PicoIDE is a day one buy for me. Can't wait to see what it offers. 😀

fosterwj03 wrote on 2025-11-20, 01:08:

Quick question on the PicoIDE: has it been tested with an ISA-based IDE adapter, either a strand alone card or one on a sound card? I've had trouble with newer IDE optical drives on ISA adapters, and I've considered going all solid state on my retro PC's instead of fighting with older drives. Thanks.

We should probably move to this thread: Gotek like Optical Driver Emulator - Is it possible? or create a new one for PicoIDE discussion, but to answer this question, I did my initial prototyping on a basic ISA-based IDE adapter and continue to test on one as well as newer PCI and PIIX-compatible IDE/ATA controllers.

justin1985 wrote on 2025-11-19, 18:18:

But the same "No PicoGUS Detected" message every time. I'm pretty confident I've ruled out soldering issues, or damage from the extensive fiddling with the first board.

One thing that crosses my mind is that a few of the small ICs (U4, U5) were off-brand copies rather than the specified TI parts because of stock at the time of ordering. Could this make a difference? The pin-out of the TI part (https://www.lcsc.com/datasheet/C7803.pdf) and the off-brand one (https://doc.chipmall.com/datasheet/rev_250308 … d_c63245304.pdf) seem to be identical.

Might the Cyrix MediaGX chipset just be incompatible? I've tried two boards but both have the same chipset. I've noticed comments further up this thread about the Vortex86 and some other oddball chipsets being incompatible. Has anyone tested the PicoGUS with a MediaGX desktop board?

I also had problems with a previous pc/104 edition of the PicoGUS in that it wouldn't get recognized for some reason unless I had Rasteris Crystal-based pc/104 soundcard connected at the same time on a Vortex86 based board. The PicoGUS in question only had the 8bit portion of the pc/104 connector connected, so might have been a completely different issue from what you're having.

As I mentioned earlier I would be happy to test out a card, but I'm unfortunately unable to send or reply to PM's because of my low post count on the forum.

polpo wrote on 2025-11-20, 04:53:

fosterwj03 wrote on 2025-11-20, 01:08:

Quick question on the PicoIDE: has it been tested with an ISA-based IDE adapter, either a strand alone card or one on a sound card? I've had trouble with newer IDE optical drives on ISA adapters, and I've considered going all solid state on my retro PC's instead of fighting with older drives. Thanks.

We should probably move to this thread: Gotek like Optical Driver Emulator - Is it possible? or create a new one for PicoIDE discussion, but to answer this question, I did my initial prototyping on a basic ISA-based IDE adapter and continue to test on one as well as newer PCI and PIIX-compatible IDE/ATA controllers.

Awesome! Thanks. I look forward to seeing the device in a marketplace.

LSS10999 wrote on 2025-11-20, 02:03:

PicoGUS uses ports 1D0-1D2 for configuration. Can you check if these addresses are accessible on the PC/104 bus?

I haven't seen a real MediaGX myself so I'm not sure, but I recall reading that MediaGX has something called VSA which the CPU traps certain I/O ports to emulate certain functionalities. It is possible that VSA might have captured the I/O cycles meant for PicoGUS...

Thanks for this - I've done a bit of checking, although I'm not too confident reading hex numbers ... according to the motherboard manual (Advantech PCM-5824), the only 1xx IO addresses that are documented are:
170- 178 2nd fixed disk for CompactFlash
1F0-1F8 1st fixed disk

I also found the MediaGX datasheet, and it mentions "The I/O locations 22h and 23h are used for MediaGX processor configuration register access." - that might be what you had in mind? But i doesn't seem to help here 🙁

Is there an easy way to check in practice whether a given IO range is in use?

Just curious, has anyone made the code for the pico to connect directly to the lpc bus?

myne wrote on 2025-11-24, 00:33:

Just curious, has anyone made the code for the pico to connect directly to the lpc bus?

I'm not sure... I did search around GitHub about using RP2040 to directly interact with the LPC bus before, so far only two notable results.
https://github.com/Team-Resurgent/modxo
https://github.com/MrGreensWorkshop/RasPiPico … sPostCodeReader

They only used very basic LPC functionality, covering just LAD0-3, LCLK and LFRAME, from what I can see.

For other LPC functionalities, particularly SERIRQ and LDRQ#, perhaps one has to refer to nukeykt's LPC Sound Blaster and figure out how to do this on RP2040/RP2350. Not sure if control pins like LRESET# and LPCPD# are absolutely needed.

PicoGUS may be able to take advantage of LPC's serialized IRQ and DMA. This means no more IRQ/DMA jumpers, and can claim more than one IRQ/DMA to allow multiple functionalities to be active at the same time. High DMA can also be used for enabling full SB16 functionality, if possible.

DMA is usually not an issue as long as it's properly initialized, but IRQ can be too contested on modern chipsets. LPC can use IRQs 2-9 provided no PIRQ line is occupying them. On Intel chipsets, this can be checked through registers 60h and 68h of the ISA bridge (00:1f.0).

Cool.
Seems like there are more advantages than disadvantages.
* potentially more performance because monitoring fewer pins.
* potentially more functionality
* potentially more people interested - since it may only require a tiny bit of soldering and a handful of bus wires instead of a whole uh... daughterboard.

Sounds like something someone will see as worthwhile at some point.