Pistorm in an Amiga 2000

[BippyM]

A did a video looking at a pistorm in an a2000.



This device isn't quite ready for the masses, but if they fix the issues it will be a great low cost accelerator



Excuse the poor editing.. I'm sure I'll get better as I practice

[ Show youtube player ]

[roondar]

PiStorm is a nifty device, thanks for the review

[vulture]

good news! any idea if there's an A1200 version in the works?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by vulture

any idea if there's an A1200 version in the works?

Yes. Claude is laying out the board as we speak. It uses a CM4 PI which can be overclocked with active cooling and is getting great benchmarks.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by BippyM

a pistorm in an a2000

How far away from the Denise socket is the CPU slot? Is there any chance the Denise adapter in A2000?

The Denise adapter routes Amiga video to Pi via MIPI camera interface where it is scandoubled and deinterlaced for RTG passthrough. Meaning all video (Native & RTG) can go through HDMI

[jotd]

Why do you say "This device isn't quite ready for the masses, but if they fix the issues it will be a great low cost accelerator " ?

Is this because all the fiddling you had to do outside the video? because in the video it looks perfect (note to self: update whdload slaves, your collection is from the previous century )

[alexh]

Originally Posted by jotd

Why do you say "This device isn't quite ready for the masses, but if they fix the issues it will be a great low cost accelerator " ?

I think he is rereferring to the fact that PiStorm 680x0 compatibility isn't 100%.

You can get crashes out of the blue (isn't that normal for an accelerated Amiga? ) but there are frequent updates and a new 680x0->ARM JIT core in the works.

[stevelord]

Nice review. It's always good to see what doesn't work as well as the progress so people can make an informed decision.

[BippyM]

Originally Posted by jotd

Is this because all the fiddling you had to do outside the video? because in the video it looks perfect (note to self: update whdload slaves, your collection is from the previous century )

The pistorm is great for anything system friendly, hence in that respect it is great, especially with the rtg aspect. For anything that takes over the Amiga.. Not so good.
There were a lot of issues with many games and demos. The chip access speed is slower than on a real amiga and on top of that there are some interrupt and irq conflicts. As you can see in the video. Turrican 2 music is really slow and state of the art demo was running at maybe 0.5fps. There were gfx corruption issues, and freezing too.



I will possibly do another video when the newer firmware is complete.



As for setting it up. I found it to be easy and following the guidance worked a treat. Maybe an hour.



As for the whdload installs. I literally grabbed a rdb image I had on my PC to use.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by BippyM

Turrican 2 music is really slow

Try updating your slave? Or try the disk version?

The WHDLoad version of Turrican 3 used to do this when playing 7voice TFMX on 68000 processors but the disk version was fine. Psygore fixed it in a later slave. What was the cause I don't know.

http://mantis.whdload.de/view.php?id=2116

[jotd]

upgrade your whdload slaves, then we'll talk

[Don_Adan]

Originally TFMX 7V replayer uses self modyfing code in mixer part. I think this is problem for ARM emulation.