the reason that it's a dangerous utility is because you could format and erase your onboard hard drive and it's barely going to warn you at all now you look here disk 0 is my 256 gigabyte onboard hard drive on here I don't want to mess with that and it is going to default to disk zero that's the one we're working with right now we want to work with disk 5 on my machine because it's my 64 gig SD card why is it only say 58 gig because hard drive manufacturers lie to your face about the capacity of the drives that is effective life we're going to select disk 5. okay disk 5 is now the selected disk if you get a message besides that but you know disk X is now the selected disk and that disk being your SD card don't proceed because you could erase your hard drive and that would be bad and that's not my problem First Command we want to do is just make sure it's wiped out we're going to run the clean command Okay access is denied let's see what we need to do about that somehow it did not detect that I had launched it as administrator I launched it again as administrator selected the right disk and the cleaning was successful no problem at all now we need to create some partitions first partition we're going to create is just a small 200 megabyte partition because that's going to contain the actual Pi storm code and that's only 20 30 megabytes so a 200 Meg partition is plenty c r e p a r t p r i size equals 200. whoops it's now created a 200 megabyte partition now we are going to partition the rest of the 64 gig drive and there's two ways to think about it one way is we could use the entire capacity of the drive and then partition it into a workbench and a work in a data partition using Amiga Os or we can create individual virtual hard drives that the Amiga actually thinks our separate hard drives for each partition either way works fine for Laughs we're going to create one Amiga partition that is one gigabyte in size and we're going to use that for workbench so we're going to create part PRI size equals 1024 for a gigabyte this next part's important ID equals 76. that lets the system know that it is a different kind of partition not just a generic like FAT32 okay oh look what I did instead of the equal sign I put the minus sign there we go yay now we have a one gigabyte partition on here now you could continue to create additional partitions like if we wanted to create the next partition to be eight gigs you could do you know 8096 right here then we'd have a second partition that's eight gigs in size or we could do this just like this that will create the rest of the partition the rest of the space on the SD card as one big partition that then we could subdivide using a hard disk toolbox on the Amiga into sub partitions if we wanted to but it's going to see it as one big disk so we're going to do that just for laughs okay now what we've done is we've created a three different partitions we're going to select partition one okay now what we could do we could do list partition I think that's right and it's going to show you the partitions that we have 200 megabyte partition 1024 megabyte partition 56 gigabyte partition okay absolutely beautiful it's showing our partitions notice that partition three is the one that's selected because it's got a big old asterisk here we're going to do a command select partition one now we can go back and take a look and it's see it's changed the default the primary the the partition that we're doing to partition one we're going to type the word assign successfully assigned a partition okay now we could do this if we wanted to right here but we're not going to cancel out of that now we can type exit and exit again don't type end CLI like I often do now we're going to have some new partitions and only one of them is going to show up in Windows because the other two partitions we created are created with ID 76 they don't show up by default we want to format this and we're going to format this as FAT32 we're going to call this Amy boot just for laughs and a quick format is fine yippee now that we have a 200 megabyte partition here's what you do next open up your web browser and you browse to the GitHub that has all of the mu-68 code on it I'll have that link in the description here it is right here and I should be putting it on the screen unless I forget now don't be a big dummy bird like me what I did when I first tried mine the first couple of days I just downloaded oh mu-68 price storm boom rock and roll okay that's mu-68 Pi storm for the Amiga 500 the Amiga 600 and they make it 2 000 okay by storm 32 light that's the one you want and you see there's a couple of different versions the latest one is uh here 310 right here so you would download this let's see if it's the one I have yep it's the one that I've already saved so I won't re-save it but I've got the 2023 310 one right here so you would save yours then we're going to go to that folder so you can see You'd have your pie storm compressed file 2023 310 you decompress that extract all right click extract all and it's going to overwrite what I've already extracted there it should give me a message about