PIStorm - How it works

PIStorm has been one of the most interesting, and cheapest accelerators for the Amiga. So I figured it was finally time to look at it, and see how we got here and how it works.
This video is sponsored by PCBWay (www.pcbway.com)
00:00 - Introduction
00:50 - What inspired PI Storm (PI Tube )
04:38 - A Word from our sponsors
05:04 - PiTube Direct
06:07 - Bare metal PI
07:43 - Here comes the storm
09:34 - CPLDs pins and signals
12:19 - 68k on Linux
13:26 - Memory and crossing the clock domain
18:33 - RTG and other benifits
20:45 - Lets stick one in an A600
24:05 - FastRom mapping
25:11 - PiStorm32
27:03 - Emu68
30:00 - Thanks

[@fallous]

Yes, RetroBytes, THIS is why I subscribe.

[@Psythik]

Is it just me, or does this video feel incomplete? Right when it was getting started, it just suddenly ends! Dude spends all this time talking about the history of putting a Pi into an Amiga, and then just ends the video without doing so himself. I'm disappointed.

[@googlehomemini2059]

Damn straight! Love to you all in blighty from the antipodes!

[@randomfrequency]

This was genuinely the missing bits of information I wanted to know about the PiStorm, but also just accelerator cards for the Amiga in general. Kudos!

[@zh84]

We had the Z80 Second Processor on a BBC Micro in our computer lab at school, academic year 1987-8. There were three machines set up to work in CP/M: two Research Machines R380Zs, and the BBC with the Z80 attached.

[@TerribleFire]

Nice video. We did (and still do) try to keep the price of replacement original chip type accelerators low. But its a battle against chip availability as you say. PiStorm is a nice way to do this as it uses standard parts. Not my personal cup of tea but if we're going down the non-original CPU route this is my preferred option.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I must admit I have a couple of TF accelerators which I fujd are great, as I do like running stuff on orgianal Motorola chips, and 030s are still relatively easy to get hold of. Its the cost of 060 chips (and all the fakes) thats making it harder for me to go for an 060 in all the machines I would like to.

[@TerribleFire]

@@RetroBytesUK You can blame me for that. After the 1260 release the 060s went from £90 for a rev6 060 to £250 overnight.

[@ScandalUK]

@@TerribleFire no good deed and all that!

[@fuzzywzhe]

Please listen to me when I write this. I'm an electrical engineer, and although I don't work in the field, I'm trained as a VLSI designer, I.E. I was trained to make chips. This job sucks, and I'm glad I didn't stick with it, but I know the field. There's no difference between original hardware and a software simulator of the hardware, IF the hardware if fast enough. If I were to plug in a raspberry pi into say, a PS1 or an Amiga or SNES, and throw in a simulator into that, and do some tricks to get the NTSC output work and connect up all the original hardware to connect to the pi, you would NEVER KNOW THE DIFFERENCE between that, and the real thing. You might be able to detect it, if you hooked up a frame grabber, or checked color levels, or did extreme timing tests with external hardware, but you'd never be able to tell the by using the machines. There's no advantage to original hardware.

[@TerribleFire]

@@fuzzywzhe The difference is that i know its not original. Retro is all about nostalgia and I liken it to classic car collecting. Its irrelevant that you can or cannot tell the difference. EDIT: i'm also an electrical engineer trained in VLSI and have been designing accelerators for 7+ years.

[@utp216]

Algorithm or not I love your channel and the content you create!

[@drfrancintosh]

Hello Friend - I had missed the PiStorm when "everyone" was reviewing it 2 years ago. So this was a welcome review. I also learned about the differences between FPGA and CPLD. Very useful. I owned an Amiga 1000 when it first came out. While I miss it, I don't see myself going back to it. Still, learning about this emulator will inform other projects of my own. I continue to subscribe! Best wishes and Continued Success!

[@markusjuenemann]

I didn´t understand most of that (although I had an A500 and have a quite deep knowledge of AmigaDOS and AmigaOS), but I enjoyed it very much! Bright back so many lovely memories! Wish you (and all of your viewers!) and your family a nice Christmas and a happy new year!

