Amiga revival, Smart Pascal and growing up

Maybe its just me but the Amiga is kinda having a revival these days? Seems to me like the number of people going back to the Amiga has just exploded the past couple of years. Much of that is no doubt thanks to my buddy Gunnar Kristjannsen’s excellent work on the Amibian distro for Raspberry PI. Making a high-end Amiga experience that would have cost you thousands of dollars available at around $35.

Looking forward to some cosy reading

While Gunnar’s great distro is no doubt a huge factor in this, I believe its more than just easy access. I think a lot of us that grew up with the system, who lived the Amiga daily from elementary school all the way to college – have come full circle. We spend our days coding on PC’s, Mac’s or making mobile software – but deep down inside, I think all of us are still in love with that magical machine; The Commodore Amiga.

I am honestly at a loss for words on this (and that’s a first, most days you can’t get me to shut the hell up). Why should a 30-year-old system attract me more, and still cause so much joy in my life – compared to the latest stuff? I mean, I got a fat ass I7 that growls when you start it with 64 gigabyte ram, SSD and all the extras; I got macs all over the house, the latest consoles – and enough embedded boards to start my own arcade if I so desired.

Yet at the end of the day, when the kids are in bed and GF firmly planted in front of her favorite tv show, fathers are down in basements all around europe. Not watching porn, not practising black magic or trying to transform led into gold, nope: coding in assembler on a mc68k processor running at a whopping 7Mhz and loving every minute of it!

Today the madness held no bounds and forced me, out of sheer perverted joy, to order 4 copies of Amiga Future magazine (yes there are still magazines for the Amiga, believe it or not), a few posters, a mousemat and (drumroll) the ever sexy A1222. Actually that was a lie, I ordered that weeks ago, Trevor Dickenson over at A-EON hooked me up so im getting it as soon as it comes off the assembly line. And for those that don’t know, the A1222 is the new affordable Amiga that is released today. It’s not a remake of the older models, but a brand new thing. I havent been this giddy about a piece of silicon since I fell into a double-d cup at a beach in Spain last year.

Smart Pascal

It made sense to unite my two great computing passions, namely the object pascal language and Amiga into one package. So whenever I have some spare time I work my ass off on the update for Smart Mobile Studio. And it’s getting probably the biggest “demo” ever shipped with a programming language.

What? Well, a remake of the Amiga operating system. But not just a simple css-styled shallow lookalike. You know me, I just had to go all the way. So I married the system with something called uae.js. Which is essentially the JavaScript version of the Amiga emulator. Its compiled with EmScripten – a post processor that takes LLVM compiled bitcode compiled with C/C++ and spits out Asm.js optimized code.

You just cant kill it, Amiga is 4ever

So, Smart Pascal in one hand – C/C++ in the right hand. Its like being back in college all over again. Only thing missing now is that Wacom suddenly returns and Borland rise from the grave with another Turbo product. But yes, JavaScript is something I really enjoy. And being able to compile object pascal to JavaScript is even better.

The end result? Well since I don’t have too much time on my hands it’s roughly 31-32% done, and when we hit 50% is when UAE.js will be activated. So right now its a sexy cloud front end. It has a virtual filesystem that runs fine over localstorage, but it can also talk to node.js and access the real filesystem on your server.

But when UAE.js kicks in you will be able to run your favorite Amiga demos, applications and games in your browser. I am actually very excited about seeing the performance. It runs most demos OK (using the Aros rom-files). I imagine running things like blitzbasic, Amos basic and SAS-C/C++ should work fine. Or at least be within the “usable” range if you got a powerful PC to play with.

The V8 JavaScript engine in webkit is due for an overhaul next year – and while I can only speculate I’m guessing real-life compilation will be the addition. They already do some heavy JIT’ing but once you throw LLVM based actual compilation into the picture – large JS applications is going to fly side by side with native stuff. And that’s when cloud front-ends like ChromeOS and other FriendOS is going to take off.

My little remake is not that ambitious, but I do intend to make this an absolute kick-ass system as far as Amiga is concerned. And for Smart Pascal developers? Well, lets just say that this demo project has pushed the RTL for all it’s worth and helped fix bugs and expand the RTL in a way that makes it a real power-house!

