A couple of days back I posted a couple of pictures of my Raspberry PI 3b based Amiga setup. This caused quite a stir on several groups and people were unsure what exactly I was posting. Is this Amiga OS 4? Is it Aros? Scalos? Or perhaps just a pimped up classic Amiga 3.x?
The more the questions arose the more I realized that a lot of people don’t really know what the PI can do. I dont blame them, between work, kids and mending a broken back it probably took me a year before I even entertained the idea of setting up a proper UAE environment. And as luck would have it, two good friends of mine Gunnar kristjánsson and Thomas Navarro Garcia, had already done the worst part: namely to produce a Linux distro that auto-boots into Workbench (or technically, into a full screen UAE environment).
Taking advantage of speed
Purists might not be happy about it, but the PI delivers some serious processing power when it comes to Amiga emulation. The version of UAE Thomas and Gunnar opted for is UAE4Arm, which is a special version that contains a hand-optimized JIT engine. This takes 68k code and generates ARM machine code “on the fly” and is thus able to run Amiga software much faster than traditional UAE variations like fs-uae.
But what should we do with all that extra speed? I mean, there is a limited number of tasks that benefits from the extra processing power of the PI (or an accelerator for that matter). Well, being a programmer the process of compilation is one aspect I really love the extra grunt. When using modern compilers like freepascal 3.x on a classic 68k Amiga, there is no denying we need all the cpu power we can get. So compiling on the PI is a great boost over ordinary, real Amiga machines.
The second aspects is the infrastructure. And this is where we get to the pimping part. By default Workbench is optimized for low-color representation. Meaning that icons and backdrops will be 4-8 colors, fixed palette and fairly useless by modern standards. Since UAE4Arm has built-in support for RTG (re-targetable graphics), which means 15, 16, 24 and 32 bit screen-modes (the same as any modern PC) then surely we can remedy the visuals right?
Well, I had a google around and found that there is an icon library that supports the latest png based icons. These are icons that contain 32bit graphics with support for alpha blending (transparency). This is the exact same icon system that is used in Amiga OS 4.
So what I did was download the version 46.x icon library from Aminet (Note: I type 46.x because this library is seeing some heavy development so what version will be the latest when you read this is hard to say. Just download the latest and best). When emulating a desktop environment like I do, you naturally want the very best settings UAE can provide. On the PI this means a MC68040 cpu with the Amiga 4000 model. This is important because when you download libraries you can often pick different builds based on your machines CPU. So I picked the 040 optimized library file and copied that to my “Libs” folder.
A quick reboot later and voila, my Workbench was now able to show 32 bit png icons just like OS 4! In fact after giving it a nice background and cleaning it up a bit, a lot of people were unsure if this was indeed Amiga OS 3.x or 4.x (!)
Getting some “bling”
With OS 4 icons supported, where do I get some icons to play with? Well, again I went on Aminet and downloaded a ton of large icon packs especially for OS4 (I think the largest was 120+ megabyte, that is a lot of icons for an Amiga). I also visited OS4Depot and downloaded some cool background pictures and even more icons there.
I also own a proper OS 4 license. I must admit I havent used it all that much, but I absolutely love it!
Then it was the time-consuming process or manually replacing the *.info files. All files that you can see via Workbench has an associated .info file with the same name. So if you have a program called “myprogram”, then the icon file will be “myprogram.info”.
And that’s basically it! I spent a saturday replacing icons and doing some mild tweaking in VisualPrefs (again on Aminet), and suddenly my old, grey workbench was alive with radiant colors.
What I find amazing is that even after 30 years the old Amiga OS 3.x can still surprise us! If nothing else it’s a testament to the flexible architecture the guys at Commodore knocked out, an architecture that thrives in extremely low memory situations – yet delivers in spades if you give it more to work with.
Doing some modern chores
One of the first things I installed on my PI was a copy of freepascal. This has been updated to version 3.1, which is just one revision behind the compiler used on Windows and OS X. This is a bit too nifty for standard Amiga machines. You need at least an A1200 with 64 megabyte ram to work with it. Although the size of the binaries is reasonable small if you stay clear of the somewhat bloated LCL framework.
So I was able to use my object pascal skills to create a unzip/zip command-line program in 15 minutes. Doing this on my Amibian box felt great, and I really enjoy the fresh new look of Workbench. In a perfect work OS4 would be 68k and the CPU’s would all be fpga’s that ran close to Intel i7 speeds, but alas – a humble PI will have to do for now.
Amibian
If you want to re-create my experiment then start by downloading Amibian. This is a clean Linux Distro and doesn’t contain workbench. So after you have made an sd-card with Amibian you need to copy over workbench. I suggest you copy over the raw files and mount a Linux folder as a drive. Using hard disk images is possible, but I don’t trust them. And should an error occur you lose everything. So yeah, stick with folder-mounted drives if you want less frustration.
You can visit Amibian here: https://gunkrist79.wixsite.com/amibian
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