busterlabs
00 — Overview

Modern hardware for classic machines.

busterlabs is the hardware practice of Stefan Reinauer — new Zorro III expansion cards, CPLD logic and AmigaOS software for Amiga systems, designed with the discipline of twenty-five years spent in firmware and boot software.

Zorro II / IIISCSICPLD / Verilog68k AmigaOSKiCadopen source
01 — Offering

What busterlabs does

Retro computing hardware and software, taken on selectively. Mostly Amiga: designing what the platform never got, and rebuilding what it can no longer buy.

Zorro expansionZorro II and III card design end to end — bus-master and DMA controllers, schematics and layout in KiCad, prototype through production.
Glue logic in CPLDReplacing obsolete PAL and GAL arrays with Verilog for a CPLD, including reconstructing behaviour from undocumented originals.
Storage & SCSIController firmware and AmigaOS drivers — TD64 and NSD64 for disks beyond 4 GB, boot ROMs, and diagnostics down to the register level.
AmigaOS softwareFilesystems, datatypes, system utilities and ROM switching, written for real hardware rather than emulation.
ReproductionBringing thirty-year-old boards back as manufacturable, documented, open-source designs when the documentation is incomplete, missing, or wrong.
Restoration & upgradesRecapping, 68040 and 68060 processor adapters, oscillator and thermal work on machines that have to keep running.
02 — Background

Where it comes from

The retro work rests on a long career in production firmware. Listed here as background — the layer where silicon meets software behaves the same whether the year on the silkscreen is 1990 or last quarter.

Firmware & bootcoreboot ports, payload integration, chipset and mainboard bring-up, SPI flash layout, recovery and update paths.
Board bring-upFirst power-on through stable boot: schematic review, signal integrity questions, debugging the parts that only fail on real hardware.
Project stewardshipMaintainer of coreboot since 2008, after founding coresystems GmbH in 2005 to carry the project's commercial work.
Systems softwareLinux/m68k on Amiga hardware, emulator internals, and drivers across several architectures and three decades.
03 — Selected work

Projects

Nearly all of it is open source and public. A selection:

04 — Log

Timeline

  1. 1985First computer. Two years later, an Amiga 500 — then an A2000.
  2. 1990sContributed Zorro, serial and parallel port support to the UAE Amiga emulator; ran Linux/m68k on an Amiga 3000.
  3. 1997Started /dev/bios and the OpenBIOS project.
  4. 1999Joined LinuxBIOS.
  5. 2003Co-authored the first AMD64 port with Eric Biederman, starting the LinuxBIOS v2 tree.
  6. 2005Founded coresystems GmbH to handle commercial coreboot work — chipset and mainboard ports.
  7. 2008Took over maintainership of LinuxBIOS and renamed it coreboot.
  8. 2020 —Designing modern Amiga hardware: ReA4091 with Chris Hooper, then the A4092. Talks at VCF East and AmiWest.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

05 — Elsewhere

Related sites

amiga.technology

Build logs, hardware notes and the workbench side of things.

scsi.me

The A4092 project — specs, firmware, gallery and documentation.

github.com/reinauer

Source for the tools, drivers and logic described above.

github.com/A4091

Hardware, firmware and driver repositories for the A4091 and A4092.

06 — Contact

Get in touch

For collaboration, or questions about any of the projects above.

hello@busterlabs.com