overwriting it nope so now we have our extracted pie storm stuff all of this that we just extracted is going to go onto the boot partition Amy boot that we just created so you can do control a to highlight all of them and then copy so in this case we'll do right click and then copy we're going to do our Amy boot see that down there AV boot right click paste bang bang boom we've just put all of the pi storm code in that 200 megabyte partition Happy Days alright are we done with this partition no you have to now put your own Kickstart on this partition all right let me show you where I keep my kick starts I am going to use the Kickstart from 3.2.2 you can use 3.1 you could use 3.14 use whichever Kickstart you want to I'm just going to use the latest one here there's update 322 ROMs Amiga 1200 here it is a 1200.47.111 DOT ROM okay that's your ROM file there yours may have a different name we're going to copy that right over and we're going to paste it into our Amy boot folder and we're going to rename it right click rename we're going to call this kick.rom you can name it anything you want to okay but the reason we're calling it kick dot ROM is because this config file is going to point to that so we're going to open up this config file but what we're looking for is this line down here init tram FS kick dot ROM if you name your Kickstart ROM something different change the name here okay and then save this we'll maybe play with these another time and because in theory it's Linux you know what I'm going to make sure that it's the capitalization is exactly correct lowercase k kicked out ROM okay we have now created our boot partition and we're ready to move this over to the Amiga and Boot It Up For the first time so now what we've got is we have this little 64 gig card here with a 200 Meg partition on it all set to boot into the pi storm all right I'm going to take out my card that I've already been playing with for a while and put that aside and then probably proceed to drop it on the floor and lose it forever and I'm going to put our new card in there now you'll notice I have an HDMI cable right here that's because the pi storm supports really nice retargetable Graphics that we're going to be talking about in a few minutes first thing we're going to do is get Amiga OS loaded though so let's start getting that set up right here so you'll notice I do not have my Amiga hard drive plugged in here because we're going to ultimately be using the SD card as the hard drive but I'm going to plug mine in this is a IDE SATA drive I'm going to plug mine in for the express purpose of copying the data over from here onto the SD drive so I don't have to completely reinstall everything and this works actually pretty good so let's go ahead and get this plugged in and we'll get the Amiga turned on and I'll show you what to do next now you'll notice that I've launched into my Amiga early startup control I did this intentionally hold down both Mouse buttons and you'll get to this boot options I'm doing this because I want to tell it even though I have my hard drive in here pdh0 I want to boot to my gotek that has my Amiga OS 3.1 install disc on it and you'll see why in a second so I'm going to go ahead and choose that disk I've chosen my on my gotek my install disk and I'm going to boot to that now you're going to notice something here you're going to see my workbench 1200 and my work 1200 that is from my hard drive that I have plugged into my Amiga 1200 standard controller I want to go to my install directory here on my floppy my boot floppy but instead of just installing we want to go to HD toolbox and we want to tell HD toolbox to look at the scuzzy controller on the pi storm so you click it right click go to information and here where normally scuzzy device is going to say scuzzy dot device the name of the pi storms scuzzy controller is b r c m Dash sdhc.device you're going to want to put that right in there and then you're going to click save now you're going to launch your HD toolbox and in theory what this will see is it will instead of saying you're on board scuzzy it will see these three devices scuzzy zero scuzzy one scuzzy two all right for the love of God do not do anything with this scuzzy address zero loon zero this is your 200 megabyte partition on your pie storm that holds the pie storm boot stuff if you change this you're gonna have to start from scratch we're going to go here to scuzzy one and scuzzy 2 change Drive type Define new and because of a bug in Amiga OS 3.1.4 and above you're going to want to give this a different name because if you've already used this the name Drive definitions it's not going to let you save it again read configuration fisen okay great all right now we have one of them set up we're going to go to disk 2 change Drive type Define new read configuration let's see if it's going to give me an error here nope we're good we're going to save the changes save the changes now we have two devices okay we're going to partition these drives you see it is a full one gig partition that's the first one we created so we're going to delete that and we're going to create