Growing up

Do we ever really grow up? I’m not sure any more. I look at others and see some that have adopted this role, this image of how an adult should be like — but its more often than not tied into the whole A4 family thing or some superficial work profile. And since most Amiga fanatics are in their 40’s and 50’s (same age as Delphi hooligans, Turbo was released in 1983 same year as the Amiga came out), I guess this is when kids have grown up enough for people to go “wait a minute, what .. where is my Amiga!“.

But good things come to those who wait. If someone told me that I would one day work side by side with giants like David John Pleasance, Francois Lionet and the crew at FriendUp systems – I would never have believed them. A member of quartex in meetings with the head of Commodore? My teenage self would never have believed it. Both of these men, including all the tech guys at Commodore, Mark Sibly the guy behind BlitzBasic — these were my teenage heroes. And now I get to work with two of them. That is priceless.

As for growing up – if that means losing that spark, that trigger that when lost would render us incapable of enjoying things like the Amiga, reduced to a suit in a grey world of PCs – you know, then I’m happy to be exactly where I am. If you can go to work wearing an Amiga T-Shirt, tracker music on your iPod, a family you love at home, cool people to work with – I would call that a wrap.

And looking at the hundreds and thousands of people returning to the Amiga after 30 years in the desert – something tells me I wont be alone .. 😉

 

Amiga Reloaded, can I preorder?

Without much fanfare some brilliant news made it into the retro-computing scene yesterday, namely that our german superheroes over at Individual Computers Gmbh has aquired the rights to the Commodore name.

A brand new C64 motherboard, still going after all that time

“The Amiga for me represent a whole timeline of computing history that was aborted, a timeline which, had it been allowed to continue, would have given the world a much better experience of computing”

Individual has been shipping their Commodore 64 replacement motherboard for some time, which apparently is a very popular product for people into the C64 scene. I would love to get my hands on it, but while I grew up on a c64 — my computing life basically started with the Commodore Amiga.

It just wont die

The Amiga home computer is paradox wrapped in an enigma. Its been out of production since the 90’s, parts cost more than a used car – yet thousands of people around the world use this (by todays standard) ancient computer platform daily.

So what is it about this computer that simply refuses to die? Why do people, young and old, love this 30 year old computer?

I can only speak for myself, but I think it has to do with the fact that the Amiga was murdered. That is how I feel anyways. It was in the prime of it’s life, and was killed and replaced by backwater, poorly made computers that didn’t deserve to win. So I think maybe, if im honest, its a classic case of martyrdom.

The Amiga for me represent a whole timeline of computing history that was aborted, a timeline which, had it been allowed to continue, would have given the world a much better experience of computing. Not to mention our capabilities as a race with regard to data processing in all avenues of life.

My Raspberry PI 3 Amiga is just fantastic!

I have never seen PC users get into a physical fist-fight over their pentiums; or AMD users bashing Intel users in the head — but I have seen Amiga users go head to head at copy parties, beating the living daylights out of each other. You can’t buy that level of dedication, it has to be earned. I don’t think any other computer enjoy a mass of users that actually love, in the true sense of the word, every inch of their platform.

But the Amiga does.

And those that grew up on the Amiga wont rest until it’s resurrected, which incidentally can now actually become a reality.

Amiga Reloaded

I sent an Email to Individual asking them about the Amiga 1200 and if it was a part of their plan. I mean, having now finally strangled the rights to the Commodore name from the hands of vultures.

I actually got chills when I read their reply:

“The A1200 is also on the agenda, yes“

I was supposed to get into bed before midnight, but by the time the mental storm had passed I found myself messing around in UAE at 3 o’clock in the morning!

What goodies could a dedicated hardware shop like individual Computers introduce in a new Amiga? In my mind the ultimate reloaded Amiga would be something like this:

• FGPA running the show
• Stuff AGA modes into the fpga core, pure chunky out!
• A solid 512 megabyte of memory would be nice
• HDMI out
• USB for mouse
• Sata port
• WiFi on chip

The above list is just my hopes for what an A1200 Reloaded could look like. But to be perfectly honest I would be happy just being able to buy a slightly pumped up A1200 at a reasonable price. If nothing else than to stick it to the morons on ebay charging $6000 for an Amiga 1000 (its gotten way passed ridicules).

