Bondi wrote on 2026-08-20, 15:20:

Okay, thanks a lot 😀

You're welcome. Hope that the picovox will serve you well!

Hi @jansakos and @dreamblaster.

I have a question too:

One of the devices that the Picovox can emulate is the FTL Sound Adapter. But the Picovox currently doesn't have a 9-pin joystick port on it, like the original FTL Sound Adapter had. At least, not the edition being sold on Serdashop right now.

The fact that the original FTL Sound Adapter had both PCM output and joystick input support for Atari and Commodore joysticks was what made it such a cool and interesting device.

And also, many laptops and systems lacking ISA slots that don't have integrated sound cards often don't have game ports either.

Granted, there aren't many games that support the game port on the FTL Sound Adapter. Maybe Dungeon Master was the only one? But support for additional games could still be implemented, through custom patches, drivers, or emulation TSRs.

Any plans to implement that in a future revision of the Picovox? And perhaps other input functionality as well in the future?

Thanks again for such an incredibly cool device!

digger wrote on 2026-08-20, 16:39:

Hi @jansakos and @dreamblaster. […]
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Hi @jansakos and @dreamblaster.

I have a question too:

One of the devices that the Picovox can emulate is the FTL Sound Adapter. But the Picovox currently doesn't have a 9-pin joystick port on it, like the original FTL Sound Adapter had. At least, not the edition being sold on Serdashop right now.

The fact that the original FTL Sound Adapter had both PCM output and joystick input support for Atari and Commodore joysticks was what made it such a cool and interesting device.

And also, many laptops and systems lacking ISA slots that don't have integrated sound cards often don't have game ports either.

Granted, there aren't many games that support the game port on the FTL Sound Adapter. Maybe Dungeon Master was the only one? But support for additional games could still be implemented, through custom patches, drivers, or emulation TSRs.

Any plans to implement that in a future revision of the Picovox? And perhaps other input functionality as well in the future?

Thanks again for such an incredibly cool device!

Hi,
as of now, there is no support for any external joystick. The FTL Sound Adapter is, as far as I know, supported only in Dungeon Master, therefore I have decided not to add support for it. But, I have also thought about adding some joystick support. The question is how to handle it, if I should make separate mode for it, support it only in FTL mode or support it in all modes that will not collide with it.

All of this is just a firmware choice, however adding support for connecting joystick port should not be that hard. Both DIY and Serdaco version contain expansion header, which can be used for connecting anything e.g. joystick. So I just need to design something (passive design I guess) for connecting joystick and then implement it into the firmware.

TLDR: I would like to implement some sort of joystick support and both versions should be able to use it with a simple expansion board.

Thanks, and good to know about the expansion header in the DIY and Serdaco versions! That allows for prototyping, experimentation, and expandability.

One other input device that could be interesting to implement would be a PS/2 mouse port, which would of course require a custom or patched mouse driver.

Having a mouse port integrated in the Picovox would free up the serial port on laptops and other ISA-less systems that have only a parallel port and a serial port, so that would allow a Picovox to be used together with something like an MPU-232 serial port MIDI adapter. Also some systems, such as certain editions of the Tandy 1000, have only a parallel port, but no serial port, at least not without requiring a (proprietary) expansion card. So such a feature could be useful for those systems as well.

Alternatively, a new standard could be thought out that would require multiple game controllers to be connected, as well as game controllers with more buttons, or perhaps even both mice and game controllers at the same time.

Lack of support in games could be solved to some extent with patches or emulation TSRs.

And yes, it would be nice to have such inputs enabled in any emulation mode that wouldn't collide with them. Or at least have optional variants of such modes where the inputs are enabled.

Just brainstorming out loud. 🙂

I downgraded the machine from PS2/E to Schneider EuroPC (NecV20 512KB MDA,CGA,PLT). So no use of any 386er TSR possible.
Now I am collecting patches to make use of any of the soundoptions for software that runs on PC/XT.
First target will be AGI and the early adventures from LucasArts (Zak,MM). Later SC0 etc. are played with Mu50/RA50 in MT32 mode via Uart-Midi.
Is there something to consider for patching the AGI games if my machine has LTP2 278h for picovox and LPT1 $3BC for iomega zipdrive?
The only thing I should do is telling PCVX that LPT2 is the port to search for the device, right?

dr.zeissler wrote on 2026-08-25, 13:25:

I downgraded the machine from PS2/E to Schneider EuroPC (NecV20 512KB MDA,CGA,PLT). So no use of any 386er TSR possible. Now I […]
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I downgraded the machine from PS2/E to Schneider EuroPC (NecV20 512KB MDA,CGA,PLT). So no use of any 386er TSR possible.
Now I am collecting patches to make use of any of the soundoptions for software that runs on PC/XT.
First target will be AGI and the early adventures from LucasArts (Zak,MM). Later SC0 etc. are played with Mu50/RA50 in MT32 mode via Uart-Midi.
Is there something to consider for patching the AGI games if my machine has LTP2 278h for picovox and LPT1 $3BC for iomega zipdrive?
The only thing I should do is telling PCVX that LPT2 is the port to search for the device, right?