a new Partition here we want to change this name if we keep this as pdh0 it's going to conflict with the pdh 0 that my original drives are already recognized as we're going to call this uh let's see qdh0 why not we can call it anything we want to and we're going to uh let's see that's one gig let's go ahead and change the file system block size a little higher and we're going to save this now we're going to go to our second Drive we're going to notice it's also Mighty big we're going to make the full capacity because we can and we're going to call this qdh1 and give it some more buffers we got plenty of memory here file system block size because it's such a big Drive make it bigger now we have the memory where we don't absolutely have to do that but this increases the performance now we have two new drives save changes yay we got the one gigabyte and we have about a 58 gigabyte now we're going to go ahead and exit and we're going to reboot we still want this to boot up into our install floppy because we want to format these drives so I'm holding down the right Mouse button boot options again I'm going to boot to df1 but look here what we have pdh 0 pdh1 that's my onboard IDE qdh0 qdh1 that is my new brcm sdh-1 DOT device that's the ones on the pi storm but we're still booting to the install disk so here we are we've now rebooted and this is still my original workbench disc that I have in here but I've got these two new drives we're going to format the first one and we're going to call it we'll call it WB 1200. I never put in a trash can all right now we're going to format the second one we're going to call this one work we want to give it a little different name here just so that it's easier to recognize we can change that later 56 gig capacity all right so now we have a nice 56 almost 57 gig drive and we have our workbench floppy or workbench drive right here what are we going to do now we're going to go back to install we're going to open up our shell watch what we do copy now first just so you know what what Drive letters are here whoops I pho we have pdh0 which is my regular workbench disk pdh1 which is my regular work file and then we have qdh here and qdh1 I'm going to copy p d h 0 colon okay two q d h 0. colon clone oh it now goes through and it is copying everything from my onboard disk drive onto the pi storms drive that we just created we're going to let that go and reboot it when we're done so now we've copied over the workbench partition to the new drive on the SD card we would do the same thing with the work partition in this case I do copy pdh1 colon space qdh1 colon space clone all and it would copy everything from my work partition over now honestly I've got like 25 gigs on that work partition and it would take about an hour and a half so I'm going to switch over to my card that I've already formatted and already moved everything over to and we're going to continue on with the information on the pi storm so now that we've copied everything over to our little flash drive on there you can actually unplug your onboard IDE you won't be needing it anymore now can you run both the internal IDE and the pi storm simultaneously absolutely can you set up the pi storm to boot off your internal IDE and then use this as a huge hard drive for your work partition no problem at all there's no there's no worries at all they they play nicely together but we're going to unplug ours for now and we're going to boot directly up to the pi storm let's take a look so you can see that she boots right up into my workbench okay with our nice AGA screen here this is a high-res interlaced 32 color screen fairly Zippity Doo dot day and of course we would be absolutely remiss if we didn't run the good old sys info wouldn't we let's take a look at that okay so here we are in a recent version of sysinfo we're going to do a speed test take a look at what we've got here and it says it's 434 times faster than an Amiga 600 and 41 times faster than an Amiga 4000. now is any of this true well sort of yes maybe no not really uh what this is is it's a raw test of the CPU power and yes it is fast it is incredibly fast and with many things you'll get performance like this with other things that Amiga no not so much let's take a look at the memory 236 megabytes of memory I think that's adjustable I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet there's 112 megabytes of memory nice and two Megs of Chip Ram now usually when I do the disk speed test it will crash right here but let's see if it does do Kaboom and it crashes how delightful that would be perfectly honest cisinfo often crashes in the hard disk test when it's testing something a little bit non-standard so I'm I'm perfectly accepting of that now you guys know I do a lot of stuff with like art Department professional here a lot of photo editing so let's bring up something pretty big here we're going to bring up a uh a nice big JPEG file that's what we're gonna do and here's a nice we're gonna see if it's any good loading it up and it loads very quickly this is a three megabyte file this is definitely loading faster than it would on a like