Updated: The specs

Stefan Egger pointed out that a draft of the specs are online, and sadly (if this is the working draft) it seems poor compared to my hopes. But the article does start with “The following is a preliminary specification. Things may change”. Head over to

http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Amiga_reloaded

..to read the specs.

But its still good news I think. If nothing more than to at least break the monopoly that is going on at ebay. But for me personally, if this is what they are going for, I will probably have to order a Vampire 2 accellerator before I even want to get near it.

I was seriously hoping for a “minimig” fpga in the 120-200 mhz range. Just drop the custom chips and drump that into the fpga core — which would make for a very resilient computer limited only by gate-speed and overal performance.

Oh well, at least the spare parts problem is about to solve itself 🙂

In defense of Howard Scott Warshaw

Howard Scott Warshaw was one of the lead programmers for Atari back in the eighties. While I can’t say I have followed his early career, at least not as closely as my generation’s heroes like Peter Molyneux or Sid Meyer, I knew like most people that Howard was responsible for the so-called “worst game ever”. Or that was the rumor anyways, which I first heard back in the nineties or something.

The myth goes that the 1982 E.T game was so bad, that Atari actually dumped millions of returned cartridges out in the desert somewhere in an attempt to cover up the failure. It’s turned into an X-Files type operation where the game sucked so much, that the financial losses ended up killing the once mighty entertainment giant Atari.

Howard and Steven Spielberg, roughly 6 weeks before deadline

Being a programmer myself I know how much it can hurt when you have worked for months on something, only to have 2-3 individuals tear it apart publicly. I can only imagine what it would be like to get an impossible project like the E.T game dumped in your lap, with a deadline of five weeks -only to be torn apart in front of the whole world (!). And please remember guys, this is hand-written 8 bit machine code running on a now ancient piece of hardware.

The urban legend from hell

There are variations to the myth of course, like with all urban legends. In later years Howard is said to have gone to Commodore shortly after, implying that he was actually a spy of sorts, destined to kill Atari so that Commodore could make its way into the market. Which is utter rubbish because these companies were, at that time, galaxies apart. Commodore was never a big hit in the US, it struck root primarily in England and Europe. Particularly in scandinavia. The Commodore 64 was released in august of the same year, replacing the less capable Vic-20. So a programmer would be more likely to seek employment at Atari than they would Commodore.

Raymond Kassar

Add to this the fact that Howard was actually never again able to get a job as a programmer due to the myth, should be enough to dismiss this rumor as pure urban legend.

I mean, just imagine it: How would you feel if every single person on the planet was told that your code was the worst ever written or published? Not on some minuscule forum where you at least can defend yourself or just fix the bugs as they are reported. No, we are talking universally across the globe for thirty years !

It just makes me so angry and sad for what truly is one of the best programmers Atari ever had.

Was E.T really that bad?

When I originally wrote this article I had not spent any time with the game, but shortly afterwards I decided to install an emulator and give it a try. And having been an avid technologist since I was in high-school I can honestly say that this is not the worst game of all time. Far from it. I have played thousands of games in my time, from the green-mesh that was ZX-Spectrum, through Commodore VIC-20, 64, 128 and all the way up to Amiga, PC and lately, an overpriced iMac, iPhone and iPad.

The E.T game is now a highly priced collectors item

I also own nearly every console known to mankind, missing only the Nintendo Gamecube and the Philips 3DO in my collection. So as far as games go, I am fairly confident that I have enough experience and insight to make a fair judgement. And if E.T was the worst game, I for one would not lie about it.

But let’s look at the system we are dealing with here first.

The Atari game console that Howard worked on was the Atari-2600. This is a system which in terms of features is somewhere along the lines of a Commodore VIC-20 (I believe they used the same CPU even). Just to place the hardware and capabilities in some sort of context. All games were hand written in machine-code, a task which by today’s standards is applaudable in itself. There were no C compilers, no Turbo Pascal and certainly no Delphi, Quartex Pascal or SDL libraries.

