This tutorial is being written from the perspective of Twister OS. Other Raspberry Pi operating systems will likely work as well so this is not a requirement. This tutorial assumes that you know how to connect to your Rasberry Pi from a Windows computer using a utility like WinSCP in order to transfer files. As always, begin a new adventure with your Raspberry Pi by applying some updates:
sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade -yOpinion
If you want a really simple way to get into Amiga on the Raspberry Pi, one way to get there is to download a distro like PiMiga which has nearly everything you need pre-installed out of the box. The guy who put that distribution together did a great job of creating a beautiful, full featured Amiga system packed with great software and games, and it looks incredible. If that's what you want, there probably isn't a better way to go.
However, this resembles no Amiga I ever owned or used. It looks close enough to a modern operating system that the things the Amiga was never good at (the internet, connecting to modern communication mediums) are going to be very frustrating. I prefer either the old blue, black, orange, and white of Workbench 1.3, or the cool grey and blue of Workbench 2 and 3. That's what an Amiga looks like to me, and we can forego any frustrating ventures into worlds the Amiga was never properly a part of, back when it was a commercially available operating and computer. Just my 2 cents.
What Flavor of Amiga Do We Want?
The purpose of this tutorial is to document the process of getting the Amiga operating system up and running on the Raspberry Pi, configuring it for the optimal balance of stability and speed, and installing a handful of utilities, games, and applications on our new "Amiga". In this tutorial we are going to create 3 different virtual Amigas, each with a particular focus on aspects of the Amiga experience that makes sense for each "type" of Amiga.
If all we want to do is play some classic Amiga games - a basic Amiga 500 setup with Workbench 1.3 is perfect for 80-95% of all classic Amiga games.
If we want to explore an accelerated Amiga to use professional level graphic and productivity software, then an Amiga 2000 setup with a more advanced CPU, floating point unit, expanded memory, and running Workbench 2.1 is perfect.
If we want to run AGA games, have retargetable graphics for higher resolutions or color depth, or have the fastest possible Amiga to experiment with the unique graphic and simulation software that the Amiga had to offer, have "large" memory setups, and the "latest" Amiga operating system, you are going to want an Amiga 1200 configuration running Workbench 3.1 or later. As of this writing Workbench 3.2 has been released, but for the purposes of this tutorial I am going to stick to Workbench 3.1. Everything I show you here will apply equally well to later versions of the OS - the basic installation and use remain unchanged. (There really is no practical difference between the Amiga 1200 or Amiga 3000 in terms of emulation - the differences were down to form factor and expandability, both of which are irrelevant to emulated machines.)
Gather Essential Resources
To begin our Amiga adventures we need to gather some resources that we are going to need.
Purchase and Install Amiga Forever
No getting around this one (legally) -- you are going to need versions of Amiga firmware ROMs (Kickstart), and the Amiga Operating System (Workbench) disk images in order to get Amiga emulation working in Amiberry. Purchasing Amiga Forever is a way to get all of these necessary resources in one step. If you only intend to install a Workbench 1.3 system, then you want the Value Edition. To complete all of the tutorials in this series, you will want the Plus Edition (this is the one I recommend). There isn't much reason to get the Premium Edition except if you want a professionally produced DVD image, and a number of extra multimedia files that document the final days of Commodore. For die-hard fans only, in my opinion. This is a Windows program, so you will need to download and install this in a Windows machine in order to get access to the Kickstart files and Workbench disk images.
Download Amiberry
On the Raspberry Pi, go to this page and look for a link on the right side of the page under the heading Releases and click on the one that is labelled Latest. On the page that opens, you are looking for the distribution that is named (in part} rpi4-sdl2-32bit.zip (assuming you have a Raspberry Pi 4. If you have some other model of Raspberry Pi, use the version appropriate for that model.) Once downloaded, extract the ZIP folder your Downloads folder. Rename the resulting folder Amiberry and move it to the /home/pi folder.
Navigate to the /home/pi/Amiberry folder, and in there create 3 new folders to contain files we will need, and to contain the Amiga systems we are going to create: adf, workbenches, and systems.
