I'm not seeing any mention of SPDIF output, so I'll just mention this: if a device can do I2S, there's a pretty good chance it can also output SPDIF (as long as it can be configured for a framesize of 2x 32-bit words).

Thanks for posting this. I knew this was in the works, but lost track of it.

I've got a PicoGUS in my DOS6.22 rig and it's been a godsend, allowing me to setup a pretty sweet system that 1993 me would have drooled over. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the PicoIDE for that same build. I would love an alternate option or companion to the real optical drive in it now, or the ability to add a 3rd easily accessible IDE drive.

StriderTR wrote on 2025-11-20, 18:43:

Thanks for posting this. I knew this was in the works, but lost track of it.

I've got a PicoGUS in my DOS6.22 rig and it's been a godsend, allowing me to setup a pretty sweet system that 1993 me would have drooled over. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the PicoIDE for that same build. I would love an alternate option or companion to the real optical drive in it now, or the ability to add a 3rd easily accessible IDE drive.

I think I'll probably end up with a couple of these. One for optical drive emulation and then another to use for different OS/Hardware configs etc

I really like the look of the 3.5" drive housing. Do you know if the manufacturer will provide an option for black casing instead of beige?

+1 vote for a 5.25" front panel because what it replaces is a CD-ROM drive and I'm lack of 3.5" slots.

crusher wrote on 2025-11-21, 08:04:

+1 vote for a 5.25" front panel because what it replaces is a CD-ROM drive and I'm lack of 3.5" slots.

I'm already looking at designing a couple 5.25 bay "adapters" for it. One for my own system so I can incorporate it into the same 5.25 bay that currently houses my SD to IDE and Wavetable Pi LCD and rotary encoder. The other would just be a 5.25 bay version of the PicoIDE basic design.

If I get my hands on one, and I get those adapters tested and working, I will post them up over on Thingiverse just in case anyone else would want them. I just need the PicoIDE in my hands for proper measurements before I can do anything. 😀

This thread should be closed and let Polpo open a dedicated main post (which he said he would), so he can maintain the OP post.

Maybe the opposite order makes sense. We close this thread after Polpo starts a new thread.

I'm very interested in getting a Pico IDE. Having a storage device where I can change the ATA feature set on the fly is something I'd like to have.

I'm not seeing another thread about this.

But preorders just opened up, the link is in the first post.

And... it's already funded... And still climbing. 😀

110% Funded! as of this post.

That's amazing to see! Can't wait to get my hands on one!

I've noticed something nobody pointed yet, it's the fact the PicoIDE is stuck in MWDMA 0-2 modes.

The MWDMA is very old transfer mode for IDE (before the UDMA even started exist in mid-1995).

So it means the device will never support UDMA ?

Because MWDMA vs UDMA it's night and day for speeds/reliability on the vast majority of motherboards from Pentium MMX, Pentium 2 mobos and newers.

Also MWDMA is known to have issues beeing using at same time with others devices connected on the same IDE cable on boards made for UDMA.

I guess for a 386/486 it's great the MWDMA.

But anything starting from Pentium MMX and up it's a bit disapointing.

Except that, the device looks good will wait reviews before buy.

One question, what is the speed of uploading image from the Wifi Web Interface ?
Important question for people who not dissemble the PC often to remove the SD-Card (when not used in front panel but internally)
On ZuluIDE for example it was limited to 1 mb/s because of Raspberry Pi limits on the hardware.
As both projects use the same Raspberry Pi chip hardware (the RP2350) i wonder how you fixed the speed issue.
As example, for a single ISO of 600mb it takes roughtly 15 minutes to upload it.

TgamesFR wrote on 2026-01-30, 00:11:

I've noticed something nobody pointed yet, it's the fact the PicoIDE is stuck in MWDMA 0-2 modes.

The MWDMA is very old transfer mode for IDE (before the UDMA even started exist in mid-1995).

It really depends on your use case. The site mentions MWDMA mode 2 and PIO mode 4 support being as fast as a 52X CD-ROM. That and CD audio support makes it a great replacement for a CD-ROM drive.

