PiStorm - The evolution of an open source Amiga accelerator - FOSDEM 2024

This is the talk I gave about PiStorm for the Amiga at FOSDEM 2024.
Video recorded by FOSDEM and shared by them under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium Licence.
Details available at fosdem.org/2024/schedule/even...

[@StooCambridgeArtist]

PiStorm = Cool! Great video and thank you so much for the shout out at the beginning. Appreciate the kind words and the praise for my work. 🙏😎

[@poggs]

Excellent presentation sir! I have a PiStorm on its way for my A1200

[@JoeBlogs720]

Didnt use mine for a while as it had a lot of issues, I recently put it back in my A500 and I'm amazed, choice of coffin or caffeine os, now with wifi, I'm blown away.

[@cheater00]

man, haven't seen you in 15 years. i see you've been busy with some really good stuff!

[@NigelsWorkbench]

Great presentation Andrew 😊

[@dlma7196]

Thank you, very educating video. I'll share this with the local AMIGA club. 👍🤠

[@ChrisMcNeely]

wow

[@AndrewRoberts11]

Any plans for Emu68 to fork and incorporate the WiFi code and Pi drivers, of the RISC OS Open project?

[@linuxjedivideo]

As of about a month ago, Emu68 added beta WiFi support. The RISC OS Open code would likely not be compatible because the init and driver is entirely on the 68K side talking to the hardware, written using Amiga's libraries.

[@josephphillips9243]

Nice simple explanation that, thank you. Ooh that trapdoor. Can you please share the link to it? Just another quick one, following on from one of the questions asked. What else can the Pistorm32-Lite do, HDMI, WiFi connectivity?

[@linuxjedivideo]

Sure, the trapdoor STL can be found here: www.thingiverse.com/thing:5980829 The Pi from the PiStorm32-Lite adds RAM, disk and HDMI (via an RTG driver) for now. A prototype pass-through video device exists right now to put the Amiga AGA graphics into the Pi's camera port to show on the HDMI too. No WiFi or USB yet, but I do know WiFi is being worked on. It also loads any Kickstart ROM file you want from the SD card to boot from. Michal's Patreon feed covers the software/driver development side quite well: www.patreon.com/michal_schulz

[@josephphillips9243]

@@linuxjedivideo Thank you very much. I like the way you presented. I hope you will do further video for significant updates

[@gigo41astic]

thanks !

[@fischX]

Would be interesting to run aros on the pi with an ABI passthrough to AmigaOS

[@linuxjedivideo]

That can probably be done using Musashi. We do something similar to access the Pi's Linux CLI from the Amiga.

[@slowlymakingsmoke]

Enjoyed that Andrew. Keep up the great work.

[@NovaTheCoderVideos]

Always nice to see one of my old ports running well 😊 Have you tried to run dosbox RTG yet with a game iso mounted? Also, any plans to support CAMD?

[@linuxjedivideo]

I didn't know DOSBox_RTG was a thing, but taking a quick look, it should run extremely well. As for CAMD, I don't think there are plans right now. That isn't to say there is opposition to doing it, but things like WiFi and USB drivers are a higher priority. It is open source, so you are welcome to contribute patches to support this.

[@RobSmithDev]

Very interesting! I’d love to hear a more in-depth talk at some point but i understand that’s not for everyone

[@linuxjedivideo]

This is a cut down talk of a much longer one I planned to give at the RMC Cave last year, but it didn't work out. Hopefully we will make that happen soon.

[@JohnSmith-iu8cj]

Very interesting! I feel like in the end you could have talked for at least another hour and it wouldn’t have stopped being interesting 😉

[@linuxjedivideo]

Thank you. This is actually a cut-down version of a much longer talk I had planned to give at a museum last year (and would be on KZbin), but things didn't go to plan. Maybe later this year.

[@yorkan213swd6]

Any chance to run Amiga Unix with Pistorm 32 ?

[@linuxjedivideo]

I suspect the biggest issues are: 1. It might need an MMU (Amiga Linux does), and neither PiStorm implementation provides this. Although Musashi can have it with some minor code changes is. 2. It likely needs Unix specific SCSI drivers to talk to the SD card.

[@electronicsworkbench]

AVID - Amiga Video Injection Device NAVID - Native Amiga Video Injection Device

[@JohnnyReb1976]

Sources say that a JIT emulator, because of how it works inside, can't really implement a MMU.

[@linuxjedivideo]

It is definitely possible to do so. But the effort required is high, and the amount of things that really need it is very low (anything other than Linux?). It would also incur a performance hit, but that is true of 68000 MMUs anyway. I doubt it is a high priority for Michal.

[@dh2032]

what talk. And only getting 20 minutes, (I can not imagine, what following presentation was, to cut this one short )😞, its as close a getting new a amiga as its been in many year to date, as said in the video, with out any selling body parts, also it let amiga OS, it shine, it always from the start been left wanting in the hardware department, unless money wasn't problem, which was shame as as the same spec. amiga could out per form any mac with the same CPU and ram, cost many times most, the PC where still clunky dos prompts and with graphics, and sound card, a loan would be close to the hole asking price of an a basic amiga system, you did get mush more than dos prompt, and beep, bop sounds like something from the 70's

[@linuxjedivideo]

Unfortunately the way FOSDEM works is that a topic gets a room for either half a day or a full day, they can fit as many or as few talks as they want in it. But to make it fair to everyone, 20-25 minutes is pretty typical for a talk. To be fair, every other talk I saw in the Retrocomputing Devroom was great. Amiga OS is still developed today, which is great. My Amiga 1200 was running the latest 3.2 release.

[@Alphadec]

will never put a PI into any o my amiga computers. Period.

[@linuxjedivideo]

Then don't 🙂 It is not for everyone, and that is OK.

[@elmariachi5133]

PiStorm is good. But stil not happy, as long as ChipRAM performance is worse than the original.

[@linuxjedivideo]

There is a very long answer to that which in summary is "it depends, but that isn't always the case". But, does it really matter? There are very few things the current chip RAM performance impacts. Compatibility has been achieved with pretty much every game and demo that exists now.

[@YoutubeHandlesSuckBalls]

Just incredible that a £35 SBC is way more powerful than the best Amiga you could ever build. Essentially, the Amiga just becomes a hardware Amiga emulator plugged into the Pi.

[@TrimeshSZ]

It's not really that surprising - the 68k series stopped evolving architecturally back in 1984 when Motorola decided to refocus their efforts on PowerPC. If we lived in some alternate universe where the 68k architecture got another 3 decades of development as happened with x86 then by now we would have some incredibly fast 68k parts. I wonder what the 68k 64 bit extensions in this parallel universe would look like?