[@Matt-kabob]

Merry Christmas! Thank you for your detailed videos.

[@Ihatebrexit]

This is brilliant! Goes into real detail about how and why 👍

[@coolest10293]

Extraordinary details into how things work and backstories to those things very much are why I subscribe!

[@ctid107]

Of all the retro channels out there, this is one i look forward to most. Thanks for another wonderful video - Happy Christmas and all the best for 2024 !

[@technickuk]

This is a really good overview with just the right amount of detail for me. Thanks RB!

[@OneBiOzZ]

Thank you very much for the technical explanations. This was an extraordinarily useful summary. Please keep this up.

[@10MARC]

Nice information on how this all works on the back end. Thanks for this!

[@RetrogradeScene]

Another fantastic video. So much detail but so easy to follow!!

[@ScottPlude]

Great video and a great sense of humor! I could watch videos from you that simply discussed grass growing! THANKS!

[@ninline2000]

Thanks for this video. It's always helpful to know the whys as well as the whats.

[@colday74]

Seeing as I got my first Amiga and Pistorm this past week.... seems to be absolutely up to date to me!

[@bldlst2k]

The first 20 seconds of commentary of this video reminded me why I subscribed to this channel, I love retro/computing history and this channel has been a gold mine of information. Anyway, great channel, and great to catch new content as it gets posted. Take that KZbin algorithm!

[@MegaManNeo]

It's very interesting to hear where that idea with the Pistorm originated from as no one else seems to cover it. Thanks!

[@IntenseGrid]

Excellent video. I really like your accent, and the deeper explanation of the technical details. I had no idea about the BBC Micro, but the tube port was quite a foresight for expandability, kind of like the decoupling of the CPU of the Amiga being somewhat decoupled from the graphics and audio, which is why we can upgrade the CPU way beyond what was envisioned. Your explanation of the GPIO pins vs CPU signals on the Amiga explains why we have Chip Memory speed limitations to some games and as reported in SysInfo4.4.

[@SprocketN]

Very interesting, clearly presented and obviously deeply researched. Thanks. I never felt the need to accelerate my Amigas, when PCs appeared that were faster I bought a PC, then another etc…

[@Stormbolter]

Thanks for the updated review! Back when the pistorm was doing the rounds, Amiga 600 support was not fully there yet, so I largely ignored it. Is good to know it got decent support, and all the new things!

[@MoreFunMakingIt]

I very much enjoyed that. And as well as being thoroughly entertained you filled in a few knowledge gaps. Great stuff John!

[@coolvideos8864]

Seriously love this channel! It goes more in depth that most retro channels which with me being a super nerd is very appreciative of lol

[@CubicleNate]

This was fantastic. Thank you for the history lesson and now I am back and forth between PiStorm and Vampire on what I want to do with my A600. I didn't know how disliked it was until recently. I always loved the little machine!

[@FireByTrialMedia]

Love the detailed videos! Totally why I'm here 😊

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

Well merry Xmas and a prosper new year. I always find this videos interesting even if I can't implement, still shows me how computing was in the other parts of the world.

[@johnmiller4859]

Excellent video. This is why I got interested in computers in the first place. The only downside is every time I see an Amiga video, I wish I had bought one all those years ago.

[@nysaea]

love the energy of your videos!

[@julianregel]

Brilliant video, thanks! Love your content.

[@zxrenew5642]

Brilliant again, have great Christmas buddy!

[@tinman7551]

Merry Christmas Retro Bytes 🥰😍❤️ I truly appreciate and enjoy your channel and I’m looking forward to seeing more content in 2024 🎉😊

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks that's nice of you to say.

[@phil2768]

Thanks. That was quite a deep dive. I had and A500 and A1200 but I never fully understood or appreciated how the hardware worked. I have an A1200 now (and am looking to get an A600 of a mate). I might kickstart my youth again 😊

[@matthewfranklin7541]

Happy Christmas!!

