Mr. Fusion - Universal MiSTer installation image
Mr. Fusion is a tiny, custom Linux distribution designed to run on the DE10-Nano and install MiSTer.
It comes in the form of a compact 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 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.
From there, using the built-in scripts, you can configure WiFi (or use Ethernet out of the box) and run the standard MiSTer Downloader script to get an up to date MiSTer installation.
You can provide custom WiFi and Samba configuration which Mr. Fusion will install alongside the basic MiSTer setup.
Requirements
- 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.
Instructions
Step 1
Download the latest version from the releases page.
Step 2
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.
Step 3
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!
Step 4
Put the SD card into the DE10-nano and power it on. After a few seconds the orange LED on the board should light up. If you have a TV or monitor connected to the HDMI port, the screen will turn blue and then show an installation notice splash screen:
Mr. Fusion will automatically re-partition and resize your SD card and copy all the necessary MiSTer files onto it. When it's done it will reboot your DE10-nano and you will be greeted by the MiSTer menu.
If you have an I/O board, you can pair a Bluetooth controller by holding the OSD button and you can map controller buttons by holding the "User" button. Otherwise you can connect a USB keyboard and hit F12 to open the MiSTer menu.
Through the Scripts section you can configure WiFi and update your MiSTer. Please refer to the MiSTer documentation for more information.
Note: 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.
MiSTer scripts support
The MiSTer Downloader 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.
Adding more scripts
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.
Custom WiFi configuration (optional)
You can copy a custom wpa_supplicant.conf file in the root of the SD card
after flashing the Mr. Fusion image. It will automatically be copied to the
correct place during the installation of MiSTer.
This allows you to configure your WiFi credentials before you install MiSTer
and thus removes the need to connect a keyboard after installation.
Custom Samba configuration (optional)
You can copy a custom samba.sh file in the root of the SD card
after flashing the Mr. Fusion image. It will automatically be copied to the
correct place during the installation of MiSTer.
This allows you to enable Samba before you install and thus removes
the need to connect a keyboard to your MiSTer or having to ssh into it.
How is this an improvement to the MiSTer setup process?
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.
Getting help
If you need help, come find us in the #help channel on the MiSTer FPGA Discord server.
Reporting issues
If you think you found a bug or you have an idea for an improvement, please open an issue.
Building it yourself
See BUILDING.md for more details.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Sorgelig, Rysha, Ziggurat, alanswx, r0ni and Locutus73 for their insights. Thanks to amoore2600 for pushing me to build this. Thanks to everyone else who contributes to the MiSTer FPGA project.
Disclaimer
This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. See LICENSE for more details.