User avatar
Kevin Brice
Seattle, WA
YouTube

Posted Mon May 03, 2021 3:44 pm

I can't speak for others, but there's no hate for Linux on my end - it's great. But it's weird having it run the CPU for the Amiga while running its own multasking OS stack with the entire Raspberry Pi OS running, and a read/write file system that gets its power hard cut every time the Amiga gets turned off. And since the Pi is on the network, it means SSHing into the Pi regularly to patch the system. I can't just turn on automatic updates, as then I'm at even more risk of corrupting the system when I turn off the Amiga. I just don't like the VM inversion going on there, where my physical machine is now a VM client that also happens to control power to the host, where I can't easily get insight into what the host is doing. And all of this is still slower than if I just ran the VM on the Pi without the Amiga hardware involved.

User avatar
Bulletdust

Posted Mon May 03, 2021 4:15 pm

Kevin Brice wrote:
Mon May 03, 2021 3:44 pm
I can't speak for others, but there's no hate for Linux on my end - it's great. But it's weird having it run the CPU for the Amiga while running its own multasking OS stack with the entire Raspberry Pi OS running, and a read/write file system that gets its power hard cut every time the Amiga gets turned off. And since the Pi is on the network, it means SSHing into the Pi regularly to patch the system. I can't just turn on automatic updates, as then I'm at even more risk of corrupting the system when I turn off the Amiga. I just don't like the VM inversion going on there, where my physical machine is now a VM client that also happens to control power to the host, where I can't easily get insight into what the host is doing. And all of this is still slower than if I just ran the VM on the Pi without the Amiga hardware involved.
You have to see the bigger picture - This is a great concept bringing the price of Amiga accelerators way down in price. Bang for buck, it really can't be beaten.

I agree, the current implementation running under Raspberry Pi OS isn't really ideal - But the hope is that someone will see the potential in the project and can come up with a solution running closer to bare metal on the Pi itself.

I've got an unused A500 here as well as a spare Pi3, when I get a chance I plan on giving it a go. People in my Amiga user group are raving about the implementation.

User avatar
fxgogo
Twickenham , U.K.

Posted Mon May 03, 2021 4:31 pm

I am wondering how long it will take for the Linux system to be removed? So many projects outside the Amiga community would benefit from a low level kernel system that exposes direct access to the hardware. The benefit of the Pi is it is very well documented and has a massive amount of momentum. Even Eben Upton is keen to see where this goes. I am excited, even if I don’t jump on board right now.

User avatar
Kevin Brice
Seattle, WA
YouTube

Posted Mon May 03, 2021 7:05 pm

Bulletdust wrote:
Mon May 03, 2021 4:15 pm
You have to see the bigger picture - This is a great concept bringing the price of Amiga accelerators way down in price. Bang for buck, it really can't be beaten.

I agree, the current implementation running under Raspberry Pi OS isn't really ideal - But the hope is that someone will see the potential in the project and can come up with a solution running closer to bare metal on the Pi itself.

I've got an unused A500 here as well as a spare Pi3, when I get a chance I plan on giving it a go. People in my Amiga user group are raving about the implementation.
That's the thing - bang for buck, it's easily beaten by that exact same Pi not inside an Amiga, unless you're specifically relying on Zorro or video slots for something. I have a 500 that might be fun to accelerate with a Pi, but I honestly can't think of a use case that's not better served by just running Amiberry on my Pi, or UAE on my PC.

I wish I shared your optimism about PiStorm dropping Raspberry Pi OS/an entire read/write Linux system underneath anytime soon. More and more features are being added that depend on the Linux stack: storage, networking, RGB, etc. Those will be hard to completely reimplement separately, and impossible without still running a multitasking OS in which the Amiga virtualized CPU is one of many processes. The best I see happening is a system that boots with / mounted as read-only by default, but there's no eliminating now having to be a sysadmin of both the Amiga and the Pi, with it potentially being a royal pain to maintain the Pi.