a 68 or 30 or even a 68 or 40. this is a 29 12 by 3381 size image we're going to scale it down and see how quick scaling works with this new little guy right here let's scale it to half the size and then we're going to half the size again just for last so we're going to scale it down to half the size look how fast it scales that is absolutely much faster than my 684 68 or 40 does we're gonna bring it down again 728 by 845 boom all right now let's render it and let's do something fun like uh oh 800 by 600 here there we go in full ham 8 glory and we're gonna see what kind of picture it is I don't even know what this one is oh look at that it's my wedding day how sweet isn't that a nice one to pick Douglas so you can see that it actually generates the images very very very quickly and it does a really nice job the other awesome thing about what I do with this is jpeg images are memory Hogs when they're decompressed on the Amiga and with over 300 megabytes of memory available I don't have any issues loading anything let's take a look at another program let's look at image effects we'll load this up in a nice uh Let's do an 1280 by 1024 and 256 colors sorry this is 1280 by 720. now see how that's redrawing the screen like that see how slow that is we'll talk about that in just a little bit oh look eventually someday it will get there okay that's in 1280 by 720 which is a resolution the Amiga supports just fine you'll just never find a monitor that supports it unless you get something like an indivision MK2 or indivision MK3 okay see how slow that is let's redraw the screen and take four hours to do it but once we actually get in here let's see we're going to open up the same picture and it loads up the jpeg image fairly quickly there we go look at that happy couple and we're going to do the same thing we're going to resize it this time we're just going to go in and do scale and we're going to make an actual image size here size preset and this is going to screw up the aspect ratio totally but that's okay we're going to go pal hi-res over scan now look how fast that scales the image this would normally take 45 seconds to a minute on my 68 or 40 easily that's done in seconds because the CPU is so blazingly fast here now we're going to go ahead and render it and I'll choose a different resolution that's what we want we want pal and ham eight renders it quite quickly I said renders it quite quickly there's the happy couple and again it butchers the aspect ratio but we're just doing this as a as a little test here and we will watch as we move things around and watch it slowly repaint the screen now let's talk about what's going on here so what did we just see right there first of all we saw how easy it was to get your pie storm set up to boot your Amiga we saw in CIS info how incredibly fast the CPU is and how beautiful the screen is this is these are just AGA screens right now and we launch our art Department professional we saw how unbelievably fast that was that was so much faster than my 68040 it's it's truly noticeable just rescaling that image like I said might take a minute maybe even a minute and a half to watch it rescale here seconds done boom just like that displays the images just beautifully but then we launched image effects and we went into a mode where honestly ninety percent of you are never going to go into but the Amiga supports beautifully 1280 by 720 in 256 colors Believe It or Not Amiga supports it fine it's just you have to have like a in division MK3 or MK2 to display it on a modern monitor or you need a really wacky multi-sync monitor that'll sink like 17 kilohertz and 22 kilohertz 25 kilohertz then this plays fine amiga's always been able to support it but I did that intentionally to show you something interesting many of you have heard that chip Ram access on the pie storms is slower than a native Amiga and it's true it just is whether it's ECS chipset or AGA it can't pull the data back and forth fast enough and so access to chip Ram is slower and what we're seeing from what from what I can tell what we're seeing is the result of that when we deal with high color screens you're going to see this even at 640 by 480 and 256 colors and I'm working on a second video where we're going to do some comparisons and and see just uh just just where it is but Kevin and Quattro and I from hold and modify did a couple of tests playing back some uh AGA videos and seeing the difference in speed between like a 60 to 40 and a 60 to 60 in the pie storm and the results that we're seeing are when you use higher color especially ham 8 on a pie storm it's going to be slower than if you were running on a honestly almost slower than running it on a 68 or 20 with a lot of memory but it's certainly a lot slower than a 68040. those screen redraws we saw right there where image effects was was refreshing the screen one little panel at a time yeah 1280 by 720 256 color even on a 68 or 60 is not blazingly fast it is noticeably slow but it's two to three times faster than what we're seeing on there even on my 68 or 40 and we're going to do a follow-up video just to show the the performance