The Atari 2600, over 30 years old

Developers essentially had a primitive text-editor, less evolved than even the most low-level linux command-line variation (which I must admit that I detest), and that was it. You punched in assembly instructions and compiled with a second program. And there was no multi-tasking remember, so you had to quit the editor to compile. Just imagine how fun it was when a typo was present in line 48916 or something. Back into the editor, fix, save, exit – and try to compile again.

This is just to give you an idea of what it was like being a programmer in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

Now back to E-T and the whole “worst game” thing.

First of all, turns out that Howard had only successes up until E.T came along. Most of his games, especially the smash hit “Yar’s revenge” sold millions of copies and were immensely popular, making truckloads of cash for Atari. So Howard is absolutely not a bad coder. Quite the opposite, he was a highly skilled computer engineer; top of his class!

Yars Revenge was a smash hit and sold by the millions

The E.T project was essentially a task thrown in his lap by management, who for some reason had managed to muscle the rights to E.T from Steven Spielberg personally. So Howard got the great honor of writing a complete self-contained gaming world in just five weeks. That is insane by any standards, and no matter how good you are at coding – five weeks is just madness. Even a small title could not be completed in that time, let alone a ROM image trying to capture the essence of a movie success like E.T.

Sure, these games rarely had dedicated graphics artists. The graphics was blocky pixels that were defined in the sourcecode as bit-masks. So when we talk about development time for a game, it was shorter than Amiga or PC games which required more elaborate graphics, something that is often the most time consuming aspect of building a title. But still, five weeks?

And E.T was huge. If you think Star-Wars is big and all the commercialism around it is awesome, well with E.T you can triple that. So if you released all 3 initial star-wars movies at the same time, then you will have a good idea of how big E.T actually was.

You could hardly walk into a mall or store without some piece of E.T merchandise being offered. From posters to puppets, pencil cases, nap-sacks, bed-sheets, lamps, T-shirts (I loved mine to death and actually sold my BB gun just to buy the T-Shirt), shoes — everything which could be stamped with an E.T image or name was branded and sold. It was a billion dollar orchestration on a global scale.

So. Can you imagine the pressure and commercial anticipation for the computer game? The world was in a E.T frenzy, and every child in the western hemisphere was counting down for christmas, hoping to find the game under the tree.

The blame game

I think it’s so sad for Howard that people still talk about E.T as “the worst game of all time”. It’s worse than sad, it’s almost heartbreaking – even though I have never met the man.

It’s simply not true. E.T is not the worst game at all. From what I saw when testing this, it’s absolutely not deserving of such a title. And I know this because I lived with the alternatives. Hell I had a ton of C64 games on Turbo-Tape which just sucked the marrow from your bones every time. The way it worked back then was that you could get bootleg games on tape. Normal music cassettes. That was how games for the Commodore 64, Spectrum and all those early “home computer kits” were distributed and sold.

Howard at his developer station

You had a tape recorder hooked up to your computer, and the analog sounds from the casettes were transformed into digital patterns (data). If you ever had a PC in the 90’s you most likely remember the strange sounds it made when connecting to the internet? Well, that sound is the analog version of digital data. And that technology has only recently been replaced by fiber-optics. In some parts of the world modems are still used, like south america, Africa and regions of the middle-east.

Cut from CG magazine

Anyways, hackers existed back then as well and you could get bootleg versions of games and programs in compressed form (a bit like winzip or rar in our age) using a packer called Turbo. Turbo allowed you to stuff 10 games into the space of a single, un-compressed game. So what we did was put as many as 50 games on a 60 minute tape. These tapes were called “Turbo Tape’s”.

You would not believe some of the games that were sold for these computers; computers which were en-par with and better than the Atari’s 2600. And judging by E.T’s gameplay, it’s a much higher quality production than the early Commodore offerings I enjoyed as a child growing up in the so called “wealthiest country in the world” Norway (I still havent seen much of that wealth, I guess it’s only for politicians and other species of rodent).

So whenever someone says that E.T is the worst game ever made — just tell them that it’s not true. It’s a stupid urban legend that has practically destroyed a very accomplished programmer’s career and haunted him for 30 years. It’s a total lie and any gamer or programmer with half a conscience intact should stamp the myth out utterly.

