Go Beyond Amiga Emulation on Raspberry Pi With PiStorm

Last Updated on June 6, 2021

You’ve probably heard about Amiga emulation on Raspberry Pi. But what about physical integration of the two systems? PiStorm lets a Raspberry Pi double as an Amiga accelerator.

If you’re new to the world of retro gaming and your platform of choice is the Amiga, you probably have two main questions:

What is recapping?
What is an accelerator?

The first question is easily dealt with (some components on the motherboard leak and need replacing) but the second is trickier. With so many Amiga accelerator cards around, it can be difficult to decide which one you want. Then there’s the problem of sourcing it, not to mention the price of an Amiga accelerator.

Well, there’s a new solution in town. You can now accelerate your Amiga using PiStorm, a 68K emulator for the A500, A500+ and A2000 Amiga models. It runs on a Raspberry Pi 3A board, and uses a PiStorm adapter which costs just £11 (€25). So, you’re looking at an entire outlay of under £50 to accelerate the Amiga. PiStorm enables you to connect a microSD card to your Amiga, supports USB HDDs, and adds 128MB of Fastmem, with 720p video ouput.

Here’s a look at it in action:

Small video showing latest PiStorm 68k Emulation in action.
All runs on a stock A500+ (ECS,1MB Chip), just plugged in PiStorm and a USB HDD holding the HDD Image as HDF. CPU is set to 68EC030, RTG at 720p/16Bit , 128MB Fastmem.#Amiga #raspberrypi https://t.co/giTjdoiG4w pic.twitter.com/HsPu47JrnT
— Claude Schwarz (@Claude1079) February 19, 2021

You can find out more by perusing the PiStorm GitHub page.

In short, this is way superior to Amiga emulation on Raspberry Pi. This is literally plugging the Pi into the Amiga to enhance the performance of the 16-bit machine. In fact, this is such a significant development that the bottom might just fall out of the Amiga accelerator market.

At the time of writing, this is only of ECS chipsets. We’re waiting for news on an possible AGA version…

(Hackaday)