This Week in PiStorm 2021-09-12

Very much a status update this week for upcoming projects. So, let’s get straight to it!

PiStorm32 Updates

The early prototype PCBs have arrived with Claude and he has been testing the absolute basic functionality of the board to make sure the individual parts work and that it doesn’t break an Amiga 1200.

I cannot understate enough the fact that this is not ready for production yet. Even if the hardware functions exactly as intended, the firmware could take many months to complete, probably going into next year. The hardware designs will not be released until it is known to work, firmware and all.

Once everything is ready, we can then sort out if/when there will be group buys and how to proceed from there. I’ve included some of the tweets below:

The booting above was with the Amiga 1200’s built-in CPU.

Emu68 Updates

Michal’s motherboard has been repaired! Thanks to Claude who diagnosed and replaced a bad RAM chip on it so that development could proceed. Michal hasn’t been resting this time and neither has the community. You can see this update which details build changes and screenshots of some games that are already working on Emu68.

Blank HDF Files

I’ve talked in the past about how to create blank HDF files, but some people can still struggle with this, especially due to the formatting bugs in Amiga OS 3.1.4 and 3.2. Leigh has made a couple of blank HDF files ready for you to use that is already partitioned to have 500MB for the OS and the rest of the 8 or 16GB for your files. They have been formatted using the PFS3 filesystem and the geometry has been configured for optimal performance.

You can download the 8GB version here and the 16GB version here (they are compressed so are actually small files to download).

Community Videos

Dread on PiStorm

There is a new “Doom clone” game for the Amiga which has been released called Dread, Mike’s Retro Tech has been trying this new game out on the PiStorm which can be seen here:

PiStorm AHI Testing

Last time I mentioned that there is a new alpha-quality AHI audio driver for the PiStorm so that audio can be sent to the Pi’s audio jack or HDMI. Simo has made a quick video demo of this working:

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.