There's a Storm a Brewin'

A short post this time. If you're into your Amiga stuff then you'll almost certainly have heard about the PiStorm. This amazing little board, in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi 3A, adds an inexpensive (but see below) accelerator to a stock A500 with the possibility of large amounts of RAM, SCSI hard disk support and retargetable graphics too. All for what should be the cost of about £11 plus a Raspberry Pi 3A (currently £23.40ish).

BUT

Chipmageddon is upon us. There is a worldwide shortage of silicon at the moment and it's affecting every industry from toasters to luxury cars. Even us hobbyists are not immune. The key component of the PiStorm is a small CPLD (think a tiny re-programmable chip like an EPROM), which holds the firmware and does the heavy lifting. They should cost a couple of quid, but with extensive supply problems, prices have increased dramatically. There are some stocks out there but they're not cheap.

So, until chip supplies stabilise - which could be Q4 2022(!) - expect to pay anywhere from £30 to £50 for an assembled PiStorm (without a Pi 3A).

Before I go any further I should also point out that the software behind the PiStorm is still very much 'Beta'. If you want a fast accelerator that is 100% compatible with all games etc then this is not the product for you (go and get a TerribleFire or something similar if that's what you're after). But updates are regular and huge progress is being made with every update.

PiStorm in place of MC68000

Pi 3A mounted on the PiStorm

The PiStorm board replaces the 68000 CPU and the Pi 3A plugs into the board. Setup is surprisingly straightforward if you just want a basic accelerator. I managed to get the rough equivalent of a 40Mhz 68030 with three SCSI drives (image taken from my existing 4Gb CF card) and 128Mb of fast RAM with the minimum of effort. Things like RTG and networking require a bit more effort and I plan to get these going on my board when I have time.

Look at the size of that.....memory!

The only issue I found was that the board I had kept popping out of the 68000 socket. Given that I intend to keep this board and just update it as and when it has updates I decided to take the slightly drastic step of soldering it directly to the motherboard. It would be relatively easy to remove if needed but ensures that no more popping out crashes occur...

Now get out of that!

A happy consequence of doing this is that my RGB2HDMI now has clearance to connect a HDMI cable. Yay! 

Let's all just get along.

At this point there are still several things I want to do, as mentioned above:

1) RTG support - "...colours! So many colours!..."

2) Networking - not sure if I could tweet from my Amiga but it would be cool if I could...

3) File copying between Pi and Amiga - useful for new apps or updates to apps

4) Investigate if the Pi can be controlled from the Amiga over SSH?

And at least I've found a use for two of my Raspberry Pi! Stay tuned for more.