It will get the job done if you want to use it as an HDD. But SD to IDE adapters are $10-15 if you want UDMA speeds, and you can have the HDD and CD-ROM on different IDE controllers.

Once you move away from pure DOS, you get options for CD-ROM support. You can use software that supports CD Audio, or an Pi Pico based external USB CD emulator.

Finding solid state UDMA storage is pretty easy.

Finding solid state storage that you can fix to MWDMA or PIO is much more interesting, especially when working with socket 5 and older.

I would love to have something like this for floppies. Yes, I know, there's already the Gotek devices with FOSS custom firmware, but the hardware ain't FOSS and additionally I can't control it from the host machine which is actually a dealbreaker for me.

Hi everybody, sorry I've been neglecting creating a thread on Vogons about the PicoIDE project but I see one has already been created. I'm fine with keeping this one because there's already some discussion going. I'm really surprised by how well the Crowd Supply campaign has been going!

Regarding MWDMA vs. UDMA - this version of the device does not have the ability to support UDMA because some of the UDMA signals need different types of drivers that PicoIDE lacks. I was very intentional about this: I wanted to constrain the scope of the first version of PicoIDE enough to actually ship in a reasonable timeframe as a solo developer doing this on my nights and weekends. PicoIDE is ambitious enough as it is, and UDMA bus signalling is quite different from PIO or MWDMA, so I decided to leave it out. I created PicoIDE as the drive emulator that I personally really wanted: polished front panel and web controls, supporting optical drives extremely well for any 90s-era system, and supporting hard drives on earlier systems that only accept fixed CHS parameters that have issues with commonly available CF or SD card adapters. I agree with SScorpio above that later UDMA2+ systems are already very well served by those cheap adapters. Also you'd be surprised at how fast MWDMA mode 2 feels on late 90s machines - and PicoIDE benchmarks faster than several UDMA supporting CF cards in some of my systems. PicoIDE currently benchmarks at the speed of a 78X CD-ROM drive and completely saturates the 16MB/s of MWDMA mode 2 in HDD mode. If you really need faster HDD emulation speeds there are other devices out there like ZuluIDE v2 and the upcoming SD2IDE which is going to be blazing fast (UDMA 6/ATA133, using SD Express cards).

The speed of uploading images to the web interface varies between 500kB/s to 1MB/s depending on WiFi reception. That could probably be improved with some tweaks to the SPI protocol between the front panel board and main board, but 2.4GHz WiFi becomes a bottleneck surprisingly quickly.

polpo wrote on 2026-01-30, 20:13:

Hi everybody, sorry I've been neglecting creating a thread on Vogons about the PicoIDE project but I see one has already been created. I'm fine with keeping this one because there's already some discussion going. I'm really surprised by how well the Crowd Supply campaign has been going!

Regarding MWDMA vs. UDMA - this version of the device does not have the ability to support UDMA because some of the UDMA signals need different types of drivers that PicoIDE lacks. I was very intentional about this: I wanted to constrain the scope of the first version of PicoIDE enough to actually ship in a reasonable timeframe as a solo developer doing this on my nights and weekends. PicoIDE is ambitious enough as it is, and UDMA bus signalling is quite different from PIO or MWDMA, so I decided to leave it out. I created PicoIDE as the drive emulator that I personally really wanted: polished front panel and web controls, supporting optical drives extremely well for any 90s-era system, and supporting hard drives on earlier systems that only accept fixed CHS parameters that have issues with commonly available CF or SD card adapters. I agree with SScorpio above that later UDMA2+ systems are already very well served by those cheap adapters. Also you'd be surprised at how fast MWDMA mode 2 feels on late 90s machines - and PicoIDE benchmarks faster than several UDMA supporting CF cards in some of my systems. PicoIDE currently benchmarks at the speed of a 78X CD-ROM drive and completely saturates the 16MB/s of MWDMA mode 2 in HDD mode. If you really need faster HDD emulation speeds there are other devices out there like ZuluIDE v2 and the upcoming SD2IDE which is going to be blazing fast (UDMA 6/ATA133, using SD Express cards).

