Planning a new releasse in time for VCF East in April 2026.

[William Cattey]

An actual release is like 5 years overdue. There is SO much that users of the published trunk source are getting that everyone should get.

So I'm ramping up my hardware at home, and my understanding of the build tools.

I want to ship out a new PiDP-8i release in time for VCF East in April.

Really, the only outstanding item is a yay or nay on the Inverted Deposit software option. Everything else, I think is in place.

See the current Changelog at: https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/file?name=ChangeLog.md&ci=tip

Questions?

Comments?

-Bill

[AndyB]

That's a ton of work.  Outstanding.

[William Cattey]

Thanks.  I will need some testers when I have Release Candidate images.

[William Cattey]

Warren, the original author of the image creation tool, recommended I consider adopting rpi-image-gen as a replacement for his bosi image creation tool.

But I've tripped over an interesting problem.  rpi-image-gen is forward looking. It doesn't support the old ARMv6 Pi Zero platform.

We had previously put a fair bit of work into the low-overhead NLS blinking light support, and the previous release did distribute an ARMv6 Pi Zero image.

How prevalent are the Pi Zero configurations out there? I'd very much like to keep supporting EVERYBODY with the newest software.

Please reply to this thread with opinions.

Oscar, if you're listening, I know you sell a lot of PiDP-8s these days with people putting Pi4 and Pi5 processors in them. Do you have a sense of the footprint of legacy ARMv6/ Pi Zero systems out there?

-Bill

[Bill Wenrich]

My PiDP-8 does use a Pi Zero W, but I have other Pi Zero 2 W & Pi 4 available.

People who already use the Pi Zero (1) or Pi 1 can keep doing what they've been doing. If the existing install-from-source-control instructions still work, that feels sufficient.

In my opinion, new 32-bit builds should be discouraged in the project documentation. Raspberry Pi has an unusually long EOL on their hardware (I think they are promising to sell Pi Zero 1 and Pi 1 at least until *2030*), but I don't think it's practical to expect community support for all that time.

RasPi has been shipping 64-bit boards for a decade now and IMO as a hobby project, I'm willing to assume anyone building a kit can also afford a Pi Zero 2.

-Bill

[William Cattey]

That datapoint about your willingness to migrate to a newer platform is encouraging. Thanks!

[William Cattey]

Status report:  I've migrated our image builder from Warren's bosi tool to the modern rpi-image-gen tool chain.

I built a deployment image based on the current trunk and successfully booted headless on a Pi3b, Pi3b+, and a Pi4.
I've checked this work into trunk so it's canon going forward.

The current plan is to consider NLS and the 32 bit Pi platforms legacy. If there is outcry, doing a bosi build for some of this stuff is possible, albeit time consuming, and fiddly.

My next milestone is to do the work to convert trunk to using the OS/8 Combined Kit completely built from source as the new default boot environment.

While I'm working on that, others are looking to see if we can get the inverted deposit switch code sorted out to make the cut for the new release.

-Bill

[William Cattey]

Status update:

The trunk is now pretty much how I want it for the new release.

Images are building to my satisfaction.

The default boot image has been changed from the binary OS/8 v3d to the built-from-source OS/8 Combined Kit.

The remaining open question is if the invert-deposit option can be included.

Would people please check out trunk and see if anything has been missed while I dig in on the invert-deposit testing?

-Bill