Pick Up A PiStorm32-Lite And Make Your Amiga 1200 Up To 1300 Times Faster
Amiga 500, 600 and 2000 Too!
If you like playing with old hardware and have run into troubles finding replacement silicon or would like to pump up the performance significantly, then check out the PiStorm32-Lite and other PiStorm boards. The boards use the Emu68 bare-metal 68000 emulator for Arm on a Pi 4, which was a substantial improvement from the original PiStorm projects. The current iteration doesn’t handle networking at the moment, however Andrew Hutchings has plans for this year which might include restoring that functionality.
In one example he loaded up Quake and the game peaked at 90fps, rather impressive for hardware from the 80’s! If you don’t want to modify your own board, you can pick up a PiStorm32-Lite for $90, the boards for the Amiga 500, 600 and 2000 are less expensive if that is the model you want to resurrect. If you weren’t an Amiga fan, there is also a board for the Atari ST and Sinclair QL fans are working on their own version.
Using Linux did bring advantages, though. Given a sufficiently warped mind creative imagination, and substantial configuration, other chunks of the Pi's hardware can be linked up to AmigaOS: networking, RTG graphics, HDMI output, USB ports, and more.
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Yeah it’s neat but it essentially turns your Amiga in a glorified I/O interface card by taking over many of the Amiga’s functions. Might as well just go full software emulation at that point.
A more authentic experience would be with a more traditional upgrade slot card like a Terrible Fire. You can find plenty of non-destructive expansion slot options at amigakit or amigastore.
I think you refer to the old solution, musashi, but this isn’t really the case with the emu68, which is essentially a baremetal solution, replacing the 68k with an eumulated CPU (68040), you can use RTG and wifi (still in beta) as I/O extension.