Atari as a company was massive, with thousands of employees and hundreds of programmers. So the myth that E.T sucked so much that it toppled an entire industry is a joke at best. And what a complete disaster for Howard which until recently have been carrying this label around, unable to get even a clerical job in the computer game industry because of it. People dont care that he was in fact one of the best coders at Atari and that his games sold in their millions. They all remember him through the E.T myth. It has been a clear case of character assassination from day one.

From what my reading has availed, Howard had re-invented himself and is now a “silicon valley head doctor”. It makes sense to have a programmer who speaks geek fluently to also be a doctor. And considering what he’s been through thanks to this stupid myth, he no doubt have a lot of wisdom to share with stressed out programmers who need help to deal with the problems we all face in life. A lesser man would have thrown himself in front of the metro for carrying such a label, but not Howard. A testament to his character and ability to find solutions.

A global apology

Howard Scott Warshaw, modern photo

The gaming community at large owes Howard an apology. Especially teenagers who have absolutely no insight into what software development is, nor would they have the skill or intelligence to produce anything like what Howard did back then. Even if they worked for years on it, they would not be able to re-produce what Howard did in just five weeks.

Nothing provokes me more than a 15-year-old kid thrashing stuff he doesn’t even know how works. He sits there with his X-Box or Playstation and acts like he – based on his wast experience – had the right to thrash talk anything and everyone. Youth is wasted on the young Plato once wrote, and nowhere is it more evident than in the mentality of spoiled western teenagers.

In all fairness the Kassar family and even Warner Bros themselves should write a huge check for Howard; for damages endured over a period of 30 odd years. It must have been practical to have a scapegoat to blame for their poor business decisions; but eventually the truth comes out.

I also hope Howard one day receives the recognition he so deeply deserves, not for the five-week marathon that he incredibly enough delivered on — but for all the games he built prior to that, and for the fact that he was a pioneer. No one had done these things before. There were no books on coding games or courses you could take. These guys at Atari were the first to venture into a purely abstract science expressed through electronics; And they went in there armed only with their own ideas and ability to solve problems.

Well Howard, I can’t give you a huge check, nor can I give you an award — except to say that I will do my best to stamp out this lie which has haunted you for so many years. And I hope others who read this does the same.

Facts unearthed

Turns out that a movie about this was made a year or two back, called “Atari: Game Over” which deals with the subject directly. In the movie they film as the desert graveyard where the so-claimed millions of games were burried, is exhumed. Turns out it contained very little E.T games! Instead some of the biggest Atari sellers were buried out there.

So what has been called a coverup and scandal, was nothing more than Atari cleaning out their storage space. No doubt to save money. Yet it ended up as a myth that killed the career of an excellent and innocent developer.

Here is a link to the movie “Atari: Game over” which can now be seen on NetFlix.

Howard at the excavation site, digging up E.T from the desert

Building an Amiga for $40 with Raspberry PI and UAE4All

Right. As most readers probably know by now, I absolutely love the idea of re-furnishing old computers to their former glory. I tend to buy second-hand computers and technology and turn them into something useful and modern, or at least something the original designers didn’t consider when they made it. Like my $43 Apple G4 with dual monitors, a kit I turned into a MorphOS powerhouse – that is presently running a custom synapse (FreePascal coded) file-server.

Well, I’ve had a Raspberry PI floating around the place for a whole year now; It was originally something I bought for my 11 year old son in a desperate hope that he would fancy a DIY project with his old man. But sadly I have capitulated to the power of minecraft and the fact that he is more a “soccer kid” than a programmer. I love him either way, but I hope to initiate him into the mysteries of code – which have given my life so much joy. Especially in my childhood, playing games and trying to make them using Blitz basic 🙂

The RPI mini computer, size of a pack of cigarettes

Either way, yesterday I was shopping when came across a special offer on 5V re-chargable batteries, the models meant to re-charge your iPhone. So each battery holds enough juice to fill an empty phone when you’re on the road. I suddenly remembered that the voltage and amp was identical to the Raspberry PI, and since you could chain-connect several batteries together via USB->USB MINI connectors  I figured if I got a couple of them the PI could run on them.

