PiStorm 600 on Amiga 600 – Video signal lost after Kickstart attempt

[rick130]

Hi,

I’m having trouble getting my PiStorm 600 to work on my Amiga 600, and I hope you can provide some guidance.

Setup details:

Amiga 600 – fully recapped, stable power supply
PiStorm 600 – purchased two units from different shops, CPLD flashed and tested by the vendors
Raspberry Pi 3A+ – at one point inadvertently inserted reversed into the PiStorm, but GPIO diagnostics indicate all pins are OK
Emu68 version – latest stable release
SD card – SanDisk Ultra, fully functional
Display – tested on TV and Commodore 1084S monitor

Problem description:

The Amiga boots, and the display initially shows a signal.
Pressing Ctrl+A+A seems to attempt Kickstart load, but a very brief graphical glitch appears and the display goes black.
The problem occurs consistently on two different PiStorm units and two other Amiga 600s with different motherboard revisions.

What I’ve tried:

Using different SD cards
Connecting to different monitors/TVs
Verifying Emu68 configuration for A600
Running GPIO diagnostics on the Pi, all pins check out

Despite all this, the video signal never stabilizes to reach the Kickstart screen.

Could you advise on any additional diagnostics or configuration checks I can perform? Any insight into what might cause this behavior would be hugely appreciated.

Thank you

[carlosbragatto]

You could have damaged your RaspberryPi.

You could test it by disconnecting it from the PiStorm, connecting it to a TV directly via HDMI, and try to boot a ready-made Linux distro like Raspbian. You'll know at least if the Pi works on it's own. Depending on where you live, if I were you, I'd grab a cheap RaspberryPi Zero 2W for debugging purposes...

[rick130]

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion.

I’ve already tested the Raspberry Pi separately by connecting it directly to a TV via HDMI and booting a standard Raspberry Pi OS image. It boots normally without any issues.

Additionally, I installed and ran GPIO diagnostic tools (gpiotest), and no faults were detected — all GPIO pins appear to be functioning correctly.

So at this point, it doesn’t seem like the Raspberry Pi itself was damaged.

Any further ideas on what I could check next would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again.

[YaroHolicz]

Hi
Sorry for my English, because I use a translator. I'll tell you my experience with Raspberry Pi 3A+, maybe it will help you. I bought a HAT for raspberry Pi - Bulky MIDI MT32 Emulator. I prepared an SD card and inserted a new Raspberry Pi 3A+ into it. I started it up. Only one diode lit up, I think red. Boot from the card failed, black screen on its HDMI output. I inserted an older raspberry 3A+, started it up and everything worked fine. So I complained about the new raspberry. They tested the latest Linux distribution in the store and said it was OK. They sent it back to me, they didn't accept the complaint. I did the same thing as the first time and it didn't work for me again. I downloaded the latest Linux distribution and it really worked. So what now? Then I looked at the two raspberry 3A+ boards, the old one and the new one. One had revision 1.6 and the new one 2.3. At the same time I was also building a Pi 1541 emulator disk drive for C64. Here was a link to the latest Raspberry Pi firmware. I downloaded it and unzipped it with 7-ZIP. I had to unzipped it twice to get to the key files. There are versions of the files that the software uses to BOOT and load, as well as this various emulation software. The files are named something like start4.elf, start.elf, fix up.dat .... etc. So I replaced all these files on the SD card for Bulky MIDI MT32 Emulator, which matched in the new firmware, with the newer ones. And suddenly the new raspberry started working with HATT for MT32 emulator. Try that too. Maybe it will help you. I'm sending you a link to the firmware for raspberry Pi.

https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/releases