June 2023 Musings

Time flies and updates have been a little sparse and sporadic lately. I spent a great deal of time working on Amiga Pi and still have quite a long ways to go. Alas though, its also time to move on with other projects I have been wanting to work on as well. Today I am just going to share some updates.

The first of 2 Minimig’s I am playing with has arrived and is up and working. I wanted to get a PiStorm up and working on it and have done so with little effort. There was one minor struggle, however, and obscure AR3 setting in the Minimig 1.96 was the culprit. Once that was disabled everything came together nicely! I have to say the red PCB is gorgeous and makes me wish Raspberry Pi’s came in assorted colors as well. Maybe the RPI team will make us some anniversary versions like this some day! I will do a more Indepth review of the Minimigs and explain why I have two!

My Crystal C64, new Power Supply and Kungfu Flash Cartridge is up for sale on Ebay. I have still another C64 PAL Machine in addition to the Dark colored C64 Reloaded I built/purchased with a wonderful Ultimate II + Card. If needed I have the plain C64 I can harvest chips from if ever needed. I am slowly getting back to the 64 and plan to do more on the Ultimate II +. Eventually I will be selling off more redundant equipment based on my preferences and needs going forward. Keep in mind I still have the Chameleon Cartridges (also awesome) and its Dock and have a Mega65 on back order as well. The Chameleon and its Dock will go when the Mega65 gets close to shipping, however, that’s likely a year out from now.

I have been also working on the retro station, moving some of the FPGA based computers to their own shelf so i can keep them hooked up and ready for usage. If you haven’t noticed, I like to have several projects going on at the same time and work on the one that grabs my attention at the moment. Note the WiModem on the Minimig, works great and eventually I will be doing more with the BBS Article that I have started. The MiSTer now has a better home as well.

I have a few simple mods to do on the Minimig 1.96 and then it will go up for sale as well with Pi and Mods . Mods are simple things like a Null Modem Networking Solution I am working on with a Pi Zero, SD Card Extender for the Pi for Convenance as well as a simple HDMI Extender like the one you see, however, the angle will point to the back so it is aligned with the other connections. The other Minimig I ordered will be my long term Minimig, more on that later as that will be the unit I ultimately review.

My Crystal Amiga has been my Daily Driver as of late. I carved up the pretty case in an effort to create ports to eventually put the screws back in and seal it up. Oh well, I have a lot to learn about cutting Plastic so eventually when I am done butchering the prototype case I will order another case for it and try to be more exact in cutting out the spaces I need. I have the PiStormLite 32. I have the Crystal Amiga setup with multiple boot Options depending on using a IDER switch and external ISE SD Card interface and the PiStormLite 32 SD Card. This allows me the ability to easily switch between WB 3.1, 3.22 and 3.9, or even slip in the Caffeine SD Card externally.

The Black Vampire Amiga and Vampire Stand Alone have sat idle for the past few months. One of the two will go up for sale, I believe it will be the Stand Alone in special case, however, we will see. Not there yet!

I added another Mac to the project list as well, this one is an SE Plus that I will gut and replace the innards with a Pi 4 Multi Emulator the primary being a Mac SE, with other emulations available as well. No Amiga on this one though as I really more Amigas than I need! The other still awaits MorphOS on the G5 which I am definitely closer to setting up now that I have some space for it.

Thats it for this update! Lots of fun and reviews ahead!

EverStaR