And work it did! I was actually able to get 6 full hours of “mobile” activity from the Raspberry PI with just two batteries (!). Which is en-par with any modern laptop of portable touch device (IPad, Android Pad). I also stopped by an electronic’s store and picked up a USB splitter – turning the meager 2 USB slots on the classical Raspberry PI into a 6 slot connectivity monster.

Tip: A rule of thumb if you want a “portable Amiga” is to add one battery to the chain per USB device you have connected that requires power. Keyboard and mouse doesn’t require much, but count one battery (a total of 2 so far). Add two more batteries if you use a USB disk drive, and a single battery if you use a Wi-FI dongle or a USB stick. So for an RPI with keyboard, mouse, external 512 gig disk and a wi-fi dongle: count 5 chained batteries.

Tip 2: Save your sanity and buy a pack of those cheap wireless keyboard and mouse. It requires very little power on the RPI and you dont have cables all over the place. Especially in your living room where your wife will no doubt comment after a while 🙂

Top 3: If your TV has an USB plug, buy a USB to mini-usb cable, then use the USB on your TV to power your RPI (!) It works brilliantly and once again saves you a power cable. With this in place you only need the HDMI cable and your’re ready to rock.

Linux to the rescue

One of the cool things about Linux these days is that it’s driver database has grown huge over the past 7-8 years. It used to be that getting anything at all to work on linux, let alone “off the shelves” windows hardware, was nearly impossible. I vividly remember having a (then) high-end gaming PC with the latest Mattrox graphics card (the type you could buy 2 or 3 and chain them with fire-wire optical cables for extreme performance) + Soundblaster 16, but when I tried to install RedHat Linux I ended up with a bog-standard VESA driver! That was such a disappointment that I did not touch linux for 8 years.

Well those days are long gone and most modern Linux distro’s are able to recognize whatever you throw at it. Since I picked up Ubuntu and started using it full-time I have yet to find a single piece of hardware that it cant work with. Which is brilliant! Especially the source-based drivers that (in theory) should work on all distros as long as it uses the driver API to talk with the hardware.

Either way — this meant that getting the Raspberry PI to recognize keyboard, mouse, external drive and even my printer (!) was actually easier than on my spankingly new Mac! You plug it in and seconds later it’s ready to go.

Memories of Amiga

I must admit that I miss my Amiga a lot. Im now 41 years old but when I think about my Amiga, which I clung to until the last moment, only selling it in 1995 due to Microsoft Office requirement in college, I get all warm and fuzzy inside. It’s the same emotion you experience when you meet “that special someone from the past, she that got away”. I guess it’s common knowledge that people who grew up with Amiga’s are extremely passionate about it – bordering on fundamentalism. And this is decades after it’s gone out of production (!).

There are crimes in the history of technology; VHS vs. Betamax was one of them – but the absolute worst crime in computing history – en par with the extinction of a the west-indies by a hoard of drunken sailors in the 1600’s, will always be the unjust death of the Amiga. We would inhabit a very different technological world had Commodore survived to this day, that is for sure. It would be faster, easier and far more friendly than anything we have today. Nor would it be driven by megalomaniac psychopaths like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Although Petro Tyschtschenko can give you a nasty scare if you meet him holding “the walker” prototype in a dark alley somewhere.

Right – here are few things people may not know about the Amiga:

• You could buy VR (virtual reality) equipment based on Amiga Tech 20 years ago. VR is not new nor is it innovative, it all started with the Amiga
• TV series Babylon 5 used Amiga for all it’s graphics
• LucasArts used Amiga 4000 render-farms
• Nasa loved the Amiga and had a ton of them, they were also used in a couple of satellites!
• While Microsoft Windows could barely run calculator and notepad simultaneously, the Amiga had full preemptive multitasking
• AmigaOS was architected after UNIX and is extremely resource sufficient; running a full multi-window desktop, multitasking with far better performance than Mac’s and PC’s at a meager 1 megabyte of ram and 14Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU. That’s like a 14 year old beating Mike Tyson
• It was only when PC’s adopted graphics accelerators and 3D hardware that Amiga’s struggled to keep up
• PPC accelerator cards were made to make up for it, but commodore screwed up the marketing
• Ultimately the Amiga died due to neglect by Commodore, which filed for bankruptcy
• After the demise of the Amiga, the MC68000 CPU’s were mainly used in washing-machines (auch!)