[@brufnus]

Now some of us (myself included) are running a dual boot Emu68 and Musashi on the same sd card, giving the best of both worlds right at the finger tip. A script on each allows for an easy reconfig and reboot into the other. That's working great!

[@saeidyazdani]

wow a very well made and informative video :) thanks!

[@Eremon1]

I love the communities that come up with this stuff. Being Canadian, the BBC Micro is not something I'm too familiar with. It's always nice to hear about folks saving and using older hardware. Cheers.

[@jeffreyjoshuarollin9554]

Great video, as always.

[@proteque]

oh wow. you explained the way the Amiga use accelerators, memory etc very thoroughly and for once on youtube: correct! I am impressed! :) Thanx!

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

Lovely job, John.

[@user-wg3fe3ij2o]

I came for the background jazz music 🎷 and stayed for the technobabble.

[@tYNS]

Great Explanation!

[@stephenwhite506]

The genius of the software running on the Pi is that it maps the Amiga side of the memory map to a page in the Pi's memory that will cause a page fault when accessed. This way, it doesn't need to compare every address access in software to determine if it is on the Amiga side or the Pi side, the Pi's MMU will do it in hardware. The page fault handler can then simply perform the communication with the Pi's GPIO and the FPGA/CPLD to process the 7/14MHz bus cycle. PiStorm is continuously evolving. There are some exciting enhancements in progress based around a version that uses a CM4 Pi. The CM4 has many more GPIOs available. The Amiga's digital signals from Lisa and Paula can be piped over the HDMI is one such example.

[@a500]

To answer the question posed in the first minute: Yes, yes, this is exactly why I am subscribed :-)

[@halikstears6307]

0:55: Yes, Retro, that is EXACTLY why I subscribed.

[@AFourEyedGeek]

I had to replay the section around 22:00 as I stopped listening because I was in shock at how cack handed opening of the unit that was. Put a towel on the surface of the tabel so you don't scratch the front. Great video, I really enjoyed it.

[@DFX2KX]

Having never touched an Amiga, I had no idea how those accelerator cards worked. This was a neat watch.

[@djksfhakhaks]

I love the comedic take on the hardware from my childhood. It was frustrating back then, now it just seems stupid that we put up with it. Best channel ever!!!

[@maxxdahl6062]

Hell I'd take an A600 if only to just have an amiga again. But other than that happy with my amiga mini I made with a pi 400 + amiga forever.

[@3rdalbum]

If it gives you any comfort, I don't think I had heard of the PiStorm before. I'm not a Commodore fan, but even if I was and had heard of this I certainly would have watched your video because your presentation style is great.

[@catriona_drummond]

there are only few things more heartwarming than an Amiga 600 with the protection film over the Logo still present.

[@philharris9631]

Just popped on here to say that this video was absolutely superbly targeted ... it had information over and above every other PiStorm video that I've seen. Absolutely fantastic! I really hope that you are proud of this one - you should be!

[@albinekb]

Great video! The algorithm worked, brought me here!

[@Palooka37]

Man, I've always been slightly mystified about how Amiga accelerator cards worked, even after following the PiStorm with some interest. Thanks for the clarity!

[@davidblackuk]

flippin awesome

[@foobar9761]

Your videos are great! Thanks! - from a fellow nerd to another

[@Carstuff111]

Nerd stuff? On this channel? Why, never thought to see the day!..... Seriously, this channel rocks, and even in my middle age I refuse to stop learning what I can, when I can. You post awesome stuff, and I keep returning!

[@computer_toucher]

Yes. That is why I subscribed.

[@Born2Rune]

Fascinating insight into the beginnings of the PiStorm. It still amazes me how ahead of its time the BBC Micro really was. My primary school had two, but we really never got to tinker with it as the teachers did not really know how to use it properly. I wonder if that was the case for a lot of other schools?.

[@unsaltedskies]

FWIW I can confirm this was my personal experience too. I do recall playing a boat racing game which may have been called "Rapids". Beyond this I didn't use a BBC Micro until a vintage computer fare where I wrote a simple BASIC program.

