Delphius wrote on 2024-12-26, 13:59:

I have started designing a sort of companion card that will help fill in the gap for some things not included with the PicoGus, like the ability to mix multiple internal inputs like CD-Rom and a wavetable header for those who built PicoGus v1.2. It also will include a few other features that will be nice to have when using another ISA slot. I have the main design sorted and should have a prototype soon for testing. No dates yet for when this will be released but I will keep in touch on my progress.

That sounds really cool, look forward to seeing the progress.

Hayko wrote on 2024-12-26, 12:03:

I have been testing dune2 but i dont get the "speaking sounds" to work. What im doing wrong? 😀
picogus + S2 midi.

I would like to add something more: not only XMS should be available to dune 2 and enabled via setup program, XMS available also should be limited to 16M, once you provide more - dune2 executable may/will crash.
My main setup for Dune 2 is PicoGUS in SB 2.0 mode + WP32 McCake in MT-32 mode.

I can’t get any of my pico 1’s to be detected on the micro 8088 I built. It does detect a pico 2.
I did see something similar reported as a bug on the GitHub page.
Is anyone had success on 8088/86?
I took the same card and made sure it was working and it was ok on a socket 5 board with the latest fw.
I also tried the micro 8088 to 4.77 and no fast wait states.
Maybe I have some instability on the Isa bus

Edit: put the picogus 1 in the slot before the cpu card and ran a msdos 6 card (not sure if this matters) and it was detected.
I think something is unstable with the backplane signals.

@polpo

any plan to add more sound card support? Still plenty of stuff emulated on DOSBox (X and Staging) not yet on the PicoGUS.

- IBM Music Feature;
- Innovation SSI;
- Covox Speech Thing;
- Disney Sound Source;

carlostex wrote on 2025-01-03, 12:06:

any plan to add more sound card support? Still plenty of stuff emulated on DOSBox (X and Staging) not yet on the PicoGUS. […]
Show full quote

any plan to add more sound card support? Still plenty of stuff emulated on DOSBox (X and Staging) not yet on the PicoGUS.

- IBM Music Feature;
- Innovation SSI;
- Covox Speech Thing;
- Disney Sound Source;

My informed guess is that Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source should be semi-trivial.
For the Innovation SSI-2001, code from https://github.com/Bakisha/STM32-SID-PLAYER could be reused.
IBM Music Feature emulation sounds considerably more involved to me.

Hmm how much does that code depend on the 6502 emulation? There's certainly no need to emulate that. I thought most stuff emulated on the PicoGUS came from DOSBox, seems like i'm a bit uninformed.

Benedikt wrote on 2025-01-03, 18:46:

My informed guess is that Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source should be semi-trivial. For the Innovation SSI-2001, code f […]
Show full quote

carlostex wrote on 2025-01-03, 12:06:

any plan to add more sound card support? Still plenty of stuff emulated on DOSBox (X and Staging) not yet on the PicoGUS. […]
Show full quote

any plan to add more sound card support? Still plenty of stuff emulated on DOSBox (X and Staging) not yet on the PicoGUS.

- IBM Music Feature;
- Innovation SSI;
- Covox Speech Thing;
- Disney Sound Source;

My informed guess is that Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source should be semi-trivial.
For the Innovation SSI-2001, code from https://github.com/Bakisha/STM32-SID-PLAYER could be reused.
IBM Music Feature emulation sounds considerably more involved to me.

CST and DSS both are actually connected to a printer port and SPP mode would be really easy to implement with the PicoGUS. Also The CSS is just a 8bit to analog converter:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing - you could also just build the circuit shown there. The DSS seems to be similar straight forward when looking into the programming documentation: https://archive.org/details/dss-programmers-guide and the example code is just using SPP mode of the printer port. If a game requires the printer port in EPP mode it would be harder and ECP is not possible with PicoGUS (since it needs communication on BASE_PORT + 0x402). If someone wants to dive deep into the parallel port: https://ia800901.us.archive.org/26/items/f15_ … s_processed.pdf

For the Innovation SSI exists a nice clone: Say "Hi!" to the Renovation SSI-2001! which could be used as a starting point (Benedikt is the thread opener of it). There is even a SID Player for the RP2040 which would make it even easier: https://github.com/henrikenblom/SIDPod Only possible issue could be that handling the ISA Bus and the SID player at the same time is too much for load a single RP2040.

carlostex wrote on 2025-01-03, 19:23:

I thought most stuff emulated on the PicoGUS came from DOSBox

Some does, but with the important modifier, "...on a Pico, in an old PC". Even where there's pre-existing code, the amount of dedicated work required to add each new sound mode to the PicoGUS varies from relatively trivial (with basic things like Covox), to impossible.

I believe the current work is focusing on more mainstream modes yet to be incorporated. However my understanding is that (at least some of) the niche modes you mentioned are likely to happen in time too!

