The Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book - Projects_Book_v4

Tutorial WALKTHROUGH

(^152) The Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book raspberrypi.org/magpi

microSD card
USB stick
Wired Xbox 360
controller
Amiga Kickstart
ROMs
amigaforever.com
Amibian
magpi.cc/rcFTIK
You’ll
Need
he Commodore Amiga’s top-notch sound and
graphics made it one of the most desirable
home computers of the 1980s and early 1990s,
at a time when your average IBM PC was still plodding
along with EGA graphics and an internal beeper.
Amiga games from the era have aged incredibly well,
and look and play brilliantly on everything from a
portable display to a widescreen TV. We’ll take you
through turning your Raspberry Pi 3 into a perfect
modern-day Amiga emulator. You’ll need a Windows,
macOS, or Linux desktop operating system to copy
the Amibian Linux distribution to your microSD card
and unpack the Kickstart ROMs required to make
it work smoothly.
Start by downloading the Amibian distro. Format a
microSD card, decompress the Amibian RAR file, and
use Win32DiskImager or Linux’s dd command to copy
the IMG file to the card. A 4GB card should be plenty,
as Amibian only occupies around 300MB.
Slot the microSD card into your Pi and power up. It’ll
boot directly into the UAE4ARM emulator, but there’s
some extra configuration to do before we start playing.
Quit UAE4ARM to get to the command line and run:
raspi-config
Select Expand Filesystem, which will give you access
to the entirety of the SD card’s capacity for storage,
then Exit and select Yes to reboot.
If your Pi won’t output sound via HDMI properly,
enter this at the command line:
nano /boot/config.txt
Make sure the following lines are present and aren’t
commented out with a preceding hash (#):
hdmi_drive=1
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_force_edid_audio=1
Save and return to raspi-config:
raspi-config
Select Advanced Options > Audio > Force HDMI
and then reboot.
Kickstart me up
To run Amiga programs, you’ll need a Kickstart ROM

• firmware from the original computers. UAE4ARM
  comes with the open-source AROS ROM, which can
  run only some Amiga programs, so we recommend
  using genuine Amiga Kickstarts for reliability.
  The Amiga’s Kickstart ROMs and Workbench GUI
  are still being maintained, thanks to Italian firm
  Cloanto. Amiga Forever Plus Edition, priced at €29.95,
  gets you a complete, legal set of Kickstarts for every
  Amiga computer and console. Cloanto is still working

T

TURN YOUR PI

INTO AN AMIGA

Recapture the glory days of 16-bit computing by turning your Pi

into a faithful Amiga emulator

You can load and create

emulated hardware

configurations for specific

Amiga computers

K.G. ORPHANIDES

K.G. has been tinkering with computers

since the mid-’80s and writing about

them since the late ’90s. They’ve

mostly survived the experience.

@KGOrphanides

Once you’ve set up your

emulated hardware

and firmware config,

just mount a floppy disk

image and click Start

Game controllers,

mouse, and keyboard

configurations can

be selected and

tweaked in Input