BYOPC: Raspberry Pi 3 + Amiga (Premium)

As you may know, I was a long-time Amiga user, and I remain a fan of this innovative platform. There will never be another computer like it, and the Amiga is the only computing platform I've ever used for which I am still truly nostalgic. Someone noted on Twitter the other day that the Amiga was the first computer with a soul. I added that it was also the last.

So what made Amiga so special?

First, it offered capabilities---like multiprocessing and true multitasking---that PCs and Macs wouldn't gain for decades. And it provided 4096 colors and unique video and multimedia functionality at a time when the the PC was mostly text with 16 colors and the Mac was black and white.

Second, and this was key for a young man who grew up on the Commodore 64 and computers that were as powerful as game machines as they were as computers, the Amiga was an astonishingly-good game machine that offered bitblit, sprite, parallax scrolling, and stereo sound capabilities at a time when the PC and Mac were, of course, laughable in this regard. The Amiga's innards were initially aimed at arcade game machines, and this computer was the first to provide better graphics and sound than actual arcade machines.

I could go on, but better men than me have already documented this wonderful system. If you're looking for a complete history of the Amiga, I strongly recommend Commodore: The Amiga Years by Brian Bagnall, which I previously backed on Kickstarter. It's the definitive history, as told by the people who were really there. Fans will also want to check out Viva Amiga, a 60-minute documentary that is available on iTunes, Amazon Video, Google, and other services.

20 years later, the Amiga is still impressive in many ways. But today's PCs and Macs can easily emulate any Amiga, even the high-end models that I never owned because they were so expensive. In fact, there is a great emulation package called Amiga Forever ($10 to $50, depending on the version), which I own and recommend. This provides access to VMs of all Amiga models and the ability to run Amiga apps and games on them. As important for the purposes of this BYOPC project, Amiga Forever also provides legal versions of the Amiga ROMs, which include both BIOS-like Kickstart ROMs and Workbench (OS) ROMs.

Which means that, yes, even a lowly Raspberry Pi 3---whose processor is so unsophisticated that it is literally immune to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities---is powerful enough to emulate any Amiga. That such a thing is possible in such a tiny package says a lot about the passage of time and the incredible advances that technology has made since the 1980's. In some ways, this is as miraculous today as was the original Amiga back in 1985.

In recreating the Amiga in a modern mini-PC like the Raspberry Pi 3, there are two basic approaches, I think. You could try to build something you might actually use as a general purpose computer, which I don't think makes any sense given the immaturit...