difference now does this make it bad absolutely not they've been enhancing this the entire time and it's getting better all the time and I've been in touch with the developers and they have a theory about why that's happening but I need to let you know it does happen if you're planning on getting this and doing because you want to do big AGA animations and things like that this isn't the right product get yourself a 68 or 60 you will have better performance with high color AGA modes if you're doing what I'm doing editing photographs even high color photographs because I don't need the redraw to be fast I just need to be able to see the image unbelievably fast incredibly fast now there's something we can do to improve things and make this blazingly fast even in High color modes and that is activate retargetable graphics on the machine this supports retargetable Graphics beautifully now let's talk about how we do that you're going to need two different things to get RTG graphics working on your Pi storm and it's so incredibly easy now I put this on my compact flash card this is just a 64 megabyte compact flash card I use it for a little basic data transfer I downloaded both of these on my PC and I copied them right over Picasso 96 our friend Jens from Individual computers still sells a brand new copy of this you can pick it up for like seven bucks and it's a nice updated copy or the free version that's still on Amy net still works fine I'll have links to both in the description and then you need this file emu68-vc4 this is something that's available from a link it's a Google Drive link that I will put in the description okay first of all let's go ahead and install Picasso 96 we're going to go through and install of it so let's uh copy that over to my downloads and we're going to decompress Picasso 96 lha E I couldn't tell you how many times I've forgotten to put the e in there now when it's done let's go ahead and launch the installer the cost of 96 install set up okay we're going to go through we're going to do we're going to say it's a first install just so we can pretend like we're doing it uh from scratch intermediate user now here where it asks you um we don't want to read you can choose literally any of these video cards here because we're just going to change the name of it we're just going to install it pretending we have a Picasso 4 card and in a minute we're going to change the name accept the defaults there yes yes yes yes yes all the defaults and it's now installing Picasso 96 again accepting all the defaults and just telling it that I'm using a that specific video card and we don't need to reboot quite yet second thing is we want to find the second bit of code that we have right there that's the Dot card file what we want to do with this is we want to put this in the lives folder now you can use Directory Opus you can do it from a command prompt or what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go to the workbench unhide all the folders we're going to look at lives inside of the lives folder here you see this one called Picasso 96 this is where all the different drivers for the different network or video cards go we're just going to copy mu 68-vc4 Dot card into lives Picasso 96 and again copy that over any way that you want to then you're going to go into your workbench again we're going to take a look at devs we're going to take a look at monitors and you're going to see that there's this Picasso 4 monitor that exists right here and we're not using a Picasso for so we're going to click it we're going to go to information icon board type Picasso 4 guess what we're going to change that to we're going to change that to we change that to the e m u six eight Dash v c 4. now notice we don't have to put card on the end of it and that's okay so we're just telling it which of those files to look at we're going to save that and then we can rename this if we want to right now it's labeled Picasso 4 but we know it's not a Picasso 4. we're going to go ahead and rename that to Pi RTG now we're going to reboot and carry on with setting up the retargetable graphics so when we reboot we need to set up RTG Graphics modes these are not preset go into prefs go into Picasso 96 mode you notice it says it can't find any modes that's fine we're going to go ahead and this icon here we're going to drag this down right to here and we're going to give it a name we're going to call this Pi RTG now we should get a message here um once we attach it to the board there a mode which is not suitable for this board has been found no boards 320 by 200 blah blah blah we want to erase all the modes that are not compatible and we're going to create our own so we've now deleted all of those modes that are not compatible what we have is a 640 by 400 mode and a 640 by 480 mode Let's Take a look and see if those actually work we're going to do true color 640 by 480 we're going to do test now I switch my input over to my Pi storms input and beautiful 640 by 480 24 bit but we do not just want silly little 640 by 480 modes we want additional modes how do we get our 800 by 600 and 1280x720 now pay close