This Week in PiStorm 2021-10-03

Work never seems to slow down in the PiStorm world, this week is no exception. So let’s get to it!

Huge Merge to Main

In the last 24 hours there has been a huge merge from wip-crap to the main PiStorm tree. This has a vast number of bug fixes and improvements if you don’t already use wip-crap. Note that the firmware has not changed as part of this merge, so you do not need to re-flash it. Here is a list of key changes (Thanks to _Bnu for the summary):

• The default.cfg file has been renamed to amiga.cfg. The PiStorm will still try to load default.cfg by default if another config file is not specified. This is to fix two things:
  1. The PiStorm will eventually be used by platforms other than the Amiga.
  2. Any changes made to default.cfg now won’t need be obliterated when you update.
• The RTG driver now has hardware mouse cursor support. This speeds up all things RTG quite a bit, but it requires the updated pigfx020.card to display a mouse cursor at all. If your Amiga is currently configured to boot into an RTG mode by default, please set it to a native RTG display mode, and then run the PiRTG installer from the PiStorm HDF or otherwise copy the new pigfx020.card to LIBS:Picasso96.
• There is an extremely experimental “Chip fastpath” feature that speeds up Chip RAM/bus bandwidth a fair bit. This may cause instability, so only enable it if you want to try it out for yourself, this is done by typing make ACFLAGS=-DCHIP_FASTPATH on the command line instead of just make. This requires a make clean.
• Physical Zorro (2) devices now initialize before virtual ones. _Bnu has tested this, and it appears to work fine, but if there are any problems with it, please give me a shout in #beta-testing or #software-support or something and I’ll try to fix it or revert it as soon as possible. This should in theory fix the problem with for instance the CD-ROM drive on the CDTV not being the first AutoConfig device detected, but it likely still won’t work very well due to the lack of bus arbitration support in the CPLD firmware.
• Updated and added numerous readmes to various subdirectories on the repo, with information like generic config file settings and platform-specific setvar information in the related directories.
• Various RTG scaling options, can be configured using either the PiStorm application or more exhaustively using PiSimple in for instance scripts.
• RTG DPMS support by me. This can be enabled in the config file to put the HDMI mode to sleep when no RTG mode is active. This can be used for instance as a sort of auto-switch between the PiStorm RTG and RGB2HDMI output.
• Slow2fast Agnus detection improvements by LIV2.
• Incredibly questionable virtual AHI device. While this “works”, it doesn’t work properly, but you can enable it if you want to mess around with it. Currently can’t/won’t be fully fixed until IRQs can be made to work properly. More detailed information on how to use it is available in platforms/amiga/ahi.
• A bunch of PiStorm interaction device acceleration commands have been added. These are currently only used in a special build of ScummVM, which is available at http://www.apehead.se/snakes9000/buld.zip This zip file must be extracted to its own folder, you cannot overwrite an existing version of ScummVM with it as it does not have theme support or anything like that. It is entirely possible that it won’t work properly, and it does require the PiStorm interaction device to be enabled to display anything at all on screen.
• CPU emulation has seen a minor speed increase, not entirely clean code-wise but should be fine for the time being.

Thanks to the many people who worked on and tested everything in this release.

Emu68 Updates

Last week I reported the “disappointing” benchmark of Emu68 PiStorm, which still made it the fastest Amiga 500 still using the original chipset. Well, since then things got a bit faster…

This is the expected limit with a Pi 3A+, when the Pi 4 / CM4 is supported the it could even be double that.

Amiga 1200 with a RISC-V?!

Just for fun, Claude managed to flash a RISC-V CPU onto his A1200 PiStorm prototype board. Completely useless for the Amiga, but more testing to show the chip working:

Community Videos

The Storm

CityXen has made a really fun video about upgrading their Amiga using a PiStorm.

Amiga 2000 800MIPS!

Of course Simo has done an update demonstrating the new performance benchmark for Emu68:

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.