[@anusblaster8671]

Pretty much the same. They were around, but not used much. Not really acceptable, the amount of tax went into buying them, they should have been used constantly untill the letters wore off the keys.

[@philharris9631]

Whereas we had a couple of really good math and science teachers who ran break/lunchtime and out of hours computer sessions for any of the kids who were interested and just encouraged us to get involved … if all you wanted to do was play games then fine but a number of us were doing programming in assembler too.

[@anusblaster8671]

If a teacher said I could stay after hours to use the computers, I would have been so happy, waking up, excited to go to school. But, nope, they made it boring, and I hated every second of it.@@philharris9631

[@KKC78]

I purchase a PiStorm with Pi 3 A+ from Spain for my A1200. I'm waiting very exited to connect that monster inside my Amiga!

[@drunken1079]

Hey ! thanks for the nice Video. Certainly will point people to it when I need to explain PiStorm ! Just a small correction, the inspiration for PiStorm I got actually from the Musashi 68000 C Emulator and a bit of boredom. At one point I wondered if I can emulate with Musashi a hardware CPU in a target system :)

[@karlosh9286]

I'm impressed. That's one lot of work, and excellent video too. I have to admit there is part of me wondering why not just do the Amiga emulation on the raspberry pi, like the RetroPie games stuff does , but I guess the hardware side has an enjoyment of it's own. I'm remember the early 1980s home microcomputer era well, with me being a secondary school boy geek who nagged his Dad for a micro. I got a Dragon 32, the BBC was too much money for my Dad. Unfortunately the Dragon got lost in one of my house moves, I think it got left in a loft, and I only realised it a real lot later ! I'd love to have a play with that again ...

[@KipIngram]

Oh, BareMetal Py sounds really cool - I ought to look into that.

[@IainShepherd1]

Top stuff. just the right level of detail for me. Really in awe of the hardware hackers and emulator devs.

[@edgarskarklins3572]

Wery informative video, much appriciated. Far more value than unpacking "look, I bought this shiny thing"... And thank you for sharing info about bare metal Pi. Im planing a home lab - power supply, signal generator, other bits and bobs in one 19" rackmount case. I havent decided, but leaning towards radpbery. Making my own snappy software would be better than waiting for linux to boot. Ok, waching cat videos on a lab power dupply/signal generator is useful, but a bit oferhead...

[@ScottPlude]

Thanks!

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks Scott, thats very kind of you.

[@MichalSchulz]

Thanks for the video! Although I have enjoyed it there are few more or less incorrect things:) first of all in the introduction on bare metal you have mentioned some libraries which can be used - Emu68 does not use any of them. There are only two libraries in use - one to decompress the firmware on pistorm32, another one is capstone used during debugging to disassemble arm and m68k code. Then you wrote about hard drives on Emu68. Well, this one is at the same time simpler then you have described it and way harder. Emu68 has absolutely no knowledge about that. It’s great advantage and power is that it exposes entire raspberry pi hardware to AmigaOS. What you see as a hard drive is an AmigaOS driver (written by me) running on m68k side and accessing raspberry’s microSD controller :) so, easier for Emu68 since the only thing it knows is arm cpu and gpio, but was harder for me as I have to write all drivers by myself

[@RetroBytesUK]

On the HD front I think it fits the broader point I was making, that someone has to write the code to drive the HW directly to access storage. There is no OS routine, that can just be used that abstracts out the hw, its a much harder road to walk than faking a basic block storage controller and calling fopen, fread, fwrite to do all the work on storing it. I assume there must still be exposed device on the pi side of things that your code is using the access the pis hw. I take it your code provides an alterative to scsi.device thats deals with spi its self then.

[@RetroBytesUK]

The library I mentioned at the beging is in use for pi tube direct, which is what I ment at that point. Re-using the term baremetal pi, to also mean just targeting the hw directly (baremetal) was probably not the best choice on my behalf however. As i did create a situation where I could be easliy miscontruded when it came to emu68. Sorry for the clumsy turn of phrase there. I must admit I also had thought the driver project was part and parcel of the emu68 project. So thanks for pointing that out.

