My first Amiga was the Amiga 500. Coming after owning a Commodore 128, the Amiga 500 seemed like a magical machine, full of amazing color and sound. I upgraded the memory, and later gave it a sidecar hard drive. 50Mb! This would be impossible to fill up! Stock Amiga 500s came with Kickstart 1.2 and later Kickstart 1.3, and came with Workbench 1.2, and later Workbench 1.3. We're going to build a solid Amiga 500 in Amiberry using Workbench 1.3 and the most common hardware upgrades available to Amiga users at the time. This is what 80%-90% of Amiga games and programs available are expecting to see.
Different Kinds of RAM
In reality, the basic Amiga 500 was a modest device - 7Mhz 68000 CPU, 1/2 Mb of 'chip' RAM, 1/2 Mb of 'slow' RAM (if the expansion card was fitted) and everything needed to be booted from floppy disk. What do we mean by 'chip' or 'slow' RAM. And does this imply the existence of 'fast' RAM? Chip RAM was memory that both the Amiga's graphics and sound chips and the CPU could directly access. Because this memory is shared between the graphics chips and the CPU, there exists some contention for access, so this RAM is slow for the Amiga OS to use for programs or data storage. The original memory expansion for the Amiga 500 went into an expansion bay in the bottom of the device called the 'trapdoor'. Because of the hardware design of the 500, this memory had the same contention issues as chip ram, but could not be used by the graphics chips. Thus, it became known as 'slow' RAM. The Amiga 500 had provision for expansion through a side slot, and up to 8Mb of memory could be attached there through various hardware products, such as the sidecar hard drive module. This 8Mb of RAM could be directly accessed by the CPU, and was the preferred location for programs and data. This was known as 'fast' RAM.
Later hardware developments pushed the possible expansion capabilities of the Amiga 500 beyond what the stock hardware was capable of, but for the purpose of this tutorial we are going to stick with the limitations of the original Amiga 500 hardware and the expansion options that were commonly available in the market.
Build The Amiga 500
Open a terminal, cd to the /home/pi/Amiberry folder, and start up Amiberry.
cd ~/Amiberry
./amiberryIn the interface that opens, first go to the Paths section on the left hand side, and define some of the paths that Amiberry will use. If you followed my instructions in Part 1, the default paths for everything will be correct.
Go to the Quickstart section, and check to see that the Amiga model is set to Amiga 500, and leave everything at the default options.
The defaults for most of the other sections should be exactly what we need.
Go to the ROM section and verify that the KS ROM v1.3 (A500,A1000,A2000) is selected.
Go to the RAM section and push the Z2 Fast slider all the way to the right to maximum value of 8Mb.
Go to the Floppy Drives section and assign the Workbench 1.3 adf images to DF0 and DF1. Click the "..." button on the right side of each text input field to select /home/pi/Amiberry/workbenches/1.3/amiga-os-134-workbench.adf for DF0, and /home/pi/Amiberry/workbenches/1.3/amiga-os-134-extras.adf for DF1.
Go to the Hard drives/CD section. We are going to add a Hardfile to contain our Amiga operating system. Click the Create Hardfile button. In the dialog that appears, ensure that the Device name is DH0, Bootable is checked, Boot priority is 0, and the path should be /home/pi/Amiberry/systems/Workbench 1.3/System130.hdf. Use a size of 50Mb - larger than that and the Amiga may not boot successfully. Press OK.
Under the Display setting we are going to change some defaults: Slide both the Width and Height all the way to the maximum settings, Check both centering options, Set Line mode to Double, fields, and Interlaced mode to Double, fields.
Now go to the Configurations section, and give this config a name: Amiga 500 8Mb Fast RAM, and give it an appropriate description, and hit Save. Now hit Start. The Amiga 500 will boot from the floppy image we assigned to DF0, at a very slow and historically accurate pace. Now that we have the nostalgia for the speed of floppy disks out of our system, press F12 (on the Pi400 this is the Fn - F2 combo) to return to the Amiberry GUI and give our floppy emulation a bit of a speed boost. Go to the Floppy drives section, and slide the Floppy Drive Emulation Speed all the way to the left until it says "Turbo". Then go to the Configurations sections, click once on your configuration in the list, and hit Save. Then press the Resume button to return to the Amiga emulation.
You will notice that there is an icon on the Workbench (what we call a 'desktop' nowadays) labelled DH0: but it will not open. This is the virtual hard drive we created when we created the hard file, and it needs to be formatted before we can use it. Open the Workbench 1.3 Floppy on the Amiga Workbench, and then double click the Shell icon. This will open up a CLI (command line interface) very much like the Linux terminal. We will enter a number of commands in the shell to format the drive in DH0: and then copy the system files to it.
format DRIVE DH0: NAME SystemYou will be prompted to press ENTER to continue. This step will take a very long time, so you might want to get up, stretch your legs, get something to drink, prepare a meal, and eat it. Nostalgia!
Then you will want to enter these two commands, one at a time. Each step will take some time to complete.
copy DF0: to DH0: ALL QUIET
copy DF1: to DH0: ALL QUIET
If you open the System volume, you'll see all the files and folders we copied over, but they are in a jumble.
This is easy enough to remedy. Press the Right Mouse button and select Clean Up from the Special menu at the top of the screen. To preserve this cleaned up state, highlight each and every icon, return to the Special menu and select Snapshot. Yeah, Workbench 1.3 was a little rough around the edges and lacks niceties like Select All, marquee selection, Snapshot All, etc., all features that appeared in later versions of Workbench.
At this point we've installed Workbench 1.3 on our "harddrive", so press F12 to return to the Amiberry GUI. We are going to the Floppy drives section and we are going to eject both Floppy images. We are then going to the Configurations section and we are going to Save this configuration. Finally, we are going to press Reset to restart the Amiga with this freshly updated configuration.
Before we install some games and programs, lets do a little exploring. Open the Utilities drawer (thats what they're called on the Amiga) and double-click the Say utility. A couple of text windows will open, with some brief instructions. Whatever you type into the input window will be spoken aloud by Stephen Hawking! To exit Say, just hit Enter on a blank input line.
To exit the Amiga emulation at any time, simply press F12 and press Quit in the Amiberry GUI,
This tutorial is now getting long. In the next tutorial we are going to install some utilities to make our Amiga experience a bit smoother, and install some programs and games. To get you inspired for the next installment, I will leave you with this YouTube video extolling the virtues of Workbench 1.3. Enjoy!