Raspberry Pi Fuels PiStorm and Lazarustorm External Performance Boost for Amiga 500
The venerable Commodore Amiga 500 has an incredibly popular scene these days. Many users refuse to give up on the slab of plastic!
One of those who refuses to give up on the Amiga is Arananet, who has created the Lazarustorm PCB that breaks out PiStorm (an accelrator to really turbo-charge your A500) to inteface with the Zorro II slot on the left side of the A500. No fiddly hacks inside the case, just connect Lazarustorm to the slot, and your A500 gets a much need boost.
Image Credit: Arananet
Lazarustorm brings a completely reversible mod, all of the soldering — bar one solder joint on the A500 — is on the Lararustorm PCB. You will need a PiStorm and a Raspberry Pi 3A. PiStorm provides an interface between the Raspberry Pi and your Amiga. The Pi is there to emulate a Motorola 68000 CPU at a much higher clock speed! As an added bonus, the micro SD card can be used to create virtual hard disks for your huge collection of games and utilities.
Upgrading the CPU on an Amiga 500 was damn near impossible, but fast forward to the 21st century and the ability to mimic a more powerful CPU was made possible with PiStorm and a Raspberry Pi 3A+. Yes, this combination could super-charge your Amiga 500 to ludicrous speeds, but you had to get your hands dirty and desolder the Motorola CPU. With Lazarustorm, we don't have to do too much soldering, thats because the Zorro II slot, hidden on the left side of the Amiga 500 and 500+, directly connect to the CPU. In its heyday, the Zorro II slot provided access for add-ons such as an Intel 286 PC "sidecar" board, RAM expansion and even SCSI hard drives. I had a GVP unit that brought all three of these features and provided a faster CPU, but that cost a fortune back in the 1990s! PiStorm is much cheaper and also much faster!
Amiga and retro computing enthusiast TME Retro has a great video showcasing the full install process.
The Commodore Amiga 500 has a special place in my heart and my computing history. I got the famous Batman pack which coincided with the release of Tim Burton's Batman and the video game. My parents bought it for me from Alan Heywoods in Blackpool, along with a ten-pack of games. It was my first computer with a mouse, heck, I learnt how to use a mouse with my Amiga 500 and Amiganoid (an Arkanoid / Breakout clone). For its time, the Amiga 500 was a beast, made up of custom chips and a Motorola 68000 CPU that ran between 7.09 MHz (PAL) and 7.16 MHz (NTSC).
Head over to Arananet's GitHub repository to get all the details and Gerber files to make your own Lazarustorm boards!
Main image is a still taken from TME Retro's YouTube video.