[@MichalSchulz]

@@RetroBytesUK only one thing is done on pi side - mmu mapping which exposes the entire MMIO space of raspberry (all peripherals) within 32bit address space. The rest is done on m68k side - basically the device driver which follows the same protocol (API) as any other driver. Thanks to that AmigaOS can communicate with it as with any other hard drive, no arm involved. Still, it is not Emu68 code anymore.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Also thanks for the work on the driver much appreciated.

[@MichalSchulz]

@@RetroBytesUK you are welcome! I must admit the entire Emu68, the way it evolved from my initial idea, is a great journey and I feel absolutely happy hearing that so many people are using it :) when started I never expected it to be where it is today :)

[@danielktdoranie]

I have one in my A500 and my A1200. Caffeine OS is great and updates over the internet

[@CoLD.SToRAGE]

Never expected to see WipEout appear in an AMIGA video. 😊 🚀

[@thimblebirb]

ima be honest i liked the images and the other stuff but didnt understand one bit of it. great video! (take this, algorithm)

[@tiberiusbrain]

I also dont know how or why the allmighty algorithm referred me here, but i am glad it did, my man. Take care in 2024 as well!!! Loved the vid about the dec company. Love those great tech tales, as well as some explanation as to how things work. One that really interested me was the elite video, as i am an elite dangerous player. So yeah, i guess the algorithm DOES understand why you deserve referring, sometimes at least! It IS why i am here

[@nickhenning]

Networking on the A1200 with EMU68 is pretty straight forward with a PCMCIA network card, but these are getting rare and expensive. Until a bare-metal network driver arrives, the best modern solution I've found for adding Wireless networking to a Pistorm/EMU68 setup is to use a A314-cp board with a Raspberry Pi zero W. It plugs into the clock port and gives you an FTP based file transfer device over WIFI with a shared disk between the RPi Zeros SD card and the Amiga. It can also be used as a standard SANA-II network card for Internet access. It's quite fast as well - certainly good enough for 'Amiga-style' net surfing.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I suspect exposing the raw ethernet device is the easiest to achieve and get working. As they could very thinly wrap the physical device so its addressable by the emulated 68k, then its a case of creating a SANA-II driver, like you would for other ethernet cards. As the reset of the networking stack exists in Amiga OS nobody would need to write that again. Wifi would be a whole different keetle of fish as you would need the wrieless stack, including all the WPA suplicant stuff.

[@rdc-ts9gp]

64k subs 😊

[@greatquux]

Nice video! I wonder what else is remaining for the actual Amiga to do if the PiStorm is doing all this!

[@RetroBytesUK]

There is still a fair bit, the original gfx/sound custom chips are still in use for most games. All the original input devices, keyboard, mouse, and joystick are all still in use. You also still have the abilitiy to use orginal floppy disks and drives.

[@gumbi79]

top content

[@BleughBleugh]

Gained a sub! Thankyou :-)

[@DarkestVampire92]

I'm still hoping that someday soon, Pistorm will be good enough to actively allow the Amiga to make use of the ARM processor rather than emulating a much, much older processor badly. Aka, instead of getting an 8mhz, 16 mhz or 28mhz chipset emulated, you can get a 1500mhz chipset to run classic movies on your Amiga, or have CD-quality audio running in your classic games, or even commit heresy and have Windows 95 era games running on an Amiga 500.

[@semicuriosity257]

PiStorm doesn't fully emulate 68000 since the Amiga doesn't fully use 68000's features e.g. bus error handling. A separate PiStorm branch needs to be developed for 68K Mac and Atari ST.

[@LemaruX]

There already is one for the Atari

[@linuxjedivideo]

That is true for the original PiStorm (although there are plans to make this more universal in general, as it solves Amiga problems too). For the PiStorm32-Lite, the entire bus is implemented, the Verilog was basically redone from scratch.