This reminds me of shipping Electron "desktop apps" to get to market faster because it's faster to iterate and get to that 80% mark. That last 20% is really hard, and most don't ever fund it, especially since it might require feature take-backs in the interim while stalling development on the in-market solution. Don't get me wrong - PiStorm is an amazing tech demo, and I think it's incredible people are getting it working. It's really neat. But I'm not personally interested in using it as anything other than a fun tech demo, and would very much prefer something like Buffee.

User avatar
stevelord

Posted Tue May 04, 2021 4:59 am

Chris Edwards has a video running the PiStorm on an Amiga 1000. Interestingly, no more Kickstart disk needed.

Trigger warning: He ain't running 1.x.

User avatar
nonarkitten

Posted Tue May 04, 2021 6:01 am

stevelord wrote:
Tue May 04, 2021 4:59 am
Chris Edwards has a video running the PiStorm on an Amiga 1000. Interestingly, no more Kickstart disk needed.

Trigger warning: He ain't running 1.x.
Hey, you know what would be really cool? If it emulated the ECS chipset so we could get 2MB on the Amiga 1000 and have that come out the HDMI so we don't have the analog fuzzies anymore.

Also, that save icon holder is pretty useless, we should just replace that with loading from USB or SD.

And finally, you know that massive 40 year old power supply and NMOS based logic board suck up a lot of power, and now that we're not using it for anything, we'll just remove those and power off a 5.1V wall wart.

Waitaminnit....

User avatar
stevelord

Posted Tue May 04, 2021 9:35 am

I learned not to bother yucking other peoples' yum. Lets face it, the Amiga 1000 wasn't really a Commodore design, they were just lucky enough to buy it. Likewise, when Commodore went kaput we had people running architectures never built for the Amiga like PowerPC.

If people want to run an emulator less efficiently but use their Amigas as shells, that's down to them. As beautiful as a pristine Amiga of any model is, we all have things we'd like to do from the Parceiro to ZZ9000. If this gives people a more enjoyable experience, more power to them.

I did find the no Kickstart disks amusing. If you don't want to use Kickstart disks and want more chip RAM, the other models are all perfectly fine alternatives. But if it makes him happy, fair enough.

User avatar
BloodyCactus
Lexington VA

Posted Tue May 04, 2021 5:01 pm

nonarkitten wrote:
Tue May 04, 2021 6:01 am
And finally, you know that massive 40 year old power supply and NMOS based logic board suck up a lot of power, and now that we're not using it for anything, we'll just remove those and power off a 5.1V wall wart.
well the A1K expectes a 'tick' at 50hz/60hz from the PSU. so its not so simple to just throw out the psu unless you have a tick circuit replacement as well.

User avatar
dalek
Australia

Posted Tue May 04, 2021 5:10 pm

BloodyCactus wrote:
Tue May 04, 2021 5:01 pm
...tick circuit replacement as well.
quite easy to do with another raspberry pi

User avatar
Mixel

Posted Wed May 05, 2021 2:08 am

I don't have an A500/1000 etc but I can totally see the appeal of it, I can imagine there are a lot of people with hardware devices they'd like to keep using on the Amiga, which could use the extra power.

Getting my serial Wacom running in WinUAE was a pain, I wasn't at all able to get my other serial tablet to work.. I'd be very surprised if it was possible to get either it to work at all on the Pi or MiSTer.. But it definitely works on my A1200, and more reliably than it does in WinUAE.. It's just if you want to run ArtEffect (and photogenics, etc) to it's full potential you need something WAY faster than my 030, and preferably RTG too! So max compatibility with Amiga peripherals + lots of power seems like best of both worlds to me?

This probably applies even moreso to the big box amigas that could have tons of weird upgrades that you might want to keep up and running.

.. Fully agree they'll be much more useful once/if they allow 2MB chip like the Megachip did. The idea of A1000s and A500s cheaply being able to do that is pretty great.





Return to “Hardware”