Pi:NextPi

NextPi

NextPi 1 was designed for a 1GB SD card, and will not take advantage of larger SD cards.

NextPi 2 is designed for to use all of a 16GB microSD card (some brands of SD cards aren't a full 16GB in size, and have been known to cause problems) - it will not work on smaller cards, and like it's predecessor, will not expand to expose the space of larger cards.

Synopsis

NextPi was a customised DietPi version distributed with the original "KS1" nexts, it has been superseeded by NextPi2 - which will work on both KS1 and KS2 nexts (and other compatible clones) as long as the SD card is large enough (>=16GB).

NextPi (and NextPi2) is optimised for Read Only filesystems (making them safe to turn off without a clean shutdown) and are designed with the specific use of embedded in an 8-bit computer in mind.

The term Accelerator is somewhat of a misnomer, technologically. It's not an accelerator in the terms that it accelerates the next itself, but it permits the execution of code on a much faster processor - that of the Pi Zero. Think of it as a co-processor, or "companion computer".

The Linux install that makes up NextPi is not usable as a "General Purpose" operating system due to the read only nature of the main filesystem. The read only nature also helps minimise any breaking changes to the operating system that could prevent future patches installing correctly.

NextPi does have writable FAT16 user partitions which can be used for user software development and misc. purposes although, for developed games using the Pi for media playback, and executing assistant code /ram is more suited (see the documentation included with NextPi about filesystems for more details) and NextPi 2 also has a Persistent Cache system, managed by the nextpi-cache CLI API.

Features

MP3 decoder; MIDI synthesis; Upload your own code and run it for custom acceleration functions; Encryption (useful for online high score validation, etc); TZX tape emulation, including accelerating tape loading far faster than possible with normal tape media or most TZX players; Simple scripting and API for most of those; Dual head output, including displays upto 1080P and Video MPG video decoding; and USB Host, so one could write interfaces to custom hardware (someone already added MIDI keyboards

Release Summary

Current Public Stable NextPi1 Release: 0.99D - download site
Current Public Stable NextPi2 Release: 1.92D - download site
Current Public Testing NextPi2 Release: N/A - public testing versions are handled via Discord
Current Private Testing NextPi2 Release: 1.93A - private testing versions are not available for public download

Getting Started - A User

• SUPervisor

Getting Started - A Developer

• Basic Concepts
• Communication Devices

• CLI API