Raspberry Pi and an A500 expansion thought experiment

[psxphill]

I was thinking about if you could route a Pi3 thru a vampire and be able to use 3.9 and Linux at the same time.

You can have 3.9 and Linux at the same time if the Pi isn't connected to the a500 at all.

Or you could run Linux on the a500.

[psxphill]

Linux on a 68k? Old Linux is of no interest to me, something a bit faster and more productive is what I had in mind.

Port a modern Linux to 68k and run it on Vampire.

Rpi isn't particularly fast and connecting it to an a500 would not make it better.

An Arm chip on an a500 expansion is slightly more interesting, although it would have no software so a vampire is much better.

[psxphill]

Anyways, a rPi runs in circles around Apollo core, so I don't see your point.

Use an rPi then, but it makes zero sense trying to combine it with an a500. What are you going to do hook the a500 up with rs232? That sounds modern (http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/siamese).

You could use an Ethernet card on your a500, but you're still not really integrating the two together. You've just created a LAN.

An RDP server for Amiga would be interesting as you could use the rPi for video output, but you could also use a PC. You could also run an X server on the a500 and connect the rPi to it, so you can output Linux software to 4 colour ECS. It might be fun for a few minutes, although it will be really slow (even slower if you run 8 or 16 colour). At least the software for that has been around for 20 years already.

Hopefully as some point Apollo will wake up and support the 060 MMU so you can use Linux too (well you can use Linux without an MMU but some things don't work https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/nommu-mmap.txt)

I hope that eventually Vampire supports Wifi somehow.

[psxphill]

Was thinking of something a bit more like Amikit's "Alice". To be able to go back and forth without switching OS.

Run an emulator like Alice on the rPi then. Maybe you could convince amikit to get it ported. Something like Siamese RTG over RS232 is the only way you'd get anywhere near close, good luck getting someone to write that code (if you can track down the Siamese source code then you may stand a chance).

[psxphill]

Maybe, in the future some expansion connector on the vampire. Won't hold my breath.

I think the best you could hope for is Ethernet. I'm surprised nobody has made one for the a500 tbh.

[psxphill]

I don't have the technical know-how to do this - but i am reminded of the nay-sayers regarding Majsta's FPGA pursuits. They said it couldn't be done - yet he persevered and he proved them wrong. Someone who has the desire , enough time , money and will power to give this a shot!

Who said it couldn't be done? I don't know anyone that he has proved wrong.

Using a raspberry pi to respond to 68000 bus cycles using gpio is pretty crazy. I won't say it can't be done, but any result will probably not work very well. Those IO Pi Plus 32 channels are connected to i2c, I don't think desire/time/money/will power will cut it. You could stick a bridge between the amiga and the pi, which may as well be Ethernet. It would be pretty cheap to make an a500 PIO Ethernet adapter, a DMA one would be preferable and likely more costly.

What irks me is that a quad core 1.2Ghz ARM Pi3 with 1GB ram, 6 USB ports, serial I/O, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, microSD slot, Ethernet and HDMI output and can run Kodi costs $35 but we can't create a 100Mhz Amiga for less than $500....

Are you kidding me?

If you could create an amiga that was as cheap to manufacture as a raspberry pi and would also sell the five million the raspberry pi has sold. Then you could get one for $35 dollars. The raspberry pi is just an existing chip put on a board though, so the development cost was low. Therefore you'd need to figure out how to get someone to design all the chips and masks for free.

Give me a billion dollars and I'll build you a 1ghz $35 dollar amiga which would be the same as a PI but feature 68060 and SAGA. If you want an actual computer you may want pci express and possibly pci/zorro (although those may be better suited as external bridges).