Raspberry Pi & Amiga

More details on a new page here Hardware: Rasberry Pi & Amiga

Most people in the tech world know about this tiny all in one Arm powered computer, price from as low as £7 for the pi zero. There has been many interesting little projects that have come out of the Pi thanks to its low power, size and cost. One of the more popular uses of Pi hardware is to emulate the old 80s and 90s Computers, this also includes the Amiga, even the Pi Zero is (just about) powerful enough to run A500 games. However its the slightly more powerful Pi, the Pi 4 and recently launched Pi400 (a all in one computer inside of a keyboard just like the popular Amiga500) where it has more than enough power to emulate the fastest Amiga (even out performing the recent Vampire v4).

Some might not like to think of this computer or emulator as a future of the Amiga, however I feel the more advance the emulation has become the more I do see this as a viable Amiga future, yes it be nice to have a native operating system and native applications, but I do feel we are just a bit too small of a community to keep up with the partiality fast moving part of the computer industry such as the world of web browser. So why would emulation be the solution, well thanks to years of development you can pretty much emulate 99.9% of all apps and games without any problem on various machine, however a very targeted emulation program on specific hardware could be improved even more, like the Pi is getting.

Thanks to developments like Rabbit Hole as well Amiga emulated systems can now run apps from the host os from within the Amiga emulated environment, this can make them feel part of the original system. So you can pretend that Amiga has programs like Chrome! There are already a few Pi dedicated Sd card packs for the Amiga nuts, below are two of the most popular ones.

Pi4 and Pi400 support is only going to improving with time, and new solutions like Ami-Hybrid, Aros Arm, Amikit are all being worked on for the system.

So the Amiga support of these Arm boards has a pretty bright future and I am for one intrested in how this might make bring back old users and new out side of the Amiga market to get them back to there favourite platform or at the very least give a very low cost solution for Amiga users to have one of the better classic Amiga experices.

I will likly write up a second report on how these new solution work on the Pi400 when I get one (wich I hope to get at some point this year).

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