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.