[@semicuriosity257]

@@LemaruX The PiStormSTE version is still a work in progress. Atari uses FC lines and depends heavily upon bus arbitration and interrupts. The Atari version doesn't have Amiga's fast Emu68. PiStorm32 Lite is a separate development and uses Efinix FPGA. PiStorm32 is canceled due to PCIe latency.

[@LemaruX]

@@semicuriosity257 I am well aware that the Atari development is still in development. You said a branch is needed for the Atari, and I just pointed out that there already is one. And no, PiStorm32 is not cancelled. The PCIe latency issue is related to the Raspberry Pi 5, NOT the PiStorm32

[@semicuriosity257]

@@LemaruX From Claude Schwarz @Claude1079 Sep 30 _Did some experiments on CM4. Doing timed mmio reads from a PCIe Gen2 controller memory BAR region._ _Yeah looks like the internet is right, PCIe mmio latency is high. ~1.3us , average access time over 1 million reads. Meh_

[@PCBWay]

Happy New Year, everyone here 🥳

[@Lucretia9000]

The 68020 on the A1200 has a 24-bit address bus, but the trapdoor exposes a 32-bit address bus.

[@semicuriosity257]

A1200's built-in CPU is 68EC020 which has a 24-bit address bus. The trap door's 24-bit or 32-bit address capability is based on the active host 68K CPU.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I did decide to gloss over that detail a little, as I did not want to make the video longer, and I thought it might confuse poeple trying to explain how the slot does allow for 32bit addressing, yet as part of the cost reduction in the ec version of the 68020 there is not the 32 address pins. The main bit I was hoping to get across was the increase in the number of address lines pi storm 32 had to deal with.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Thanks for rasing it in the comments section, as for those interested in that level of detail its usful to know.

[@MichalSchulz]

The trapdoor exposes 32 bits of address bus, but the topmost 8 bits are free floating on a1200 board

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@MichalSchulz Yes there is nothing inside the A1200 that lives in the part of the address space as the ec version of the 68020 could not address it.

[@michaelgutierrez8072]

Good video. I miss the background music though :D

[@HokusaiXL]

So I have an A600HD, and this makes me want to play with the piStorm. Before I thought it was moving more or less all of the hardware to the pi, but just being a CPU/Ram emulator makes a bit more sense. I love the original quirks of the amiga, and I don't want to get deep into the rabbit hole of full on emulation.

[@csolisr]

It's hilarious to see old devices using add-ons that can viably emulate the entire device they're accelerating a hundred times faster than normal.

[@billymania11]

A good video on the PiStorm. I had no idea how complex the story was. It took a lot of dedicated people to bring us this far. At some point, the original hardware will impossible to obtain. We'll be left running a complete emulation on a PC or on an FPGA. I prefer the FPGA approach. I guess that would be the Vampire V4 right?

[@RetroBytesUK]

Indeed it would be. The v4 standalone does not need any original amiga bits. There is a v4 based accelerator for the A1200 called ice drake.

[@FlavioVillanustre]

Or a MiSTer, if you want to have the CPU reimplemented in the FPGA, or a minimig, if you'd rather have a real 68080 in there. Quite a few options, actually!

[@binarydinosaurs]

Blipverts eh? :D One of which said 'media offline' but I'm not quick with the pause feature while sat in bed. Top stuff though mate, I've often wondered how PiStorm worked.

[@RetroBytesUK]

As one or two people have mentioned it, I went crawling through to spot where it was. It looks to be a rendering problem I did not spot. In the editor the media is there, and the frame is correct with the media there, in the rendered output there is a big red media missing error. No idea how davinci managed that one.

[@benkeeling1935]

WROCC man here too 😂

[@DatBlueHusky]

thank god for the pistorm, it has changed the community on amigas and make stuff finally affordable, also will be demise of vampire eventually

[@RetroBytesUK]

The vampire started off with similar goals to make a cheap accelerator, and for a while the Vampire 2 for the A600 was relatively cheap its just the price of FPGAs moved significantly on them. So they where left with a choice of just stop, or target performance, and go with the rising costs. They chose to keep going. It does mean for those that can afford it there is a premium high performance option, and there is a much more affordable option in the form of the pistorm for the reset of us, which while not quiet hitting the vampires performance level does let us do things that where unobtainable to us back in the day. It would be nice if the two projects could co-operate and standardise AMMX so pistorm could implement that extension to the CPU too.

