An Amiga Emulator for the Raspberry Pi
Amiga Upgrade
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Turn your Raspberry Pi 500 into an Amiga 500 with the Pimiga 5 Amiga emulator and gain access to a huge selection of Amiga games, demos, and applications.
One of the last popular home computers was the Commodore Amiga. Its several models, produced from 1985 to 1996, included keyboard computers (A500, A600, and A1200) and desktops/tower cases (A1000, A2000, A3000, A4000). They were all based on a Motorala 68000 or better processor (e.g., the 68030 or 68040). In comparison to the mostly text-mode, IBM-compatible PCs, they offered astonishing graphical features. The AmigaOS operating system allowed multitasking, and the machines booted into the Workbench desktop environment.
Still very popular in the retro computing scene, you'll find several active projects that work on emulating these machines, either in software or in Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware, including:
- THEA500 Mini [1]: Created by Retro Games Ltd., this emulation is a miniaturized replica of the A500 with a nonfunctional keyboard, a game controller, and a mouse. While it's primarily intended to run classic Amiga games, you can get Workbench to run, attach a USB keyboard, and then use all the available software. The machine runs the Amiberry emulator on an ARM chip.
- THEA1200 [2]: Also from Retro Games Ltd., you can currently pre-order this full-size replica of the Amiga 1200, which includes a working keyboard and Workbench out of the box.
- MiST and MiSTer FPGA: The MiST project [3], whose name is a combination of Mi (Amiga) and ST (Atari ST), primarily emulates the two machines on the Altera Cyclone III FPGA, though there are further cores for many other machines. A more popular (and more powerful) successor is MiSTer FPGA [4], which uses the bigger Altera Cyclone V FPGA on the Terasic DE10-Nano board. It also provides a good Amiga core, but there's a stronger focus on gaming consoles like the PlayStation 1 (PS1) and the Neo Geo, as well as on classic arcade machines.
- Software emulators: WinUAE [5], the WinUAE fork Amiberry [6], and FS-UAE [7] let you run classic and modernized versions of the Amiga desktop on various hardware platforms, including Windows and Linux PCs, Apple Macs, and Raspberry Pis.
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