attention because this is not necessarily clear okay this little symbol here new item drag it down 640 by 480 active change this 800 by 600 okay that's a nice mode perfect now this is still highlighted drag this new item over to here 256 color chunky 256 color Let's test it test I'm switching my switch box 800 by 600 8-bit color we're going to do that for every mode we want you do this one time and everything's saved drag a new mode over this time High color mode perfect drag it over here you want to save it yes true color mode perfect we're going to drag another one over yes true color and Alpha beautiful we've now created 800 by 600 modes right here okay now we're going to do it again drag this down let's say you want to keep the aspect ratio good so 10 24 by 768. all right we've now created a new a new mode 1024x768 drag this here chunky mode 10 24x6 768 is it going to work yes it works absolutely beautifully push back do the same thing drag it over High color drag it over save true color drag it over save true color and Alpha perfect okay now we've got 640 by 480 800 by 600 1024 by 768 let's do a nice wide format mode I like 1280 by 720. nice high def but still not a horrible struggle try to get over here 256 color drag another one High color drag another one true color drag another one true Alpha okay not that difficult let's just make sure it works we're going to look at this uh true color mode here 1280 by 720 24 bit color guys this is not rocket science it's really not that hard to do okay now we're going to save these and we're going to reboot and we're going to see how our new modes work now you'll notice we're still in 640 by 400 in AGA modes we're going to go to prefs we're going to go to screen mode and look what's appeared here all of these mu 68k modes 1024x768 1280 by 720. let's look at that mode full 24 bit color click use and I'm going to switch my switch box because it's got a switch between the pi storm and look what we have here we have a 24-bit workbench beautifully fast incredibly fast as a matter of fact you know I'm going to bring this down to a 16 bit because for some reason it changes the color of workbench at 24 bit in a way I don't like I like this better yeah that looks better that's still a 16-bit workbench look how fast that is that is blazingly flipping fast full retargetable graphics on your Amiga we're going to launch Ad Pro we're going to bring up our picture again because I'm so unbelievably good looking okay let's go ahead and scale this down to 1280 by 720 that's going to really screw up the aspect ratio because that's not the aspect ratio we have here but again we're just having fun now we're going to see if we can render this in a Picasso mode here maybe 1280 by 720 16 million Colors Let's see what happens absolutely nothing does not like the Ad Pro Picasso saver that's fine okay we've reloaded the image we've rescaled it this time we're going to use one of the other renderers we're going to use the 8-Bit 1280 by 720. we're going to see how she looks execute see how fast that is much faster than AGA graphics and it still looks absolutely fantastic absolutely beautiful now can you still use all of the AGA modes on here absolutely so what have we learned here today well we've learned that Doug looks absolutely fantastic in a suit on his wedding day oh oh I guess my wife looked pretty good too but yeah Doug looked really good on his wedding day we learned that retargetable graphics on a pie storm is not that hard to do just follow the steps and you just have to follow him once and boom you've got modes 800 by 600 1024 by 68 1280 by 1024 1280 by 720. now I haven't tried like that the full high def like 1920 by 1080. I honestly haven't tried it it might work I don't know we should probably try it but it's easy to set up we also learned that workbench in 24 bit mode looks a little strange it changes the colors and on mine and I don't know why but going into 16-bit mode which is 65 000 colors looks perfect we find that rendering with a program like our department professional to those High color modes works great I've also done it in image effects Works fantastic now can other programs load up on retargetable Graphics absolutely a program like new mode or mode Pro they work great they take standard Amiga programs and they launch right in retargetable graphics windows for example if you look over my shoulder here let's go to prorite we're going to launch Pro right now normally pro-rite's going to launch right on a standard Amiga screen is a test but we can use a program like mode Pro or new mode to tell it to launch into retargetable Graphics now watch what happens now that I have new mode up on this uh configured on here when we launch Pro right new mode asks us if we want to promote the screen sure we want to use prorite in 1024 by 768 in 16-bit color so I just choose that choose that I'm going to tell just to use it this time and not save it 10 24 by 768 in 16-bit color prorite is now incredibly small and hard to read but you get the point a lot of Amiga programs will work fine and retargetable graphic some paint programs like personal paint