[@cpt_bill366]

I have always been a big fan of Wipeout, and I had no idea it was ever on the Amiga. I would love to see a side by side comparison with the original PlayStation. I have always lived in the US, and I didn't know the Amiga existed until I was an adult.

[@RetroBytesUK]

The HW requirements for the amiga version are so incredibly high hardly anyone could run it. As you needed a PPC accelerator, and a 3d acceleratored RTG card that was supported by a particular 3d library. So it was the nitch, of the nitch, of the nitch. I have finally got the right 3d card, but the case pyhisically gets in the way of me fitting it, so I prpbably need to make a relocator board, assuming I can find the connector it uses.

[@philharris9631]

I worked on the original PlayStation version of Wipeout (and the subsequent versions)… at the time I was doing a lot of work for Psygnosis and was handling the translation of their (natively English) games into foreign languages including all the audio assets used in the games.

[@johansmolinski]

Came here for the yes or no. Stayed here for the why and how.

[@sicnemelpor]

Do you know of project "Ultibo", Raspberry PI Bare-metal application developing based on FPC/Freepascal (Lazarus)? You can use almos all Object Pascal functions (filesystem also) directly on you programs without using an OS. There is some CP/M emulators already.

[@AndrewRoberts11]

The PiStorm32 Emu68 could always borrow / be inspired by Acorn's / RiscOS Open's, almost bare metal, IPv4 stack, and drivers. They've been supported on all flavours of the Pi, for a decade. The code, in part, dates back to the late 1980s.

[@RetroBytesUK]

For driving the ethernet port, borrowing the code from risc os would work, saddly risc os has no wifi support to borrow from. I think utilising the IP stack from risc os would prove tricky, as while its a good ip stack targetting arm, it would need to run of the Amiga OS side of the stack so amiga apps can make use of it

[@AndrewRoberts11]

@@RetroBytesUK From Feb 2022 - "First steps to Wifi released yielding increased SD performance: RISC OS Developments are pleased to announce the release of the first steps towards Wifi on RISC OS - updated SDIO drivers for most platforms making the on-board wifi chips visible/accessible." From Dec 2023: "ROD TCP/IP Stack 7.04 released: We are pleased to announce the release of v7.04 of the ROD TCP/IP stack supporting IPv6 and many other modern network technologies." If you read the announcement, they hint the WiFi drivers, for the new Stack, will follow in the New Year. So there's a bare metal, ARM optimised, Apache licensed, C source solution, that can configure and create an abstraction for the PI's and several other ethernet/wiFi adaptors, there's code that creates a virtual RISC OS network adaptor, with communication likely handled through a couple of Words, in a flat 32-bit, common memory model, on setting / handling a few interrupts. There's a new IPv6 RISC OS network stack, that adds all the layers atop what it picks up / sets in a couple of words, on an interrupt being handled or set, using no more than C and its standard libraries, in a simple, flat, common, 32 bit memory map. I'd at the very least have a trawl of the source, for inspiration, if tasked with doing almost the exact same thing, in a very similar architecture, but the application layer in 680x0, and hooked into Emu68.

[@retroattic4647]

Thanks for filling in the blanks. Given this detailed description..... Why not just emulate the entire thing on a pi with the PiMega project? I mean the PiStorm basically regulates the Amiga to a keyboard controller and a power supply with nearly everything else running on the pi.

[@RetroBytesUK]

The orginial chip set is in use for none rtg graphics, orginal peripherals works, like joysticks, and on machines that are not the A600 lots of other hw expansions. You can also use your orignal floppy disks.

