The Sinclair QL Forum

Peter wrote:

mk79 wrote:

Peter wrote:Is it done by RPi GPIO oder did they at least use the SMI bus?

There doesn't appear to be any schematic, but according to the sources it's a simple 16-bit GPIO interface.

Probably wrong, according to a post on English Amiga board" http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=104462 PiStorm at least uses the SMI bus. That would make the 68000 bus interface significantly better. But overall, it's still a Linux box in most aspects.

Slightly more appealing to me would be the Buffee solution https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=105641 which also comes with 68000 socket. That one just provides a fast CPU and memory but does not depend on a fullblown Linux system.

Probably a trade-off design desicion between fast real-time CPU emulation and easy access to OS services for hard disk and network, USB, whatever, emulation. The PiStorm seems to be really good at the latter and obviously seems to benefit from its non-bare metal code.

Peter wrote:

mk79 wrote:

Peter wrote:Is it done by RPi GPIO oder did they at least use the SMI bus?

There doesn't appear to be any schematic, but according to the sources it's a simple 16-bit GPIO interface.

Probably wrong, according to a post on English Amiga board" http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=104462 PiStorm at least uses the SMI bus.

The sources do not agree with that assessment. It uses the normal GPIO registers.

Slightly more appealing to me would be the Buffee solution https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=105641 which also comes with 68000 socket. That one just provides a fast CPU and memory but does not depend on a fullblown Linux system.

That looks nice, yes.

mk79 wrote:

Peter wrote:

mk79 wrote:There doesn't appear to be any schematic, but according to the sources it's a simple 16-bit GPIO interface.

Probably wrong, according to a post on English Amiga board" http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=104462 PiStorm at least uses the SMI bus.

The sources do not agree with that assessment. It uses the normal GPIO registers.

No, I checked the logic sources myself, look at the SMI bus pinout: Haven't seen the software, but if the hardware supports SMI, it has at least the option to do so.

Peter wrote:<>
Slightly more appealing to me would be the Buffee solution https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=105641 which also comes with 68000 socket. That one just provides a fast CPU and memory but does not depend on a fullblown Linux system.

"The optimistic goal is about a 3.2GHz 68030 which is around 1,000 MIPS"!

Hi,

The project seems a good idea, as the Amiga A500 is hard to expand, so PiStorm look ideal, for Amiga A500 addon.

The 4 layer PCBs are available on JLPCB, but a high volume order would be required to reduce the price and of course the soldering of the parts to the board.

Personally I will wait they are in production, to fit to my 3 A500 computers with a view to selling them.

A QL version might nice but the low level routines to access the hardware will have to written.

Derek_Stewart wrote: The project seems a good idea, as the Amiga A500 is hard to expand, so PiStorm look ideal, for Amiga A500 addon.

Not that hard, it has that big expansion slot on one side

Someone has brought down boot time of the PiStorm down to 7 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2iAVPZ6tdI
That makes it appear less like software emulation.

Peter wrote:Someone has brought down boot time of the PiStorm down to 7 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2iAVPZ6tdI
That makes it appear less like software emulation.

I'm not sure if they are using the EMU68 replacement emulator in that video since the speed shown on SysInfo doesn't go off the chart...but EMU68 is supposed to be a "bare metal" 68K emulator (so no Linux) for the PI...different than what PiStorm used before (MUSHASHI 68K emulator).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw6IG1cOxWc

I have also seen MUSHASHI based solution, which just cuts boot time by using a stripped down Linux. Unfortunately I forgot the name of that Linux distro.

I haven't scanned the PiStorm Discord server in a while but took a look today. Seems right before X-mas there was a bit of discussion to push for a 68008 inclusion (user fogofwar). I'm curious if it had that support and you kept it at 7.5Mhz if you could easily interface to the CPU socket and then just see what you'd get (i.e. so no speed up but wifi, memory, SD, etc...)

Edit: oh, I suppose you'd have to add that low level hardware interface support, now that I think about it...