By: ssokolow (Hey, OSAlert, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!)
In reply to <a href="https://www.osnews.com/story/140197/amikit-launches-a-new-amiga-thats-not-an-amiga-at-all/#comment-10441501">ssokolow (Hey, OSAlert, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!)</a>.
Actually, let me correct that. I was mushing together multiple approaches in my memory. The PiStorm can run its emulation as a Linux userspace app (the original approach) which, I believe, gives greater peripheral compatibility and more fancy features, or it can run it as a bare metal application... and I believe the latter also has a JIT compiler in the 680x0 emulator, leveraging how upgrading from one CPU to another in the same ISA isn't guaranteed to keep the execution timings of instructions the same relative to each other.
By: ssokolow (Hey, OSAlert, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!)
It sounds like they've knocked off the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg_X67OfaLE" rel="nofollow ugc">PiStorm</a> (<a href="https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/pistorm-keeping-the-amiga-alive/" rel="nofollow ugc">see also</a>) that tons of people are putting into their genuine Amigas.
It's basically a modern substitute for those accelerator boards you could buy for your Amiga back in the day which, these days, either cost a fortune or are unobtanium.
The trick is that, instead of having to fab a custom ASIC or pay a lot of money for a suitably beefy FPGA (with uncertainty for how long they'll remain in production), the PiStorm works by using a cheap CPLD for translation and a bare metal (i.e. OS-less) program running on the Pi which does cycle-accurate emulation of a faster 680x0 CPU, extra chip RAM, and a configurable set of peripherals. (eg. USB controller, WiFi card, etc.)
In essence, take an Amiga, pull out the CPU, and leverage how directly it connects to the system bus to plug in a Pi pretending to be a longer system bus with a CPU, some RAM and a bunch of expansion cards hanging off it.
Similar concept to something like the PiSCSI, but extending the system bus instead of the SCSI bus.