which I've done a review on right there also work okay with retargetable graphics you see this is launched into a standard Amiga AGA Graphics mode but I can tell it to go into any mode that I want to we're going to go to image format uh we're gonna go to a nice 800 by 600 mode here 800 by 600 8-bit in theory it should Now open up on an 800 by 600 RTG screen works fine no the monitor is not crooked that's just the angle I'm at but it works okay pretty cool huh so what did we learn today Pi storm easy to purchase from a trusted vendor like Amiga kit getting an actual Raspberry Pi a little more difficult but get put yourself on a waiting list you can get one get a 3A plus if you can get it because they're nice and small nice and small getting a pi 3B works too although they're bigger it's a tighter fit but it does work the pot Raspberry Pi 4 there's a new version of mu68k that does work with the pi 4 it's incredibly fast a little bit buggier I'd wait a little while and and make sure they get all the little kinks worked out if you're doing processor intense things let's say you're rendering LightWave 3D images oh my goodness this thing is an absolute miracle if you're like me you're using image effects you're using an art Department professional or some other big Graphics program whether it uses retargetable Graphics or not the speed boost is phenomenal hard drive access is incredibly fast using the virtualized hard drive and the SD card retargetable Graphics pretty good not perfect but pretty good what I find is sometimes when I switch to retargetable Graphics mode with programs they'll get stuck you go to exit out of it and it doesn't exit out and you're stuck and you have to reboot there's some Kinks that need to be worked out with the retargetable graphics mode but it mostly works and it is fantastic for the price when you go to use full AGA screens with full AGA performance ham 8 256 color the pi storm is slower than a lot of other accelerators probably won't always be slower but today with the downloads you can get it's slower it just is a lot slower like I said I'm gonna do a video with some comparisons from 68040 running at 40 megahertz and the pi storm Pi storm is going to eat its lunch when it comes to processor intensive tasks the 68040 is going to be the big winner when it comes to manipulating AGA screens it's just a fact of life right now how does the pie storm work with games you guys know I'm not a huge gamer but I love games and I use my Amiga 1200 as my main gaming system well that is a good question it works pretty well with games I find 50 60 of whd load games I try just work right off the bat the other 40 percent you have to tweak it there's some cash settings you have to do and I'm going to put some links in the description for both the Discord server and the Facebook page where they talk about some of the the cache settings you have to do to get the games to work but don't expect to go from a 68 or 30 50 megahertz accelerator and your Amiga 1200 to putting a pie storm in there and going wow all my games are working so much better they're fantastic you're going to go huh why do half my game suddenly not work unless I go in and tweak this and change that and alter this and reconfigure that and is that really what you want to do you don't need a CPU this fast to play video games what you need is fast access to the AGA chipset which the pi storm doesn't do so it's not really something I'd recommend if you're using it for gaming stick to a regular accelerator for gaming if you're doing the kind of stuff I do PI storm all the way it's fantastic huge thanks to my wonderful fantastic patrons love you guys you can see them scrolling over this uh this this beautiful image of a of a couple deeply in love getting married almost five years ago uh boy what a handsome couple they are and modest incredibly modest but if you'd like to join in that patreon fun pop on over to my patreon site and sign up thanks for joining me today please like And subscribe follow me on all the social media channels uh please comment below and rip me a new one telling me how wrong I am about the performance on the pie storm and that actually it's like God's gift to Amigas guys vampires work better than a pie storm fact of life guys 680 60 accelerators in many ways work better than a pie storm what the pi storm has is price you know less than a hundred bucks man you've gotten a retargetable graphics fast hard drive you know yeah absolutely but don't let them fool you when they say oh this is a Vampire killer oh this is a 68 or 60 killer it's not necessarily it's different it has different strengths but please rip me apart in the comments below about it I love it but until next time this is Doug from 10 minute Amiga retrocast signing out to go lose 15 pounds so I can fit back in that darn suit again

Channel: 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast

Views: 17,869

Keywords: Amiga, Commodore Amiga, Retro Computers, Retro Computing, A500, A1000, A2000, A1200, A600, PiStorm, EMU68K

Id: 04Ra86PE5Cs

Length: 62min 46sec (3766 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2023