Task: Play Turrican II on an Amiga 500 Using the PiStorm CPU Accelerator, Caffeine OS, and WHDLOad
Needed: Amiga 500 or similar, PiStorm with Raspberry PI, Caffeine OS with WHDLoad and Turrican II
Time: 15-30 minutes
Introduction
The Amiga was known for its cutting-edge graphics and sound when it arrived in the later 1980s. This provided a platform for games that blew away what was available on other systems such as the IBM PC. I have previously posted about the PiStorm CPU accelerator for the Amiga that opens lots of doors for using the Amiga 500 including faster 680X0 CPU emulation and tons of fast RAM. Key for using the PiStorm to enhance gaming it the ability create a disk partition on an SD card where games and other software can be stored and booted from the Caffeine or other OS using a special package called WHDLoad that converts software to a bootable form from the virtual hard drive. The photo below shows my Amiga 500 setup with two monitors. The one on the right shows Caffeine OS running on the PiStorm Raspberry Pi 3A+ with HDMI out. The light grey window on the screen shown the Turrican II game folder on the Ami-Share drive partition that is accessible on the SD card from my PC. Clicking on the last file in that folder launches the game on the Amiga with video out to the monitor on the left via RGB. Control passes to the Amiga for playing the game.
I am highlighting Turrican II by Factor 5 here because I have never played it before, and it appears on a number of top 10 lists with good reviews.
Instructions
You can play Turrican II by downloading the ADF floppy disk image and booting via the Gotek floppy emulator.
I am booting it here from Caffeine OS using WHDLoad. This version, along with tons of other games, came with my purchased Caffeine OS distribution.
Comments
I can see why this game is so popular. The graphics and gameplay are amazing. I love the soundtrack as well. Well worth a try!