This Week in PiStorm 2021-06-27

For me this has been a bit of a quiet week on the PiStorm front, this is down to me moving my office, including my Amigas, to another part of the house. But there are still things to report this week, so lets get to it…

Experimental Firmware

Before you get your hopes up, this is NOT the Proto 4 firmware that everybody is eager to get their hands on. This is actually the changes to make the chip speed run faster as discussed in previous posts. It is now separate from the main firmware as some people experienced issues when using this firmware.

If you use “wip-crap” and want to use this firmware you can run ./nprog_experimental.sh or ./nprog_240_experimental.sh depending on your PiStorm’s CPLD chip to flash it. You can go back any time by using ./nprog.sh or ./nprog_240.sh.

Photos of before and after the firmware with the latest “wip-crap” below (the Chip Speed is what to look for):

Ongoing IRQ Battle

_Bnu has been fighting an ongoing battle to make IRQ handling faster and more stable with the current Proto 3 firmware. This has been very difficult because what works well for one piece of software appears to break another. Judging by a commit made by paulofduarte, he has also joined this effort. This is why on some days in the past week you may have found “wip-crap” to a bit unstable for you.

It should be reiterated that “wip-crap” is where the very experimental stuff goes to get baked for a while before it makes it (if it makes it) into the main tree. If you don’t want things occasionally breaking to the point where you can’t boot the Amiga, please don’t use “wip-crap”

Denise Interposer Building

Claude has been building several prototypes of the Denise Interposer board. This sits under the Denise chip to capture the digital RGB signals, converts them and passes them into the Pi’s camera port. It should be stressed that this is an early prototype, it works (sometimes) but there are issues. It is not generally available yet, but when it is ready the final version will be, just like the PiStorm. The final version will be different and likely use an FPGA which is easier to solder. Here are some photos of his build and test of these boards:

PiStorm on Other Platforms?

There is ongoing work to make PiStorm work on platforms other than the Amiga that use the 68K CPU. These are very experimental right now and I believe in most cases it does not work well yet. For fun Claude shoved one into a Sega Megadrive / Genesis. It couldn’t play sonic but it was still interesting to see:

YouTuber Videos

We have one new video this week from Chris Edwards discussing how to update your PiStorm with new features, you can see this below.

The End

Did I miss anything? Or is there anything that you want covered next week? Let me know! I can be found as LinuxJedi on the PiStorm Discord or LinuxJedi on Twitter.