BYOPC: Assembling the Amiga Pi 3 (Premium)

My Raspberry Pi 3 kit arrived over the weekend as promised, so I began the process of turning it into a tiny Amiga computer.

I wrote about these plans a few days ago, in BYOPC: Raspberry Pi 3 + Amiga (Premium). Today, I'm detailing the first steps I took in transforming this kit into a working Amiga mini-PC. Meaning, that I put it all together and booted the system for the first time.

The CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit - 32 GB Edition I ordered from Amazon.com contains all of the hardware you need for any basic Raspberry Pi 3 projects, minus the keyboard, mouse, and display that would be required for anything PC-like. (And minus the joystick or gamepad you will need to play games.) It's a great value, as it includes a Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B) board PC, a case, a power supply, a 32 GB microSD card and USB adapter (so you can use it more easily with any PC), and an HDMI cable for video.

With these components, you have the makings of a small and somewhat underpowered Raspberry Pi 3-based PC running Raspian or some other Linux derivative. This process is relatively straightforward and is well-documented on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website and elsewhere.

Making a basic Raspberry Pi 3-based Amiga is a bit more difficult, which is what makes it more interesting as a project. As some have noted in the comments to the previous article, the basic process here is similar to creating any Pi 3-based emulator, and there are various early computer and game machine environments out there for those interested in such things.

But my focus is the Amiga, the only computer for which I'm truly nostalgic. Here's how I got started.
Download and install the software
Before you can do anything else, you need to download the following items to your Windows PC and, where applicable, install the resulting applications.

SD Memory Card Formatter. This is the official tool from the SD Association. You should use this, and not Windows, to format the microSD card that the Raspberry Pi 3 uses.
Amibian. This is the Amibian system software in 7-Zip format. You will need to extract this before you can write it to the microSD card.
7-Zip. This is used to extract the Amibian image. (It can also be used later to extract the Amiga games you acquired with Amiga Forever, below.)
Amiga Forever Plus. This is where you can legally get the Amiga system ROMs, not to mention over 50 Amiga games. Note that this package is not free: Amiga Forever Plus costs $30.
Win32 Disk Imager. This software is used to transform your microSD card into a bootable and usable Amiga emulator system.

Get the hardware ready
For this project, you will need almost everything found in the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit, plus a USB flash drive (of virtually any size), a USB-based keyboard and mouse (a set with a wireless dongle will usually work fine too), and a display with an HDMI input. We won't need it for this part of the process, but you ...