TortOS v1.4.0

Down To The Wire. Over The Hare on the GKD Pixel 2, over its USB cable instead of Wi-Fi. Plug the Pixel 2 into a Mac, a Linux computer or a Windows 11 PC, open MENU > Down To The Wire, then http://10.42.0.1 in a browser, and type the PIN. Games, music, books and saves go on and off by dragging, and Download logs works over the cable too. Nothing to install on the computer.

Sound through a USB-C DAC on the Pixel 2. Plug in a USB-C headphone adapter and the sound goes there, ahead of the headphone jack, in Muse and in games. USB is a fourth choice in Audio Output, and the volume buttons set it like any other.

Box art and album covers on the Pixel 2. It has no network of its own, so Down To The Wire's page fetches them through your computer instead: Get Box Art and Album Covers finds games' box art in libretro's collection and albums' covers in MusicBrainz's Cover Art Archive, and puts them on the card.

Muse keeps the Music folder tidy. On both devices, songs left loose at the top of Music/ move into Music/Singles/, an album of their own with its own cover, and an album folder put straight into Music/ is filed under its artist when its tags say clearly who that is.

Updating keeps your games. The new TortOS Installer, for macOS, Windows and Linux, updates a card in place on either device: put the card in the computer and choose Update. On the Pixel 2 that used to mean writing a new image and losing everything on the card; now the new TortOS and plastron go on, and the games, music, saves and settings stay.

Truer colors in the Pixel 2's games. Its panel shows greens yellow beside the Brick's; games are now drawn through a color correction that takes most of the yellow out.

Also:

• A game resumed at power on always comes back with its in-game menu. It could start without one when the emulator was slow to answer.
• Album Art asks again about an album whose cover was taken off the card, where it used to remember it as done.

Updating from an earlier version

With the TortOS Installer, choose Update. By hand on the Brick, copy the zip's TortOS/, .tmp_update/ and trimui/ over the card's, replacing what is there. Copying the zip's Roms/, Saves/ or Bios/ over the card's replaces them, games and saves included. On the Pixel 2 the installer is the only way that keeps the games: writing the image by hand erases the card.

New install

With the TortOS Installer, choose the device and Fresh install. By hand, as in the README: the Brick uses TortOS-v1.4.0.zip, the Pixel 2 TortOS-v1.4.0-pixel2.img.xz. TortOS-v1.4.0-pixel2-sources.tar holds the source of the open-source software in the Pixel 2 image, and SHA256SUMS the checksums of all three files.

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If you made it this far, I hope you have a fantastic day.