Daily Archives: January 16, 2025

Pistorm and the Amiga

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A few years ago, I was given an Amiga 1000. What a classic! The original Amiga by Commodore!

Signatures of those involved in the development of the Amiga – This is awesome!

It’s been sitting around collecting dust as a monitor stand. I boot it up once, however, given I started my Amiga life with an Amiga 500, I’m used to Kickstart bring in ROM. For the Amiga 1000, Kickstart was shipped on a 3.32 inch floppy disk. You startup with Kickstart, you then book up Workbench.

Kickstart is the bootstrap firmware that initializes the computer and then allows the computer to boot the OS – AmigaDOS and Workbench.

I don’t have a Kickstart disk, so I couldn’t do much with that computer.

Until now!

A RaspberryPi 3A plugged into an FPGA board connected to the A1000 while testing

Using Pistorm changes the game. Using a Raspberry Pi and an FPGA that plugs into the Motorola 68000 CPU slot, you can add new functionality to a stock Amiga:

  • Allows me to use any Kickstart ROM file and no longer require a Kickstart disk
  • Not only can I replace the 68000, I can super charge that computer with any Motorola processor up to the 68040! Yes, it’s emulation, but still – it runs faster than the Amiga 3000 I had!
  • I can use RTG – Retargetable Graphics – meaning I can output from the Amiga through the FPGA daughter board and the RaspberryPi. Lots of colours and high resolution, unlike the 640×480 I would normally use.
  • I can mount
    • Linux file systems and transfer files between the Linux environment that runs Pistorm, and the Amiga.
    • Floppy disk images
    • Hard Drive images
  • I can access WIFI and the Interneti with the Linux and Amiga TCP/IP stacks

It is awesome having a computer from my past – one of the schools I went to had one in their music program, and a friend had an Amiga 1000 – and breathing new life into it.

I’ve owned two of the most desirable Amiga computers – the 3000, and now the 1000 which outperforms my 3000 – although that ECS chipset…

This has been a fun project, and I am getting a lot more comfortable with hardware projects. Also, the series of videos by Ben Eater has given me some good food for though as to how processors and these interesting processor emulators work. Completely fascinating.