Pistorm operation

[ZXDunny]

@boingball when you said "What you have to remember that if running directly from a floppy disk, then the SD card on the Pistorm32 doesn’t run first." is kinda ... wrong?

With a slow Pi (like the Pi4) installed, the system will indeed boot correctly from the floppy for a few seconds before the PiStorm gets its legs under it and takes over the system, causing the boot process to restart.

It will then restart the floppy boot process but this time Emu68 will be in the driving seat - as well as the replacement kickstart ROM, the extra Fast RAM etc etc. Booting a floppy won't cause a properly set up Emu68 partition to fail to boot - that part will still happen.

Edit: Ninja's by Kolla

[ZXDunny]

Did you, or did you not, say:

What you have to remember that if running directly from a floppy disk, then the SD card on the Pistorm32 doesn’t run first.

I mean, that's pretty much assuming that the SD card will be overridden by a floppy, and that this would then prevent Emu68 from booting. I don't think there's any other way to interpret what you said - even if you insist that the SD card must not be present after the fact.

[ZXDunny]

So again, I will ask you. Did you read the posts?

Of course I did, you've made quite a name for yourself in the PiStorm community with this, I'd literally forgotten I had an account here now!

I have to say though opening up your Amiga to remove the SD card so you can go back to stock is quite the bold move.

Edit: I am reminded that there is indeed a stealth mode for the PiStorm that would serve much better than trying to run the accelerator without an Emu68/FAT32 partition present - the long press on the ol' three-finger death grip will disable the PiStorm temporarily until the next power-cycle. That would get floppy-only games into much better shape compatibility-wise, but you would indeed lose the benefits of FastRAM and a quick 68k CPU.

All in all, it is probably easier to run the game through WHDLoad, assuming a slave exists.

[ZXDunny]

So the fact you need a FAT32 partition with a windows format for the EMU68 files and then AMIGA partition such as FastFileSystem or PFS3 etc.. For the AmigaOS Installation.

Strictly speaking you don't need either of those. You can have your Fat32 partition on a bootable USB drive plugged into the Pi (the Pi needs to boot from something after all, so that Emu68 can start), and your AmigaOS installation can be on any device the Amiga can boot from - plenty of people boot from an IDE CF card adapter rather than the SD card in the Pi.

You can put all those on the SD card if you like - it's the recommended setup - but it's not set in stone.

[ZXDunny]

There's a huge amount of misinformation about what the PiStorm is and what it isn't, about how it behaves and what it does. There's no shame in getting it wrong from time to time, we've all been there.