Open the systems folder you just created, and create 3 new folders in there: Workbench 1.3, Workbench 2.1, and Workbench 3.1.
Go back one directory level and open the workbenches folder, and create 3 new folders in there: 1.3, 2.1, and 3.1.
Go back one directory level to the Amiberry folder, and right click, and select Open Terminal Here. In the newly opened terminal type:
./amiberryThis will launch the software. It won't work yet - we haven't got any kickstart or workbench files installed, but we are verifying that the software runs with no additional requirements from the Raspberry Pi operating system. In preparation for writing this tutorial, I performed these actions on a fresh install of Twister OS, and I received the following error message:
./amiberry: error while loading shared libraries: libSDL2_image-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directoryIt is possible if you are doing this tutorial in a well-used setup of Raspbian or Twister OS that you will NOT see this error message because the necessary packages were installed at some prior time. If you do get the above error, this command should fix things up:
sudo apt-get install libsdl2-2.0-0 libsdl2-ttf-2.0-0 libsdl2-image-2.0-0 libxml2 flac mpg123 libmpeg2-4This installs a bunch of libraries all at once that the Amiberry application might need. It certainly won't hurt anything if these are already present or otherwise unneeded. This installation should be very fast. Once that completes, retry Amiberry:
./amiberryOnce you see Amiberry's GUI, press Quit to exit.
Prepare Raspberry Pi For File Transfer
On the Raspberry Pi, verify your machine's IP address. In the terminal type:
ip aIf you are on wireless, the IP address will be in the wlan section. If you have a wired ethernet connection it will be in the eth0 section. In my case, my Pi's IP address is 192.168.1.24 -- yours will very likely be different but similar to this.
One other thing you will need to verify is that you have SSH enabled in your Raspberry Pi operating system. Under the Settings menu, run the Raspberry Pi Configuration editor. Go to the Interfaces tab, and make sure that SSH is enabled. If you are running some other version of Raspbian there may be a different way of enabling this service.
Copy Over Amiga OS Files
On your Windows machine, start up WinSCP. On the Login dialog that appears, you want to click on the New Site entry at the top of the left side. Under the Session section on the right side, you will need to enter the particulars for your Raspberry Pi Host name (use the value you got from the ip a command), User name (default is pi), and Password (default is raspberry), and click the Save button. Give it useful name, and when you are finished, click the Login button. You should end up in the /home/pi folder in the right side of the WinSCP window. Double-click the Amiberry folder.
When you install Amiga Forever, it puts a helpful alias link to where it installs all of the Amiga datafiles. So, in WinSCP on the left side of the window, navigate to your Documents folder. You should see a shortcut named Amiga Files.lnk. Double-click that, and you will be taken to where the Amiga files reside on your computer (by default this is C:\Users\Public\Documents\Amiga Files ). You want to enter the Shared\rom folder, where you will find one file for each different variation of the Amiga kickstart rom. We only need 3 of these files for Amiberry. Copy over the following files to the /home/pi/Amiberry/kickstarts folder: amiga-os-130.rom, amiga-os-204.rom, and amiga-os-310-a1200.rom.
Now lets copy over the Workbench files we need. These will be located on the Windows side in Amiga Files/Shared/adf.
For Workbench 1.3 upload these files to /home/pi/Amiberry/workbenches/1.3:
amiga-os-134-workbench.adf, and amiga-os-134-extras.adf.
For Workbench 2.1 upload these files to /home/pi/workbenches/2.1:
amiga-os-210-workbench.adf, amiga-os-210-install.adf, amiga-os-210-locale.adf, amiga-os-210-fonts.adf, and amiga-os-210-extras.adf.
For Workbench 3.1 upload these files to /home/pi/workbenches/3.1:
amiga-os-310-workbench.adf, amiga-os-310-install.adf, amiga-os-310-locale.adf, amiga-os-310-fonts.adf, amiga-os-310-extras.adf, and amiga-os-storage.adf.
This is the end of our preparation and setup. We are now ready to begin creating each of our different Amiga operating environments within Amiberry, in Parts 2, 3, and 4 of this tutorial. Thank you for reading, and I hope you find these tutorials helpful.