Mise à jour Gamebuino Meta

Ça c'est bien vrai ! 

Effectivement, tu as raison, ce serait + visible. Et je dirais même plus, ça pourrait carrément apparaître dans l'en-tête des pages d'accueil, de l'Académie et du Forum communautaire avec des pastilles dans ce genre là (par exemple) :

Mais tu peux aussi suivre le projet sur GitHub et être prévenu automatiquement à chaque mise à jour :

• Gamebuino / Gamebuino-META
• Gamebuino / Loader-META

I also thought about this in the past; what's the latest boot loader version and if I already had it.

Latest one is 1.2.1. Pretty sure sold units were only either 1.2.0 or 1.2.1, the difference between the later two are just internal optimizations. There are no known bugs in either bootloader version.

And what is this?

Loader-META/loader/loader/loader.ino

That is the loader, and not the bootloader! ^^ The latest one is 1.2.6 and you can easily update it by just dropping the new binary into your sd card

EDIT: to clarify:

Loader: Program called loader.bin at the root of your SD card - it takes care of easily displaying different games with the nice icon and title screen, you can view your screenshots, set your console language, and change other settings!

Bootloader: 32K program residing at the top of flash, always, and is not replaceable. It takes care of things like upload through USB working, switching between different binary files from the SD card, some bootup stuff like automatic program validation and thelike

Can we summarize vocabulary and source of current versions?

• Loader is checkable at Loader-Meta repository
• Bootloader ??? is it Gamebuino-META repository ?
• Arduino IDE board definition ? 
  • currently, the json definition shows only versions 1.2.0 or 1.2.1
  • where can we check versions?

Is there a link between all those versions?

Library

The C++ library which you use to make your own games etc. It provides interfaces on how to communicate with the hardware easily. Repository is here.

Loader

Program that displays all your games on your SD card neatly, allows you to easily browse them and switch between them. Also has features such as setting the default name and viewing all screenshots of a game. Repository is here.

Bootloader

Little program that always resides in the top of flash. The bootloader is what first runs when you turn your console on. It does some things like initializing some clocks on the board and verifying that a valid program is currently loaded. If no valid program is loaded it automatically tries to load the Loader from the SD card, if that fails it has other fallbacks etc. The bootloader is also invoked when switching between games, it reads binary files and flashes them into the gamebuinos flash memory. Unfortunately no source code available.

Arduino IDE board definition

A simple JSON file which tells the arduino IDE how to use the gamebuino as a board to compile sketches and upload stuffs to it. You can see its json file here. The json file is auto-created using some php scripts based on SQL data, the repo for that is here.

EDIT: And everything has its own version numbering as they are basically independant. The only thing with similar version numbers are bootloader and board definition as they, at least in early development, went a lot hand-in-hand.

In case of issue with bootloader, where can we get it to flash it back? (I only mean binary file as source is not available)

You really shouldn't be able to accidentally break the bootloader, if you end up having a problem, please contact us (gamebuino team)

This can happen if you want to install the official distribution of CircuitPython, since the bootloader must be changed in this case.
Therefore, I share the question of Thierry: how to reinstall the META bootloader?

I found no information anywhere on this subject, neither on the forum, nor on the Academy, nor on the showcase site. I think it's a shame... It gives the impression that it's locked...

How did Adafruit achieve this? They must have had access to an uf2 file, right?

I think it would be great to document the installation of the bootloader on META!

This can happen if you want to install the official distribution of CircuitPython, since the bootloader must be changed in this case.

To be able to do that you would, yes, need to modify the bootloader, but to be able to modify that at all you'd need an external programmer controller. The USB upload can never modify the bootloader (at least with the META bootloader, other arduino bootloaders often don't have that protection)

I think it would be great to document the installation of the bootloader on META!

Due to large copycat potential we currently do not distribute binaries, sorry

How did Adafruit achieve this? They must have had access to an uf2 file, right?

It seems more like they used the open-source library to cross-compile and SD switching isn't working for them. This is just speculation.