v0.2

CHANGELOG

A resident .uf2 bootloader / front-end for the RP2350 retro-emulator family (pico-infonesPlus, pico-pcePlus, pico-genesisPlus, pico-smsplus, pico-peanutGB, …).

General Info

Binaries for each configuration and PCB design are at the end of this page.

v0.2

Added

• Duke Nukem 3D, a native RP2350 port from
  pico-duke3D, joins the menu as
  duke3d_game. It runs on the Adafruit Fruit Jam (HW_CONFIG 8), the Adafruit
  DVI + MicroSD breakout combination (2) and the Murmulator M2 (13), and needs
  PSRAM on all three. DUKE3D.GRP streams from /roms/duke3d/ on the SD card,
  so there is no companion data image to flash.
• Artwork themes. The graphical menu can carry up to ten sets of artwork in
  <BASEDIR>/assets/themes/0 … themes/9. Press UP or DOWN in the
  graphical menu to cycle through the themes present on the card; the choice is
  saved immediately and restored on the next boot. A theme need not be
  complete — any application it has no image for falls back to theme 0.
• On-screen help. Press START in either menu mode for a full-screen
  summary of the controls, the meaning of the * and ! markers, and the
  current mode, theme, board configuration and index file.
• Rejected-.uf2 error screen. When pre-flight validation refuses a file,
  the loader now says why in plain language instead of flashing a terse notice
  for three seconds. It names the actual problem — linked at the wrong address
  (the address is shown), built for the wrong chip or architecture, too large
  for the board's flash, corrupt, or an incomplete copy — and, where relevant,
  gives the build flags needed to produce an image the loader accepts. The page
  stays up until a button is pressed. Nothing is erased at that point, so the
  menu is still there afterwards.
• GUI and THEME keys in boot.txt, holding the menu mode and the active
  theme.

Changed

• The SD-card archive no longer leaves a menu entry without artwork. It still
  ships the small .444/.555 caches in preference to the source images, but
  where a theme has no cache for an entry its .png/.jpg now ships instead and
  the first boot converts it.
• build_emulators.sh builds Doom from pico-doom main, which carries the
  build scripts for both variants since the full-version merge.
• Menu artwork moved from <BASEDIR>/assets to
  <BASEDIR>/assets/themes/0. Existing cards are migrated automatically on the
  first boot — the cached .444/.555 files move too, so nothing is
  re-converted, and the screensaver/ folder is left where it is. The move is
  resumable if it is interrupted.
• boot.txt is now written by the bootloader. Only the GUI= and THEME=
  lines are rewritten; comments, ordering, spacing and every other key are
  preserved. The file is created on the first change if it does not exist,
  carrying the effective value of all keys. Updates go through a temporary file
  that is re-parsed before being renamed into place, so a power cut cannot
  corrupt the configuration. A card that cannot be written is not an error: the
  change applies for the session and the help screen says it was not saved.
• The .guimode file is gone, folded into boot.txt's GUI key. An
  existing .guimode is read once, migrated, and deleted.
• Menu footer and text-mode hints updated for the new controls.
• Boards without PSRAM now convert artwork for every theme at boot rather than
  one folder, since the converter cannot run once the menu is up. The first boot
  after adding a theme is correspondingly slower.
• pico-bootLoader_sdcard.zip is a release asset again. The archive carries
  the emulators, the Doom port and its WAD, the artwork themes, the screensaver
  sprites, a sample boot.txt and a new versions.txt recording which release
  tag each emulator was built from. Unpack it at the root of the card.
• Release tags now say what changed. v0.N is a bootloader firmware release
  (re-flash the board and refresh the card); v0.N.M ships the same firmware with
  refreshed emulator binaries, so only /emu on the card needs replacing. Each
  release lists the emulator versions its archive contains.
• Doom's WAD is named doom1-whx.uf2 in emulators.txt, matching what the
  build actually produces. Earlier cards declared doom1-whx-for-fruitjam.uf2,
  which the loader could never find, so it launched Doom without flashing the
  WAD.

Fixed

• A standalone build could be flashed and leave the board unbootable. An
  application linked at 0x10000000 but larger than the 512 KB bootloader
  region straddles the partition boundary: validation skipped every block below
  0x10080000 and accepted the tail, so the loader wrote a fragment from the
  middle of the image into the start of the application partition. The progress
  bar ran to 100 %, the flashed app then had no usable vector table, and the
  board rebooted into the menu with no explanation. Any block below the
  partition now rejects the whole file up front, before anything is erased, and
  the new error screen names the address it was linked at. Builds smaller than
  512 KB were already rejected, which is why this only showed up with larger
  applications.

Getting started

For board-by-board wiring, supported display modes and more refer to the pico-infonesPlus documentation. The set of supported boards and their pinouts is identical between the two projects.

1. Flash the bootloader. Download the loader .uf2 for your board. Hold
   BOOTSEL, connect the board over USB, and copy the .uf2 onto the
   RP2350 drive. See Supported Hardware in the README.
2. Prepare the SD card. Download pico-bootLoader_sdcard.zip from the same
   Releases page and unpack it onto a FAT32- or exFAT-formatted card. The
   archive contains the emulators, the Doom port, the menu artwork, and a
   sample configuration file.
3. Run it. Insert the card and power on the board. The menu appears.

Metadata

Download the full metadata pack here and extract it to the root of the SD card. This should create a /metadata folder on the card.

Emulator versions in pico-bootLoader_sdcard.zip

Emulator	Repository	Version	pico_shared
piconesPlus	pico-infonesPlus	v0.44	c0971c5
picopcePlus	pico-pcePlus	v0.3	c0971c5
PicoPeanutGB	pico-peanutGB	v0.11	c0971c5
picosmsPlus	pico-smsplus	v0.26	c0971c5
picogenesisPlus	pico-genesisPlus	v0.13	c0971c5
picoPacPlus	pico-pacPlus	v0.2	c0971c5
doom_tiny	pico-doom	v0.1	–
doom_tiny_full	pico-doom	v0.1	–
picosnesPlus	pico-snesPlus	v0.2	c0971c5
duke3d_game	pico-duke3D	fix/audio-production-rate@1700c41	–