This project provides a small, minimal image that you can download and flash onto an SD card of any size with a tool like Apple Pi Baker, balenaEtcher, Win32 Disk Imager or even dd.
When you put this SD card into your DE10-nano and start it up, it will expand the SD card to its full capacity and install a basic MiSTer setup. This will be familiar to anyone who's worked with a Raspberry Pi before.
- A Micro SD card of minimum 2 GB, for example the one that came with your DE10-nano kit.
- Windows, Mac or Linux based computer with a (micro)SD card reader.
- An SD card flash utility.
Download a copy of the image from the releases page.
Download and install an SD card flash utility for your system. Here are a few example in no particular order:
Refer to the documentation of the SD card flash utility for more information.
Follow your SD card flash utility's instructions to flash the downloaded image onto your SD card.
Note: Extract the downloaded SD card image zip file if your SD card flash utility does not support flashing zip files!
Put the SD card into the DE10-nano and power it on. The board will boot up, re-partition and resize your SD card and copy all the necessary MiSTer files onto it. When it's done it will automatically reboot and you will be greeted by the MiSTer menu, provided that you have connected your board to a TV or monitor. Continue to set up your MiSTer device as usual following the instructions on the MiSTer wiki.
Note: There is currently no visual feedback on the installation process on the DE10-nano board. This will be added soon. From powering on the DE10-nano and getting to the MiSTer menu should not take more than 90 seconds. If you don't see the MiSTer menu appear after two minutes, power off the DE10-nano, remove the SD card and start over.
The MiSTer update script is included by default in every MiSTer installation. This image also includes the WiFi setup script to allow you to quickly setup a wireless internet connection after installation.
You can add more scripts if necessary: After you have flashed your SD card and
before you move it over to the DE10-nano, re-insert it into your computer.
A new drive called MRFUSION will appear. In it is a Scripts folder. Put
any script you want to have available in your MiSTer in this folder. It will
be copied to your MiSTer's Scripts folder automatically during the installation.
Having a universal flash image means we can just use any SD card image flashing tool on any platform instead of a bespoke MiSTer SD card creation app. We no longer need to maintain such a custom made app or port it to other platforms.
A fixed size image based approach has one caveat: We want the image to be as small as possible to reduce the time it takes to download and to support a wide variety of SD card capacities. We've managed to cram everything MiSTer needs into approximately 100 MB. When you flash a 100 MB image onto any size SD card, you will get only 100 MB of storage, most of which will be taken up by the MiSTer files. Your whopping 256 GB capacity SD card will only have a few megabytes free space. The filesystem must be resized to match its full capacity.
MiSTer uses the exFAT filesystem for maximum compatibility across different platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux, ...). Linux, the operating system that MiSTer uses under the hood does not (yet) support resizing exFAT filesystems. The only way to ensure maximum SD card capacity is to recreate the filesystem with the proper size. However, we can't know in advance what that capacity is going to be so we let the DE10-nano do the resize before installing MiSTer. That's what Mr. Fusion does. Because everyone has different computers but we all have the same DE10-nano board, it makes sense to do it this way.
If you need help, come find us in the #mister-help channel on the Classic Gaming Discord server.
If you think you found a bug or you have an idea for an improvement, please open an issue.
See BUILDING.md for more details.
Thanks to Sorgelig, Rysha, Ziggurat, alanswx, r0ni and Locutus73 for their insights. Thanks to amoore2600 for pushing me to build this.
This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. See LICENSE for more details.