POSTS
Amiga Emulation on Raspberry Pi 1
I found an old SD card that I had previously installed Amibian, Amiga emulator on. I thought I would have a quick retro games session. I plugged it into the Raspiberry Pi 1 that I have. I had some ROMs on a USB stick so plugged that in too along with the gamepad, keyboard and mouse.
booted it up and loaded Turrican 2, but the gamepad wasn’t recognised. I spent some time trying to get the gamepad to work but gave up. I decided instead to flash Retropie to the SD card as I read that it would pick up the USB gamepad that I had.
I did that and the gamepad was recognised. I read the docs about how to get the ROMs to be recognised. There is a tutorial on the Retropie docs, to format a USB stick and it will create the right folder structure on the USB stick. Then you add your Kickstart rom to the BIOS folder and the games to the folder named after the console, in this case Amiga (computer).
Next issue was I realised I needed to install some emulators, so I connected the RPI to the WIFI, went into retropie-config from the menu and then packages->opt and chose the available Amiga emulators to be installed including Amiberry, UAE4all, UAE4arm and another LR-PUAE. I also needed to name the Kickstart ROMs in the BIOS folder appropriately for the emulator - see the Retropie docs for more info.
To conclude, I gave up on Amiberry because, for example, Speedball 2 ran too slow and the music was slow, even after overclocking the RPI to 1000Mhz (in raspi-config) as recommended in the documentation. I also tried different screen resolution like PAL to no avail.
So finally I ended up with a game of Turrican 2 with a working gamepad using UAE4ALL and the standard monitor resolution. I had to launch the game from the UAE4ALL config dialog rather than Retropie game list. Also I went for the A500 + kick rom rather than A1200.
Why did Amiberry run Turrican slow compared to UAE4ALL? I don’t know exactly but I did read that UAE4ALL might perform better on the RPI 1. Emulators are a great way to access the retro awesomeness of Amiga and available on most systems and a good use of a spare Raspberry Pi sitting around doing nothing.