Lazarustorm Lets a PiStorm Live Outside Your Old Amiga
The PiStorm is nothing new; if youāre familiar with the retrocomputer scene, youāve probably heard of it. By replacing the 68k processor in an old Amiga (or some models of Atari) the PiStorm accelerator gives a multiple order of magnitude speedup. Itās even a reversable mod, plugging in where the original CPU was. Whatās not to love? Well, some people would simply prefer to keep their original CPUs in place. [TME Retro] has a video highlighting the solution for those people: the Lazarustorm by [arananet].
It makes perfect sense to usā back in the day, you could plug a whole x86 PC-compatible āsidecarā into your Amiga, so why not a PiStorm? The whole bus is right there for the taking.The Lazarusstorm, as a project, is bog simple compared to the PiStorm itself. A PCB and the connectors to get it plugged into the expansion port on the Amiga side, and the connectors to plug the PiStorm into it on the other. A couple of jumpers and a few passives, and thatās it. [TME Retro] also took the time to come up with a case for it, which sits on felt feet to relieve stress on the PCBs. Itās a nice bit of CAD, but we rather wish heād done it in beige.
As for the upgraded Amiga, it runs just as fast as it would had the 68k been replaced with a Pi3 and PiStorm internally, which is to say itās practically a supercomputer by 1980s standards. You get the SD card to serve as a hard drive and can even access the internet via modern WiFi, something Commodore engineers likely never expected an A500 to do. Of course, just connecting to the network is only half the battle when getting these retro machines online. When these accelerators were new, the 68k emulation ran on top of Linux, but now that the EMU68k project has it bare metal and even faster.
This isnāt the first Raspberry-flavoured slice of Amiga sidecar weāve featured: hereās one running Spotify. If you havenāt got an Amiga, thereās a PiStorm for the FPGA-based MiniMig, too.
youtube.com/embed/-ICquEE3N9c?ā¦
hackaday.com/2026/01/29/lazaruā¦