Emulating the Commodore Amiga on the Raspberry Pi #VintageComputing #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi @Device_Plus_en
In the late 80s and early 90s, the Commodore Amiga was the dream computer. In a time of beeps and boops and screens with 16 colors, it brought jaw dropping graphics and sound. The Amiga was the ultimate home computer, with thousands of colours, 4 channels of sound, and a powerful Motorola 68000 CPU backed by 3 custom-built co-processors.
The common reason to revisit it is to play the games. It was originally designed purely as a gaming machine, although it didn’t take long to become a full computer. Many of the seminal games of the era were coded for the Amiga first, while other platforms received a port of lesser quality.
The Amiga wasn’t just for games though. It has a huge historical value. There is a fair argument that Deluxe Paint is the real beginning of professional graphic art and design on a home computer – the Mac was still monochrome at this point. Also of particular interest is the Amiga demo scene: a community of hobbyists who created software demonstrations of artistic, musical and programming skill.
It’s now easy to visit this world using a Raspberry Pi! You can use just about any Pi for this project and it’ll run, but for good performance a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4 is preferable.
Device Plus has a guide to how to set up the software on a Pi to emulate different Amiga computers with free software called Amiberry.
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