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 will need a USB-based joystick or gamepad to play Amiga games too.

Make sure all of these components—and your Windows PC—are by your side, ready to go.

Format the microSD card

Once you’ve downloaded and installed everything noted above, format the microSD card using SD Memory Card Formatter on your PC. This probably wasn’t strictly necessary in my case, since it was brand new. But I did so anyway.

Extract the Amibian image

Use 7-Zip (or a compressed file utility of your choice) to extract the contents of the Amibian compressed file to your PC’s desktop. There should be just one image file in there, called amibian1.4.img (or similar).

Flash the Amibian image to your microSD card

Now, you use Win32 Disk Imager on your PC to write (or “flash”) the Amibian image file to your microSD card.

When this process is complete—it only takes a few minutes—the card will be formatted with two partitions, one of which you can see using File Explorer, and one which you cannot. The latter will trigger warning messages from File Explorer, but you should ignore those.

Copy the ROMs and other Amiga files to a USB flash drive

If you haven’t already, install Amiga Forever on your PC. In the Windows Start menu, you will see an entry called Amiga Files under Amiga Forever. This opens a File Explorer window to C:\Users\Public\Documents\Amiga Files, where you will find the Amiga ROMs and other files you will need.

You should copy two folders of files to the USB flash drive, which should be formatted using FAT32. These are:

Amiga floppy disk images. Found in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Amiga Files\Shared\adf

Amiga ROMs. Found in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Amiga Files\Shared\rom

In other words, you will have adf and rom folders on the USB flash drive.

Later, you will also copy game files to this USB flash drive. These games are available via Amiga Forever in something called the Retro Platform File (.rp9) format. This is just a basic ZIP-style container, so you can use 7-Zip or another compressed file utility to unzip each to get at the actual game files, which are in Amiga Floppy Disk Image (.adf) format. I will look at this in a coming article in this series.

Put it all together

Now, remove the microSD card and USB flash drive from your PC and insert both in the Raspberry Pi 3. The microSD card goes into a slot on the bottom of the PC board, while the flash drive can be placed in any USB port on the PC board.

Next, connect your keyboard and mouse (or dongle) to the Raspberry Pi 3, along with the HDMI cable, the other end of which will be attached to your display. Power on the display.

(Note: I’m leaving the Raspberry Pi 3 outside of a case for now. I’ll add the case when the project is complete.)

Boot the Raspberry Pi 3 for the first time

This is the (first) moment of truth. When you’re ready to boot the Raspberry Pi 3 for the first time, plug the power adapter into the board PC. (Note that the Raspberry Pi 3 does not include an on/off switch, so you can power it off by removing the power cable. And then power it back on again by plugging it in.)

If you did everything right, the Amibian logo and Amibian (blue-colored) text environment will each flash very briefly on the display.

Then, the UAE4ARM Amiga emulator window will appear and your mouse and keyboard will work as expected.

This emulator lets you configure and use various emulated Amigas, like an Amiga 500 or Amiga 1200, plus attach various ROMs, floppy disks, and hard drives to each. You can use these systems like real Amigas, and launch apps and games. You can also configure the system to simply boot right into a specific Amiga configuration, turning the Raspberry Pi 3, pretty literally, into an Amiga.

But before we can do any of that, we need to copy the ROMs and other files from the USB flash drive to the microSD card so that they are always available. And that is going to require exercising some long-forgotten old-school text-mode skills. So we’ll look at that process, and our first experiences with the Amiga Workbench, in the next article.

More soon.