The PiStorm Revolution

I have finally recived my PiStorm kit!!

[pistorm board, raspberry zero 2 and a 32Gb microSD]

Got it for a reasonably good price (80€)

Here it is:

But what is it?

The PiStorm is an adapter board that connects a raspberry pi to the 68000 socket on the Amiga and driven by software it permits to emulate a CPU up to the 68040, expand memory, acts as a Plipbox for internet connectivity and as a Picasso96 RTG graphic card!

It's awesome, just keep on reading...

There are two software emulators compatible with the PiStorm:

Musashi and EMU68

Musashi: the original emulator project born for the piStorm, runs on linux and gives a very good speed boost.

Compatible with Networking, RTG, expands memory and gives up to a 68040 and games from floppies works really well.

Not compatible with ahi audio drivers.

As you can see 17 Mips! Incredible for an Amiga 500!

EMU68: A new emulator for the PiStorm, it's a bare metal emulation, so there is no linux, just the emulator smashing the rasp!

Compatible with RTG, HiFi Ahi Audio, expands memory and emulates up to a 68040.

Not compatible with Networking and to my "extremely limited" experience has some problems playing games from floppy (Monkey Island played without audio for example)

627 Mips? Yes I was shocked too!

Here a couple of screens of both emulators running the workbench side by side:

Musashi is enought powerful to surf the web while listening to some mod files:

Emu68 is a monster as you saw before from the sysinfo screen!

It's so powerful to emulate MacOS flawlessly!

Even with complex games!!

Emulation aside, this power gives the amiga almost endless possibilities!

Here an example of scummVM running MI3:

Here some mp3 playing while looking at some jpegs side by side with a screen of an mpeg video playing:

There is even a full distribution called CaffeineOS by Captain LeChuck that using emu68 gives you instant access to most of these applications, games and emulators!

Awesome stuff!

Right now there is only one thing missing, but the awesome people working on developing the pistorm are already figuring that out, whenever you launch an application or game not made for rtg the image is going to be displayed on the rgb out and not from the hdmi!

The solution will be a board to connect under the denise chip that will capture the video and send it to the rasp!

I would like to thanks all the guys from the pistorm developing team and all those who helped me on the PiStorm discord server!

THANKS!

Check the official pistorm page:

https://github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm