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

[@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. 🙏😎

[@cheater00]

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

[@poggs]

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

[@geoffplus1254]

great video, just installed a Pistorm 32 in my 1200 not worked how to get it working on my monitor but more than happy with it, cant wait for the "Amiga native injection device" (ANID) then I just have to keep one screen.

[@NigelsWorkbench]

Great presentation Andrew 😊

[@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.

[@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

[@MallaganVloggs]

I saw a video of someone running quake on it with a Mediator 1200 in rtg mode, and the frame rate was somewhat lacking (for what a monster performance it is in pure CPU power). He said it was because the PiStorm 32-Lite lacks DMA support. 1. Is that true? Does it lack DMA support? 2. If so, is (was?) that because of lack of GPIO pins on the Pi, or because of the EMU68k software? And if so, was it resolved by now?

[@linuxjedivideo]

Hi, 1. Yes, the PiStorm32-Lite lacks support for multiple DMA bus masters. 2. It is because the DMA start signal (BR) is being used to disable the onboard 68020 in the A1200. That is a design flaw in the A1200. It would be possible to do in machines that have the PiStorm replace the CPU (A500 for example), but it hasn't been implemented (yet) on those. There is an upcoming PiStorm which might. It will also be a requirements when we make the A3000 / A4000 version. But on the A600 and A1200, I don't see this ever being possible.

[@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.

[@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.

[@ffsireallydontcare]

I've seen recently some videos where people are using a Pi4B with the original PiStorm on an Amiga 500. How are they doing this given the GitHub repo readme states that Pi4 is not supported on the original PiStorm?

[@linuxjedivideo]

Luck, basically. It sometimes works, but is definitely isn't supported for now. It operates at a speed out of spec for the GPIO in a Pi4. In general, as new Pis come out, the GPIO latency increases (Pi5 will always be unusable for PiStorm). We have an idea for new firmware to solve that in the original PiStorm, but it is lower priority than other things.

[@ffsireallydontcare]

@@linuxjedivideo Thanks for letting me know. I thought there may be a new version of the CPLD firmware locked behind the Discord wall. As someone who cannot join Discord (I've tried), it is distressing to see more and more open source projects getting locked into megacorp walled gardens.

[@linuxjedivideo]

@@ffsireallydontcare with PiStorm, most discussion happens in Discord, but all firmware/software/hardware is on GitHub. I didn't decide where the community was created, but it is where people have gravitated to.

[@ffsireallydontcare]

@@linuxjedivideo I get it, but it's still concerning as I won't have anything to do with Zuckerbot, and Discord bans me just after the application process but right before the account landing page finishes loading. Why? "Trust and Safety" won't tell me. Odd given the longest I've been able to spend on Discord was 2 weeks, and that only involved a brief chat with both Michal and Claude about the possibility of using the PCIe lane instead of the GPIO for the Pi4 to Amiga communications channel. Progress! I have noticed that some of the related Discord servers are bridged with IRC, which is nice. Now to get everyone to move to a newsgroup and/or a public forum. Thanks again.

[@TwickenStep]

shoud i get a pi 4 or a 3+ if im planning to buy a pistorm today?

[@linuxjedivideo]

I would recommend a 3A+ for Amiga 500/600/1000/CDTV, 3B+ for Amiga 2000 and Pi 4 or CM4 with adaptor for Amiga 1200. Pi 4 is only supported on the PiStorm32-Lite. Pi 3B+ will only fit without modification on the A2000 and A1200. The PiStorm32-Lite supports Pi 3 series and 4.

[@TwickenStep]

@@linuxjedivideo awesome thanks for the response. I ended up getting a 3A+ for my A500. Im considering trying the Lazarustorm too, but people have said it could cause issues.

[@linuxjedivideo]

@@TwickenStep I am not keen on Lazarustorm myself. The key reason is the E clock (a clock for the CIAs generated by the CPU) for the internal CPU and PiStorm are sharing a trace. This is bad for a number of reasons and I'm more surprised it works at all. That being said, I've heard of people being able to use it.

[@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.

[@jaysoncowan5763]

I guess this answers the question, what would happen to the Amiga if commodore developed further.

[@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.

[@dlma7196]

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

[@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.

[@OeHomestead]

"The Amiga is not powerful enough to run ROOM." Grind: What am I? Chopped liver?

[@linuxjedivideo]

In the longer version of this talk (which I haven't given officially yet) I do talk about the fact that it was probably possible, but would have required significant investment that wasn't worth it at the time.

[@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.

[@ChrisMcNeely]

wow

[@electronicsworkbench]

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

[@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.