LSS10999 wrote on Yesterday, 13:59:

Been thinking of the RP2350B which has 48 GPIOs compared to RP2040/RP2350A which has 30. […]
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Been thinking of the RP2350B which has 48 GPIOs compared to RP2040/RP2350A which has 30.

Will this enable the possible use of additional IRQ/DMA lines in the future? Should be useful for:
- Intelligent mode MPU401 with other modes.
- High DMA (16-bit) for proper SB16 support.

For accessing high IRQ/DMA lines the card will have to be made 16-bit, though.

It already does intelligent MIDI mode on the MPU401. I'm not sure if it's based around the Hard/SoftMPU standard that doesn't support recording. But early MT-32 games that need intelligent mode work, I run a MP32 McCake on the MIDI daughterboard connector of my PicoGUS and Wing Commander plays music without a fuss.

The GUS itself is already a 16-bit card. I haven't received where the traces go, but you need to set two jumpers for the DMA channel. It's very possible both DMA 1 and DMA 3 route to the same GPIO pins of the RP2040. So you'd need to use additional GPIO for support both the low and high DMA channels of a SB16. Or if you have enough GPIO, get rid of all the jumpers all together and make it fully software configurable.

SScorpio wrote on Yesterday, 15:00:

It already does intelligent MIDI mode on the MPU401. I'm not sure if it's based around the Hard/SoftMPU standard that doesn't support recording. But early MT-32 games that need intelligent mode work, I run a MP32 McCake on the MIDI daughterboard connector of my PicoGUS and Wing Commander plays music without a fuss.

The GUS itself is already a 16-bit card. I haven't received where the traces go, but you need to set two jumpers for the DMA channel. It's very possible both DMA 1 and DMA 3 route to the same GPIO pins of the RP2040. So you'd need to use additional GPIO for support both the low and high DMA channels of a SB16. Or if you have enough GPIO, get rid of all the jumpers all together and make it fully software configurable.

I've already read the schematic. Currently the card only uses one IRQ line and one DMA channel at a time. Was thinking about the possibility of additional IRQ/DMA lines, but sadly all the GPIOs have been assigned.

Man, this card just keeps getting better and better. it's like a Swiss army knife. Very interested in checking out the CD emulation, will be especially handy for older machines that might have all drive bays used up with other peripherals, or machines with just one drive bay, or of course, machines with broken non working or partially working disc drives. One of mine in particular works... But the disc needs to be a pressed disc in excellent condition... Cdrs or a couple scratches here and there throw it off, so this will be a wonderful alternative.

polpo wrote on 2025-06-19, 15:21:

PicoGUS firmware v3.0.0 [edit: v3.0.1] is now released! This adds Panasonic CD-ROM emulation to PicoGUS. Put some ISOs or BIN/CUE files on a USB stick, plug it into your PicoGUS, and you've got a virtual CD-ROM drive that works in DOS and Windows 9x and supports CD audio.

https://github.com/polpo/picogus/releases/tag/v3.0.1

Thank you and everyone who's contributed to this incredible project.

Would it be possible to have the ISO selecting also support taking the filename as the argument? I can see the desire to have a menu that will mount the image and then launch games automatically. And being able to modify what's on the USB drive without changing indexes this would require reconfiguring everything would be ideal.

SScorpio wrote on Yesterday, 17:31:

Thank you and everyone who's contributed to this incredible project.

Would it be possible to have the ISO selecting also support taking the filename as the argument? I can see the desire to have a menu that will mount the image and then launch games automatically. And being able to modify what's on the USB drive without changing indexes this would require reconfiguring everything would be ideal.

This is a good idea and adding it should be pretty easy. I hadn’t thought of that use case until elsewhere I saw an absolutely heroic batch file that parsed the output of the /cdlist command to get the index of the specified file name.

I have some fixed bugs (/cdload showing timeout despite success, or timing out and failing after the 10th or so load) and I’ll add that feature in as well. Look for it in the next release!

polpo wrote on Yesterday, 18:02:

This is a good idea and adding it should be pretty easy. I hadn’t thought of that use case until elsewhere I saw an absolutely heroic batch file that parsed the output of the /cdlist command to get the index of the specified file name.

This is how I use my machine, I have most of the games added to Lauchbox DOS edition and scripts handle setting the PicoGUS, CPU and MT32Pi to the correct modes to run the game. I (mistakenly) assumed that selection by filename was going to happen eventually and it was just not a priority.

polpo wrote on Yesterday, 18:02:

I have some fixed bugs (/cdload showing timeout despite success, or timing out and failing after the 10th or so load) and I’ll add that feature in as well. Look for it in the next release!

FWIW I also experienced a timeout getting the CD list until the PicoGUS was re-initalized after running warcraft 1 a couple of times (which worked perfectly btw). It's a good test because it does streaming animation from the CD, soundblaster audio and FM music all at the same time.