The speed of uploading images to the web interface varies between 500kB/s to 1MB/s depending on WiFi reception. That could probably be improved with some tweaks to the SPI protocol between the front panel board and main board, but 2.4GHz WiFi becomes a bottleneck surprisingly quickly.

Thanks for the answers for all my questions 😀.

Yes it's understandable you did some limitations on the hardware as it's first version.
Things will get even better on futures revisions.

I've not talked about PIO as it's even way slower but nice to keep it for backward compatibiliy. I'm personnaly tested PIO speeds on ZuluIDE and it was too slow for games after 1995.
For UDMA 2 (33 mb/s) i'm talking about it because it's what the ZuluIDE V2 support and for some games who load big chunks of data (many GB) (games around 1999-2006) it's cleary something who will be useful later for the PicoIDE.
For DOS Games and early Windows 98 it's fine to be limited at lower speeds. For DVD games of Windows 98 up to Windows XP it's complicated, ofc we have Daemon Tools as alternative.

In my case, i have a motherboard with only one IDE channel usable and the second one is SATA, in that case 2 devices needs to be on same IDE cable.
I've tried in the past the MWDMA protocol with a SSD in primary channel, the SSD was unable to works correctly (keep crashing, unless switch to UDMA).
It's that sort of uncompatibility i wanted point on my previous message. Ofc someone using a single device per IDE cable shouldn't be affected.

I'm comparing it to the ZuluIDE as it's the same hardware pretty much, PicoIDE and ZuluIDE are based on the same Raspberry Pi chips and have same implementations/features.
But the PicoIDE UI/Web interface looks way way better and that's a good point, i see you really polished that.

For the upload it's cleary the main bottleneck, i was sure you wasn't able to fix it neither as it's a hardware bottleneck, to upload around 40 games it tooked me a whole day at 500-1mo/s on ZuluIDE.
Here on PicoIDE, it's cool the front panel is selled with the device, so many people will remove the SDCard, copy their games and the speed will not be a problem.
However, the main problem is people using modern PC cases, the fronts panel is most of time not usable as no removable bays.
In that case only mount it (like a hardrive) internally is possible.

I will buy one later because i have others motherboards, i want use a ODE on them too and it's cool to compare each solutions available on the market.

Super excited about this project! I ordered three, one for each of my retro system.

I was wondering, will it be possible to update images on the PicoIDE while the system is running? Looking for an easy way of sending files to my retro machines without taking up memory with network drivers in DOS.

riplin wrote on 2026-01-31, 10:52:

Super excited about this project! I ordered three, one for each of my retro system.

I was wondering, will it be possible to update images on the PicoIDE while the system is running? Looking for an easy way of sending files to my retro machines without taking up memory with network drivers in DOS.

Yes, via the web interface. But you're limited to 500KB-1MB/s.

It's much faster to just have the system powered off. Eject the SD card, insert into a new system and copy files. I use SD to IDE adapters for HDDs in my systems and this is how I get files on and off them.

polpo wrote on 2026-01-30, 20:13:

supporting hard drives on earlier systems that only accept fixed CHS parameters that have issues with commonly available CF or SD card adapters.

I agree that there is a need for good PIO/MWDMA support. That's the area where support gets dodgy and uneven from CF, Sintechi, and Sata devices. It's hard to count on anything other that PIO <=2 and UDMA for devices made in the last 10 years.

There are a lot of VLB IDE cards that technically support ATA2 modes (PIO3 &4) , but rarely achieve anything faster than PIO2 speeds when working with solid state pata devices available for sale today. I suspect it has something to do with mismatched IORDY implementations in the old controllers and the new storage devices. If PicoIDE lets you tweak IORDY declaration and assertion, perhaps we could see improved throughput closer to the theoretical PIO max. It would also be great if the PicoIDE could tell you on the display what ATA mode it is working in and what ATA features are enabled. That would be fabulous for troubleshooting a build. Right now, I'm almost always in the dark trying to figure out what the storage thinks is going on.

Will PicoIDE support multi sector transfers?

Will it support trim? OK, I know operating systems < 2005 don't support trim, and SD's don't call it trim, but still, it would be neat to have. Although I'll admit, I'm not sure how it would work with the virtual hard drive files.