piStorm – getting started with Emu68

In this guide, which will be my shortest ever, I explain how to get started with the Emu68 barebone JIT emulator for the piStorm.

Resources

Emu68 for piStorm Nightly build

The shortest instructions ever 🙂

Download the latest nightly build of early alpha Emu68 for piStorm from the resource above. You should be looking for a file named “Emu68-pistorm-20211106-9c3186.zip” or similar (note that the files are sorted in forward alphabetically order, and the latest are a bit down on the list).

Extract the files to the root of a fat32-formatted SD-card.

Copy your Amiga kickstart file to the root of that card.

Edit the configuration file (config.txt) and set the kickstart file name (last line in the included config file):

...
# PiStorm variant - use initramfs to map selected rom
initramfs kick.rom

Insert the SD-card in your pi3a+ mounted to the piStorm. Power on the Amiga and enjoy the extremely short startup time 🙂

The setup is now ready for boot from floppy (although many games does not work yet, at least not booting from floppy, but Workbench floppies do, as the Install3.2 disk to install AmigaOS onto a hard drive).

Installing AmigaOS on a hard drive (partition on SD-card)

For hard drive setup, there will be more steps involved, such as partitioning the sd-card into at least one boot partition and one or more Amiga partitions.

piStorm – Preparing the SD-card for Emu68

7 thoughts to “piStorm – getting started with Emu68”

    1. If the HDMI output shows the Emu68 logo then it’s probably ok, except that you might have tested with the 3.2 kickstart ?
      3.2 (not 3.2.1) is known to show only a black screen with a hard drive available (as with the SD-cards’ Amiga-partition) but not bootable, and without any floppy inserted.. If the floppy drive clicks and waits for a disk, just insert one and boot. You should probably start with the OS install floppy in this case.
      Other reasons for things not working might be you got a bad “nightly” build of the Emu68.img binary. So just download a new one and try again.
      Double and triple check the file names in the config file (KS ROM and “kernel”=Emu68.img)

    2. I had the same issue and i found out that i downloaded the wrong file. Make sure you got the file named Emu68-PiStorm-xxxxxxxx.zip and not the Emu68-raspi-xxxxxxxx.zip

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