This is very nice!!! Thank you for your work!

Would be nice to have a AIL2/AIL3 music driver(s) for the Mindscape board. One of the disadvantages of cards like the Tandy and Innovation is the limited 3 melodic voices only. CMS has 12, but the custom AIL2 CMS driver doesn't handle percussion that well resulting in out of tune sounds. The SID chip on the Innovation card can actually sound quite nice, unfortunately the 3 voice limitation is quite handicapping. Listen to Legend of Kyrandia with the Innovation card:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0uUVfC7e94

So an extra SID chip would be awesome here!

In contrast here's the CMS version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX4RQk0Nlxo

Sounds OK, until the percussion instruments are attempted. Then it gets the music horribly out of tune. I don't know if it's because the CMS chips don't have a high octave range or something, but it's just a shame. Maybe the driver needs tweaking to ignore percussion.

The Mindscape with a couple of 3 voice chips would be awesome. I don't know if the AY chips have better octave ranges than the Phillips chips but in any case would love to see a driver for this standard.

Kudos for this work Freddy! It's awesome that the firmware on the card can support all the sound standards at the same time. I've been wishing for a real hardware board that could support Tandy, CMS, Covox Sound Master and Innovation, and seems like PicoMEM, despite being emulation is the one closest to it. Keep up the good work!

Thanks,

CMS beat Tandy of course as it is Square like Tandy, but Stereo with panning and 12 Channels.

The AY-3-8910 has its own sound signature with the volume "envelop".
With emulation, we can add more AY Chip, to be 4, and Add panning register per channel....

What I would like to add is Midi to AY, OPL2, CMS ....

I add here an example, direct capture from the PicoMEM.

Any chance you add Innovation SSI and Covox Sound Master I? For the sound master you already have the synth AY emulation, probably just needs to be mirrored at a different port. IBM Music Feature would be awesome too but that one is probably a bit more complex, i have no idea how powerful the Pico is. One card that does all these simple synths is very attractive, and i'm looking forward to the progress on this, i won't mind in the future replacing my OG CMS for this. All this in 1 ISA slot only is very nice!

Very nice! Love that you keep adding features (and thus value) to the PicoMem!

Hi,

On the top of everything else (Adlib, Tandy, CMS, Mindscape) I now added Covox to the PicoMEM.

Does anybody have an idea about the I/O port to add for the Covox ?
Disney Sound Source will follow rapidly. (Almost done)
And When DMA will work, Covox Sound Master and Sound Master 2 will also be possible.

There is a test firmware for it:
https://github.com/FreddyVRetro/ISA-PicoMEM/t … e/main/firmware

The Adlib emulation is clost to have no more sound cut during disk access, I added audio mixing during Disk access and Disk access are faster now.

I start to have good result for Sound Blaster as well (Not released yet)

On the PicoMEM 1.5 (Pico2 based PicoMEM) , I can play with Doom, Quake, Terminal valocity, Duke nukem 3D in Adlib/SB without problem.

FreddyV wrote on 2025-08-05, 17:07:

Does anybody have an idea about the I/O port to add for the Covox ?

Port selection possibilities for the CSM were:

220h -> default (common Sound blaster range)
240h -> (possible SB range, also common choice for GUS)
280h -> this port is the default for Innovation SSI 2001
2C0h -> this port is the most common selection for the homebrew Tandy sound cards

I think it would be nice to have an alternative option, like port 2A0h or 2E0h.

edit: nvm, i guess you were talking about Covox Speech Thing. Mainly i think it's port 378h (LPT1) and 278h (LPT2)

Yes,

The question was for Covox

By the Way, PicoMEM Sound Blaster emulation (Virtual DMA) now Works Great with DOOM, DOOM2, Descent, Wolf3D, and lot of other games 😉

FreddyV wrote on 2025-08-17, 19:18:

By the Way, PicoMEM Sound Blaster emulation (Virtual DMA) now Works Great with DOOM, DOOM2, Descent, Wolf3D, and lot of other games 😉

Wow, when will you tell us more?

vetz wrote on 2025-08-17, 20:31:

FreddyV wrote on 2025-08-17, 19:18:

By the Way, PicoMEM Sound Blaster emulation (Virtual DMA) now Works Great with DOOM, DOOM2, Descent, Wolf3D, and lot of other games 😉

Wow, when will you tell us more?

Hi,

The PicoMEM has no DMA signals wired, so it is done via DMA emulation with the picoMEM Interrupt acting like a multiplexed HW IRQ and commands (Memory Copy)

Unfortunately, I selected all the Sound Blaster HW interrupt for the PicoMEM, so games doing hardware detection of the IRQ and DMA fail the detection.
It is simple to patch some like Sierra games....

PicoMEM 1.5 (Future PicoMEM 2) can use multiple interrupt, so with the same code and "no" multiplexed interrupt, more games are working
HW DMA is on this board as well, but I did not want to test before I got the Virtual DMA Working (Otherwise, I am sure I will never finish it)

With DMA Working, more can arrive : Tandy DAC, Covox sound Master, GUS, Windows Sound Source ....

carlostex wrote on 2025-08-11, 21:01:

edit: nvm, i guess you were talking about Covox Speech Thing. Mainly i think it's port 378h (LPT1) and 278h (LPT2)

In addition to those two, you might also want to add port 3BCh (0x3bc), since that's a common I/O address for LPT ports as well.

In the original IBM PC, that port would only be used for LPT1 if an MDA card was installed, but this port might also be used when the PicoMEM is added to a system that already has two LPT ports.

This obviously applies to both the Covox Speech Thing and the Disney Sound Source.