Software information: PineA64: Beta PineA64 ROM

If you are new to RISC OS you should read Introduction to RISC OS.

The download link provides a copy of the PineA64 (Pinebook) development ROM image. It is a bleeding-edge build which comes from the latest revisions of all the relevant sources in our source code repository and is completely untested.

Using this ROM image in your computer should only be done if you are confident that you know what you are doing! It is may be functionally incomplete and may unstable in various ways.

SDCreate

Although a copy of SDCreate is included in the download, it does not currently have any support for the PineA64.

CMOS RAM

The PineA64 doesn’t have CMOS memory on the circuit board which RISC OS expects to find to hold its essential configuration options needed before the main !Boot application is run. SDCMOS is used to store these settings on the SD card, emulating this CMOS memory. There is no battery backed clock, so the time is (usually) set up as a part of the boot sequence.

Caveat utilitor

Models

As of 23-Apr-2024 it is shown to work as expected on the 11" Pinebook (white). A recent update to the PineVideo module has stopped the 14" version booting.

Programmers

A full set of programmers exist within the HAL component, but these as yet are not created within the auto build process. For the technically minded, the image provided in the programmer is a concatenation of the bootloader and the RISC OS ROM as produced here. The ROM part of this image can be replaced with a more recent ROM image.