Turning a PI into an Amiga

Looking at the specs of the $35 Rasperry PI mini-computer we find that in a raw head-to-head comparison of CPU power (which is really unfair to the Raspberry, because the Amiga’s strength was it’s integrated custom chipset) it is head over heals beyond anything the Amiga had. The Amiga 500 had 512Kb ram, the low-end RPI has 512 megabyte ram (1024 times more!). The CPU is a single-core ARM processor running at 700Mhz, but most people overclock it to 1Ghz. I can only imagine how the PI would run if Amiga OS was ported whole-heartedly over. Amiga OS natively compiled for that hardware would run rings around an average, modern PC.

Ta-Da! Less than $50 for a portable Amiga? Take that Amiga INC!

So, how could I turn my now battery powered Raspberry PI into an Amiga? Well, I have to turn to emulation. And in order to get that working I need Linux. So I went over to the Raspberry PI website and downloaded the noobs disk image, plugged in a network cable and installed Debian (I also tried the fedora port, but Debian gave the best speed). I used the apt-get package manager to update the system, plugged in a wireless USB dongle so i could finally ditch the cable — and voila! I had a “mobile” Raspberry with wireless capabilities. Oh and I had a ordinary USB keyboard and mouse in all the time. Just in case you think I did this via telepathy.

Setting up the emulation

Next was the Amiga emulator, which comes in many flavors and forks. Once again i googled the best option and found a custom variation of Amiga4All on the RPI website. I downloaded the package and installed it.

Next, I needed a few things:

• Original ROM files from the Amiga
• Disk images of games, Workbench (the Amiga desktop) and harddisk’s

Well, considering the amount of money I have invested in Amiga’s during my teens I felt no shame visiting my local torrent and grabbing a massive 8 gigabyte ISO with everything. And I mean everything, including all the ROM files ever made for the Amiga (and then some! Even the failed Commodore inventions like the CDTV was there).

I took the Flash-Card out of the RPI and plugged it into my Mac, then copied the ROM files to the “roms” folder, and the disk images to the games folder. I also separated the floppy images from the harddisk images so it would be easier to work with.

Adapting Linux

Next, having booted back into Linux on the RPI, I edited the config file and removed the statement “startx” (towards the end of the config file) which is the command that starts the desktop under Linux (I presume this is universal, but I’m really new to Linux so there may be variations). I replaced it with the command-line call to start UAE instead – pointing it to the first game I ever bought as a kid: Rocket Ranger (I later discovered that you could disable the desktop completely when you install, but picking “text mode” instead of desktop-display).

To be perfectly frank I never thought it would work “just like that”, because I have only 3 weeks on hands-on experience with Linux (Ubuntu) so I was prepared to drone over esoteric man-files and asking people online. But to my big surprise, I 6-10 seconds later I was looking at the Cinemaware logo on my spanking new 55″ LED TV. Boy did I jump! I even got sound, although it was slightly jerky.

I went back in and had a look at the UAE config, turned on JIT, set “drop frames” to 1 (it was set to 3). I also set sound to mono, because I’m not that into music anyhow. And that was it — it worked just like my old Amiga (!)

Setting up WB

Next step was to see if any of the Workbench HD images worked, and indeed they did! It’s actually faster to use Workbench under emulation – than to use Arch Linux compiled for Raspberry (oh yes, I tested that distro as well, and it was barely usable at all).

Overclocking

A major speed boost is the over-clocking feature. You simply edit the RPI boot config and set over-clocking to max (see article on doing this here) and the CPU runs at 1Ghz, which is a great improvement from the default 700MHz. I have yet to find a game which runs worse than the original Amiga — and I’m guessing it’s not even hardware accelerated.

As you probably know the RPI comes with a proper GPU, which is how it can play HD video. If UAE was to use this there is no doubt — the RPI would replicate the old Amiga down to the letter, but with more power, more ram and full driver support for modern hardware.

Well, I hope my little adventure interested you!