Amazing Amiga Demos On A Lenovo MiniPC ThinkCentre M93p (100 Euro Refurbed)(Amiberry)(PiMiga4)

#Amiberry #Amiga #PiMiga4

The Amiga line of computers was far ahead of its time. Especially the higher end Amigas with lots of RAM, 68020 or higher CPUs and Zorro enabled RTG graphics cards. These high-end Amigas were unobtainable for me as a working student paying is way through university by having a ton of jobs, inckuding nightshifts in a home for the elderly and ER shifts. An Amiga 1200 Escom machine was what I could afford and that for me was incredibly expensive still. The Amiga 2000/3000/4000s were the stuff of legend.

The Amiga 1200 got an accelerator card and could do a lot more than the standard setup. PCMCIA Compact flash for file transfers with PCs, an Compact Flash IDE interface. Eventually an external GOTEC (kept the internal drive stock) and WHDload for a fair few of my games and demos.

Then the capacitor disease struck and the Amiga 1200 has been in need of recapping for quite some time. The caps are there, there is no leakage as of yet but I still have to make myself desolder and solder the caps in place and check the board. What has saved me in the mean time was WinUAE, WinFellow, PiMiga, MiST, MiSTer FPGA and Amiberry.

The Amiga demo scene has been going strong for decades, over 30 years now. And a lot of people are still actively using their machines. I am a Commodore 64 kid at heart but the Amiga always pulled at my heartstrings and eventually I ended up getting one, a little past its prime but still. There was a community going. The 68000 based machines like the Atari ST – which I also got 2nd hand during college and the consoles: Megadrive, NeoGeo, the X68000, the ton of 2nd hand Macintosh systems I got from one of my bosses at the University – which my sister used when she was studying to become a graphic’s designer – all have something quite special. It seems that apart from systems with a 6502 / 6510 variant the 680×0 is used by me quite extensively as well. That and Z80 based machines like the Spectrum and the MSX to mention a few.

In this video I feature quite a few few demos by Black Lotus and some other groups that make the Amiga do stuff that you’d normally find in 3D PC games. Yet the Amiga masters those. Some run quite well on AGA 68020 machines but ofthen really high end CPUs are preferred. My A1200 has a 68030 50Mhz Acellerator board and can run a fair few of these demos quite well.

I wanted to run Amiga on the big TV downstairs and I had a good inctive to try that out when I recently got a Lenovo MiniPC ThinkCentre M93p for a little over 100 Euro Refurbed) as viewing DrWho on Amazon Prima with the App on Samsung TVs results in static noise in quite a few of the episodes. Using it as a media center still works rather okay these days.

It turns out it actually is quite good at running Amiga software with Amiberry on the Linux Mint Install I put on it. Linux runs a lot smoother on the system than the Windows 10 Pro install it came with. Is it perfect? Nope. Actually the sound levels during the capture are over-steered. Resulting in crackles and pops which weren’t audible coming from the TV.

Lenovo MiniPC ThinkCentre M93p
specs:
Intel Core i5-4570T
16Gb DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
250 GB SSD

Software
Linux Mint 64-bit
Amiberry
PiMiga 4 OS files
Amiga 1200 Dumped Kickstart of Escom Amiga 1200
OBS

🤔It does a mean Amiga, although the Amiberry version on x86 does seem to struggle a little with sound – check out the video‼️. Tweaking is needed on different systems as you go. As a test I figured I’d try to record the video of the Amiga emulator with OBS on the machine itself. And it does a fair job considering it mostly needed to grab the default Amiga SD definition resolutions. But it’s not the best solution for capturing footage on this machine as it does struggle. Still wanted to share it.

I think it is rather amazing to see Demos that really work the hardware run this good on more than decade old mini PC. I might throw something like Batocera dual boot on it.

Enjoy & thanks for watching – LactobacillusPrime

Credits:
Audio used in this video has been produced by the demo-scene creators.
Piotr Pacyna Content found during: 29:55 – 30:47 which has any ad-revenue of the video go towards him. Thanks for allowing the use of the music I say to Piotr. Find out more about his music contributions in the Amiga Demo scene and his other work here:
https://www.piotrpacyna.com/demoscene
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4BffoM7bic17fPtbbg7E7Q

PiMiga4 was created by Chris Edwards et al.

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