We love the Commodore Amiga. We're also delighted with this video that shows how to turn a Raspberry Pi into an retro Amiga computer.
Dan Wood is a radio presenter and host of The Retro Hour gaming podcast. Dan spends his spare time finding new uses for old technology.
If you don’t remember the Commodore Amiga, it was a computer from the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was incredibly popular among gamers and hackers, thanks to its powerful graphics chip.
It was also used in many television stations to create title sequences. It was one of the first systems to do video editing.
Commodore computers can be quite expensive on Ebay. But don’t worry, you can use a Raspberry Pi 3 to emulate Amigas, including the best-selling 500 and the impressive 1200.
How to emulate a Commodore Amiga on the Raspberry Pi
The emulation software used by Dan is called Amibian. You should use a Raspberry Pi 3, which has enough power to run emulated Amiga software. You can also use RetroPie to install Amiga software.
Emulating an Amiga is a little more complex than other systems. You need a Kickstart ROM alongside the Amibian software.
- You will need the following
- Amibian
- Win32DiskImager
- SD Card Formatter
- Kickstart ROMs
The Kickstart ROMs can be found online, but it's safer to buy them as part of an emulated package. Dan suggests using Amiga Forever, which you can pick up on the Google Play store for 69p. You'll have to resort to finding ROMs yourself (or turn old floppy disks into image files).
There are hundreds of truly great games for Commodore's classic system. These come with the .ADF file format.
Dan does a great job of walking you through the process, and he even has a nifty 3D-printed case for his Pi that looks like a squished Commodore Vic-20 computer.
