Analogue Pocket SD Setup

Analogue Pocket SD Setup

Putting a Core on an SD card should not feel like gambling with everything already on it. SwanSong Desktop includes a careful, explicit workflow for adding SwanSong Core while preserving the rest of the card.

The FPGA project, packages, release policy, and hardware qualification remain owned by the separate RegionallyFamous/swansong-core repository.

Installing SwanSong Desktop never touches a card. Updating the Mac app through Sparkle never invokes the Pocket workflow.

Current availability

No authorized stable SwanSong Core release is currently published. SwanSong 0.3 and 0.4 report that state and perform no package download or card write.

The workflow unlocks only after swansong-core publishes an immutable stable release that satisfies the embedded authorization policy, package manifest, asset-size, and SHA-256 requirements.

User workflow

1. Back up the complete SD card.
2. Mount the card on the Mac.
3. Open Analogue Pocket in SwanSong's sidebar or choose File > Prepare Analogue Pocket SD Card….
4. Explicitly check for the official stable Core release.
5. Select the mounted card itself and review the exact volume and Core version.
6. Confirm the install.
7. After SwanSong completes its read-back verification, eject the card in Finder before removing it.

SwanSong accepts only an ordinary writable volume mounted directly under /Volumes whose kernel filesystem is exFAT or FAT32/MS-DOS. The card must be blank or resemble an existing Analogue Pocket layout. Disk images, arbitrary folders, system volumes, hidden mounts, read-only volumes, and unsupported filesystems are rejected.

Release trust

The release check is manual and has no launch-time or background request. The client accepts only the official RegionallyFamous/swansong-core repository's stable GitHub Releases and binds all of the following before extraction:

• repository, release, tag, and asset identity;
• embedded release authorization policy;
• machine-readable package manifest;
• expected filename and package byte count;
• SHA-256 digest; and
• HTTPS redirect policy limited to trusted GitHub release infrastructure.

The package download is streamed with a fixed upper bound. A tag, asset, manifest, size, checksum, repository, or policy mismatch fails before the card is modified.

Archive safety

The Core archive extractor rejects:

• absolute paths and path traversal;
• duplicate or noncanonical destinations;
• symbolic or hard links;
• unexpected top-level content;
• excessive file count;
• oversized individual files;
• excessive total expanded bytes; and
• packages that do not contain the expected Analogue Pocket Core structure.

Only regular files within the Core package's managed Assets, Cores, and Platforms paths are eligible for installation.

Transactional card write

Immediately before writing, SwanSong rechecks that the selected volume is the same eligible card reviewed by the user. It calculates required space from the verified package plus recovery needs and stops if space is insufficient.

For every managed destination, the installer keeps a recovery copy of the previous file until all writes finish. New files are written through temporary siblings and promoted atomically where the filesystem permits. After the merge, every managed destination is read back and compared with the verified package.

If a write, promotion, or read-back check fails, SwanSong restores replaced files, removes newly introduced managed files, and cleans temporary/recovery artifacts. A failed install must leave the prior managed Core state intact.

Content that is preserved

The installer does not format or repartition the card. It does not supply Pocket firmware, games, homebrew ROMs, or BIOS files. It does not change:

• games;
• saves;
• Memories;
• Settings;
• Presets; or
• unrelated cores and platforms.

Installing the Core is separate from the Pocket .sav exchange described in Playing and Library.

Test coverage

Automated coverage includes release-policy and manifest mismatch, checksum and size drift, trusted redirects, bounded downloads, malformed JSON, unsafe ZIP paths, symlinks, resource limits, card eligibility, insufficient space, identity change before write, successful merge/read-back, post-write mismatch, rollback, cleanup, and preservation of unrelated card content.

Physical beta coverage still requires real SD cards, readers, exFAT/FAT32 volumes, Finder eject behavior, and a published Core package exercised on Analogue Pocket hardware. See 0.4 Beta Testing and Release Gates.