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2×Pi×r ... Pi 2 Release Available Now

Posted by Steve Revill Fri, 20 Feb 2015 19:17:00 GMT

Today marks the availability of the very latest beta release candidate for the popular Raspberry Pi educational platform. This ROM now includes support for the Mark 2 Model B Raspberry Pi hardware, using the newer BCM2836 system on chip and a total of 1GB of RAM. The model A, B, and B+ are still supported too.

Visitors to the South west show on Saturday 21st February 2015 can pick up a copy on either SD card or micro SD card.

If you can’t make the show, it can also be ordered online for the same low price as earlier releases. We’ll be making it available as a download in the next few days for users who are confident burning the image onto their existing cards.

With a lucky rabbit’s foot in our side pocket, this follow up to the earlier RC12 is in fact RC14 and includes the following headline changes in addition to the Mark 2 Model B support:

• The kernel now understands and can render sprites with alpha levels of transparency, and hence the desktop can use these facilities too.
• The kernel now supports a much wider array of pixel buffer formats for the screen including 4k and 64k.
• The USB driver, DWCDriver, now uses fast interrupts to handle some of the load from the USB peripheral. Previously normal interrupts might miss
  some key up or mouse click events when the system was busy.
• A new diversion, !Hopper is included which is a RISC OS version of the popular Frogger game.
• Ethernet uploads via the EtherUSB driver are now considerably quicker, typically factors of 10x to 20x depending on the protocol being used.

This new release will also be featured on a future update of NOOBS by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in due course.

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