Speech Thing is so trivial that I've put off doing it forever, and Disney Sound Source isn't much more complex (adds a FIFO). I might consolidate the other simple modes (Tandy and CMS) into a single one that also adds Covox/Sound Source.

I actually made an attempt at SSI-2001 and HardSID emulation in 2023, using Hermit's cRSID emulator which is very high accuracy and is optimized well enough to run on the RP2040. However I couldn't ever get the ADSR envelopes to clock right, since cRSID's timing is very tightly coupled with its 6510/CIA/VIC emulation. If you want to hear some kind of hilarious sounding playback, here's a video of it playing a .SID file: https://youtu.be/XHBOGWlv_JQ
I will probably give it another go, using an older integer version of the reSID emulator, which is used on the well regarded SIDkick Pico.

The Music Feature Card is definitely interesting, and ymfm is probably fast enough to emulate the OPP chip, but I haven't looked hard at what else would be needed - just looking at the card it seems like there's a pretty complex front-end to the OPP.

Although support for the Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source wouldn't really add anything better or unique over Sound Blaster DAC emulation in terms of actual game experience, emulating these parallel port devices does bring some other advantages, because they require neither IRQs nor DMA channels:

• They would allow for (DAC) options better than the internal speaker on systems that are resource-constrained, for instance because all IRQs and/or DMA channels are already in use
• These types of emulated devices would also work in certain Tandy 1000 models and other PCs that lack a DMA controller
• Unlike Sound Blaster or even full GUS emulation, these parallel port sound devices would also be possible to implement in a hypothetical PCI-variant of the PicoGUS, for systems lacking ISA slots
• Ditto for possible future PCMCIA- or CardBus-variants of the PicoGUS

keenerb wrote on 2024-09-10, 19:43:

Should "ultramix" let you set volume with picogus?

It's something I'd also be interesed in. "Could not locate an Ultrasound at the port(s) specified in the environment" and tells me to run SETUP again.

Happy New Year, btw 😀

_ar wrote on 2025-01-05, 20:54:

keenerb wrote on 2024-09-10, 19:43:

Should "ultramix" let you set volume with picogus?

It's something I'd also be interesed in. "Could not locate an Ultrasound at the port(s) specified in the environment" and tells me to run SETUP again.

Happy New Year, btw 😀

I haven't implemented any mixer things so that's not possible for now. However I will probably be implementing the mixer for the Windows Sound System support I'm working on now, so I will probably port that over to GUS once that is finished.

What is the status of SB Pro emulation?

Hello everyone,
I'm hoping someone can help me here. I've been working on a project that combine's Rasteri's WeeCee with Eivind Bohler's TinyLlama 3 which has been very successful except for 1 part. I cannot get pgusinit to see the picogus on the bus for some reason. If anyone is familiar with the SOM304RD-VI it essentially offers the entire ISA bus on it's pin header so I am treating the PicoGus like it's plugged into an ISA slot. this differs a little bit from the TinyLlama v3 since that one uses the PCIRST signal which is active low and inverts it where as I used RSTDRV off the ISA bus which is active high which is essentially what the original PicoGus does. other than that, I didn't change any of the logic. I used a very similar schematic to make a PC/104 version of the PicoGus and that works so I guess what I really need is a second set of eyes on it.
I was able to succesfully drop the firmware on it and everything and the activity light comes on after I do that so that tells me the RP2040 is responding at least. it just seems like the ISA bus isn't making connection to the SOM.
and before anyone asks, I've been able to use other PicoGus devices with this SOM so I know it's compatible.

Thank you for taking the time to check this out! if I can get this working, I think the project will be complete! 😀

I also need help running picoGUS (v2 from Serda) on XT system, Olivetti M19. When running pgusinit I get both no picogus detected error and picogus card using protocol 255, needs 3. The card works on a 16-bit machine.

zb10948 wrote on 2025-01-15, 18:12:

I also need help running picoGUS (v2 from Serda) on XT system, Olivetti M19. When running pgusinit I get both no picogus detected error and picogus card using protocol 255, needs 3. The card works on a 16-bit machine.

I've seen this error on 8-bit systems before as well. I'm curious what would be different since the PicoGus v2 runs on an 8-bit bus so theoretically, there should be nothing different except the software.

Is there some older version I could try?

snipe3687 wrote on 2025-01-15, 18:15:

zb10948 wrote on 2025-01-15, 18:12:

I also need help running picoGUS (v2 from Serda) on XT system, Olivetti M19. When running pgusinit I get both no picogus detected error and picogus card using protocol 255, needs 3. The card works on a 16-bit machine.

I've seen this error on 8-bit systems before as well. I'm curious what would be different since the PicoGus v2 runs on an 8-bit bus so theoretically, there should be nothing different except the software.

this is also the issue i reported above with the micro 8088.

I see. My XT has three slots. First and second are very low profile, third is used for external riser. On that riser I normally use two cards, network and audio, but picogus seems to not work in any combo.

Could it be bus frequency related? What speed do your XTs run at?