[@linuxjedivideo]

The only emulated part is the CPU. The rest (RTG and hard disk) is direct drivers to the underlying Pi hardware. The entire Amiga chipset is used as normal.

[@EdgeOfPanic]

@@linuxjedivideo This is a 100% accurate statement 🙂

[@linuxjedivideo]

​@@EdgeOfPanic I know, I'm one of the PiStorm community admins and was a developer of the legacy Linux based PiStorm code 😊

[@briankleinschmidt3664]

Like this. Drink a pot of coffee then go to bed. When you wake up, you will have one.

[@johnm9263]

the specs of even the first pi, i heard it can do up to 16MHz per GPIO pin, but thats also limited by the processing speed of the processor, so you likely cant send 16 individual messages at 16MHz due to software limitations under out of the box situations so at 2MHz, it might SOUND doable (you have a full 14 more MHz, right?) its actually a lot harder, because it cant send out a signal that currently doesnt exist, and it cant read a signal if its too busy to even listen for it thats why RetroBytes mentioned the "bare metal" firmware/software for the pi, it cuts out a lot of the bloat that isnt necessary to get it to do the specific task its supposed to do

[@hotrodhunk7389]

That's what I like to call cursed computing. Like the time I use WSL and Kalli Linux to SSH into a server that was hosting a free BSD VM using x11 forwarding. Does it work? Yes. Is it cursed also yes.

[@AndersHolck]

Need to investigate more but Im still looking for Pistorm for my A4000. I wonder if it will ever happen. :(

[@zxspectrum16K69]

2nd greatest after the zx spectrum!

[@anss321]

If the PiStorm handles the ram, rom, storage, display and CPU, it's basically doing everything. The A600 is reduced to being a keyboard and floppy disk add-on. In other words, is it really an accelerator? To me it seems to be a separate system that happens to be attached to an Amiga.

[@AmigaFanatic1980]

It doesn't handle native chipset features i.e graphics, sound, pcmcia etc

[@anss321]

@@AmigaFanatic1980 It's says in the video that it handles graphics. Sound presumably can also be piped out the HDMI port, meaning it has to handle that too, and pcmcia is hardly a big feature. If you take a Pi running Pimiga and put it in a A600 case (with the keyboard, floppy and USB to PCMCIA slot hooked up), what would be the big difference to the user?

[@AmigaFanatic1980]

​@@anss321 unless the piStorm works differently to the piStorm32, it only handles RTG graphics & retargetable audio not native chipset graphics or audio which almost every Amiga game would use. Later life games and productivity programs benefit from the pistorms raw power and high resolution RTG graphics, but no "classic" software

[@anss321]

@@AmigaFanatic1980 So you're saying that software that benefits from the PiStorm doesn't use the original Amiga hardware, while classic software basically runs on the Amiga, with PiStorm doing CPU stuff, or is the original CPU used then too? To me it still seems like the PiStorm is a separate computer. All it lacks is some peripherals, and it could be a standalone thing. But at least if Classic software benefits from the CPU acceleration, it accelerates something.

[@AmigaFanatic1980]

​@@anss321 basically their are 2 environments that can be ran on the piStorm, Emu68, which essentially makes the pi a pure 68k CPU emulator, but does give basic RTG and Audio and booting via the uSD slot at many times the speed of the onboard IDE, so classic games and software reliant on the underlying system hardware get no improvement (maybe in loading from hardrive), but it massively improves on many later life Amiga games/PC Ports/ Productivity apps performance (& Workbench) where the CPU became a bottle neck - for example Dark Forces has been recently ported to the Amiga, even with a high over clocked 68060 you may get in the mid 20s for fame rate, but even a pi3b pushes it to a practically locked 50fps I believe. I don't know if it's for pistorm32 only but there is also an environment called Musashi which I believe emulates more of the Amiga chipset but is nowhere near as fast in CPU terms.

[@kelvin1316]

The A600 price is how I managed to get my Dad to buy me the A1200 LOL

[@benholroyd5221]

I had one of those BBC add on boxes. That was a hard drive though. Don't ask me the capacity.