Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-05-26, 04:18

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by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Hopefully I'll get to stream again soon, perhaps this weekend. It was pretty fun! I'm trying to do it on the weekend during the day US time so people in Europe can also watch live. If you follow ianpolpo on Twitch you'll be able to get notified when I go live. I've been simultaneously streaming on …

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Re: PicoMEM : Pi Pico on ISA, with full Memory and I/O bus access

Posted on 2023-05-24, 13:29

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Even if this card only had the disk emulation feature, it would be a game changer. Being able to select disk images on a microSD card in the BIOS is amazing and so much more flexible than XTIDE. And then there's everything else that it can do. Thanks for the kind words about the idea that got you …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-04-21, 05:31

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Sorry, no SBOS. The current PicoGUS design does not connect the IOCHCHK pin so it can't generate NMIs, which SBOS and MegaEM need. Unfortunately you will not be able to hear the dulcet tones of "SBOS Installed!" in emulation on a PicoGUS. I left the pin out because GPIOs on the Pico were at a …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-04-21, 05:08

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Jazz Jackrabbit and Pinball Fantasies don't use the GUS MIDI patches so that is not the problem... Both have been tested a lot so should work, but it's possible that a regression in the latest 0.6.1 firmware broke them. Give 0.6.0 or 0.5.1 a try.

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-04-20, 18:45

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have also taken the plung into making a picogus, but have run into an issue, the same issue that root42 on youtube is having. The card works on adlib, but when I try a gus pgusinit comes back card not responding to GUS commands on port 240. This is the only sound card in the system, and I have …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-04-20, 17:51

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

ULTRADIR should be set to the location of where the GUS software installation is, typically C:\ULTRASND. Without this software installed there will be no MIDI patches. I've updated the install instructions in the Wiki to walk through installing the GUS software and MIDI patches, and to set the …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-04-18, 19:36

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have a feeling this is due to solder bridges on the ICs. Pickle has a good idea to check for shorts. Also give a close visual inspection with magnification.

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-04-16, 16:36

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I need to improve the instructions for that as they’re mostly wrong because I went by memory. In the installer, choose the option to extract the files to C:\ULTRASND instead of going through setup. And then you can set the ULTRASND and ULTRADIR variables in your autoexec.bat file manually.

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-04-14, 22:02

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I'll probably resume in May. I've been away from my retro systems for about a month now... Hopefully taking this break from development to get a fresh mind for a possible new approach to emulation (some register writes/reads need to pause audio rendering and process IRQs, and I've worked around it …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-03-04, 20:49

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Thanks for posting the video here @Shreddoc! A comment on the video from @krivulak says that the CMS audio is pitched too high – that's something I noticed in testing and meant to get back to but I neglected to fix it before releasing the firmware. I'll try to fix that up (despite me saying I'd take …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-02-28, 19:50

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Was gonna suggest Logic Analyzer, didn't because you know your thing. I also think delay will not be significant and that is another selling point for this card. I am not sure if it is discussed here but next natural step for this to have a PCMCIA version of the card. It will be very useful to …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-02-28, 16:42

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Btw did you measure or know how much delay let's say the MPU-401 has compared to real hardware? I have a real Roland MPU-IPC-T so I could do some comparisons. I could probably rig up some kind of capture with my logic analyzer to compare the delays. There is an outgoing MIDI data buffer on the Pico …

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-02-28, 16:37

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Adding -0 should not be necessary, as 8086 instructions are the default. 186/286/386+ optimizations are only added if you add the compiler options for those. Likewise for x87 instructions.

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-02-28, 06:47

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I don't have an XT class machine of my own to test in, but pgusinit.exe is compiled with OpenWatcom for the DOS/16 platform, and in 86Box in 8088 emulation mode, can print the help text and fail to detect a PicoGUS.

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Re: PicoGUS: ISA sound card emulator with Raspberry Pi Pico (Gravis Ultrasound, AdLib, MPU-401, Tandy, CMS)

Posted on 2023-02-23, 04:43

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Separately, a quick note that the labelling of components C9 and C10 is swapped between the online BOM helper and the physical v1.1 PCB. It's no great issue, but can be a point of minor confusion or error if someone is religiously following those BOM references while soldering. ( not that anyone …

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Re: PicoGUS: Gravis Ultrasound emulator on an ISA card with Raspberry Pi Pico

Posted on 2023-02-22, 16:44

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Just a day after v0.5.x, firmware v0.6.0 is released! https://github.com/polpo/picogus/releases/tag/v0.6.0 Not much in the way of release notes for this one... just one line: it adds CMS/Game Blaster emulation support! Here's a video of it playing the Monkey Island title song: https://youtu.be/ …

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Re: PicoGUS: Gravis Ultrasound emulator on an ISA card with Raspberry Pi Pico

Posted on 2023-02-21, 20:10

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Hi All! Firmware v0.5.0 is finally out: https://github.com/polpo/picogus/releases/tag/v0.5.0 Firmware v0.5.1 is out: https://github.com/polpo/picogus/releases/tag/v0.5.1 This one had a lot of rabbit holes with regards to GUS compatibility, but DMA should be more reliable. Doom should no longer have …

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Re: PicoGUS: Gravis Ultrasound emulator on an ISA card with Raspberry Pi Pico

Posted on 2023-02-19, 15:52

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

JazeFox: Thank you very much for your very detailed feedback and suggestions! I appreciate the time that you took to do all of this testing and experimentation. Overclocking and Flash: This YouTube video and its followup were how I got a good feel for what I felt was safe and appropriate for …

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Re: PicoGUS: Gravis Ultrasound emulator on an ISA card with Raspberry Pi Pico

Posted on 2023-02-18, 17:28

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

FreddyV is working on drive emulation in his PicoMEM project. So far it is looking extremely promising: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/picomem-project-pi-pico-on-an-isa-board.1241199/ I have a feeling that the best route to creating an optical drive emulator on a Pico that works in DOS …

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Re: PicoGUS: Gravis Ultrasound emulator on an ISA card with Raspberry Pi Pico

Posted on 2023-02-13, 21:50

by

by polpo

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Okay now I have to build one of these. I have a Tandy 1000 , PC Jr, OG GUS, etc but there s something about this project that is awesome. Would you change any of the hardware design knowing what you know now?? There are a few things I'd change – number one would be putting the RP2040 directly on …

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