You can also patch a fairly large number of games that use AIL and/or DIGPAK drivers to use the Covox Speech Thing or Disney Sound Source.

I know many of those games aren't meant to run on anything slower/older than a 286, but it might help for at least some games on. your EuroPC. 🙂

That would be far more easy to realize, but my main target will be the very very early cga/mda supporting games with OPL2/3 and tyndlpt that will run great on such a low-end machine. keep in mind very limited harddirve space for software. I posted on the tandylpt project too, perhaps someone already did some patching for XT class machines.

Great work for such a combination of LPT sound device!

There are some external CD drives from Backport that utilize the LPT parallel port for an IDE CD-ROM/CD-RW drive and an ESS ES1688F sound chip for CDDA playback and Windows 95 sound and music as well. Since there's already the project on ES1688F and its ESFM synth emulation, it would be fun if the ESS ES1688F sound chip emulation is also implemented.

Another interesting feature would be, as how the LPT parallel port operates, another LPT parallel port at the end which is for other LPT peripherals like printers, since no one's going to sacrifice the only LPT port the motherboard has just for this sound card simulator module IMO.

Perhaps these are just for the future expermental expectations. One single LPT device with 8-bit stereo PCM, OPL2, CMS all-in-one is already incredible!

This will be perfect project for my ibm ps/2 model 50. System only has mca slots and all modern replicas that I know are based on hard to come by vintage chips. There is no picogus for mca.
Though first I must address the storage problem. I don't think I have any other option than mca to ide adapter
https://zzxio.com/product/mcide/

Edit:
I currently have for music mt32-pi over serial, and real Disney sound source for digital effects.

Kekkula wrote on 2026-08-26, 07:26:

Though first I must address the storage problem. I don't think I have any other option than mca to ide adapter
https://zzxio.com/product/mcide/

Get SCSI Adapter + BlueSCSI 😉

Hey, jansakos! This is to let you know that the picovox is working great. Surprisingly from the first try. Thanks a lot for the nice project.
I'm sure it will be even more useful when covox and lpt2opl support is added to either sbemu or vsbhda.

I ordered a second one. Now my EuroPC (NecV20 278h) and my PS/2E are equipped. Both rely on patches (no TSR, no EMM386).
So the one thing I need is patches, patches, patches 😉 or the knowlege to do them by myself (not expierenced in this though).

For PS2/E (486slc2) I used adpatch and got a lot of games already working, but for the NecV20 this is a different thing.
Because this machine can only do CGA/MDA/PLT there are not so much games available that run great on it and support adlib.
The much more interesting thing for the XT is having the very early XT games patched that supporty tandy sound.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2026-09-02, 06:27:

For PS2/E (486slc2) I used adpatch and got a lot of games already working, but for the NecV20 this is a different thing.
Because this machine can only do CGA/MDA/PLT there are not so much games available that run great on it and support adlib.
The much more interesting thing for the XT is having the very early XT games patched that supporty tandy sound.

PS2/e is a very nice machine. Do you use all those pcmcia slots somehow? If you have a pcmcia sound card, it's worth checking if there is a custom driver for it, or whether it's supported by vsbpcmci driver(vsphda fork for pcmcia cards) here https://68pins.com/
I believe support for opl2lpt and covox will come at some point as well.

My approach on the PS/2E is serial Midi with MT32 and Picovox for the rest. It's a mulitboot machine with OS/2 Warp3 / PCDOS5 Win30 / Win95 / Linx Slackware.
I use a PCMCIA-CDROM Solution and PCMCIA network-solution. Beside that I do not use the two front PCMCIA Ports. I took out the harddrive and use 2x512MB CF-Cards. No Ontrack needed, works just fine and is supported by the BIOS.

The last thing I will change on that setup is changing the Panasonic CD-ROM solution. There are Panasonic-drives that offer ESS Sound over SCSI.
That is a windows-only (perhaps OS/2 too) sound-solution, but it would be PERFECT to cover sound on every OS in the multiboot.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2026-09-02, 11:23:

The last thing I will change on that setup is changing the Panasonic CD-ROM solution. There are Panasonic-drives that offer ESS Sound over SCSI.
That is a windows-only (perhaps OS/2 too) sound-solution, but it would be PERFECT to cover sound on every OS in the multiboot.

There is a NOS Panasonic KXL-D745 on ebay now for a very reasonable price and it has ess sound. And sound also works in pure DOS. Moreover with vsbpcmcia driver it works just like vsbhda/sbemu - for a lot of dos games both real and protected mode.

Carlos patched agitlpt for 378h and gave me a hint on how to re-patch from 378h to 278h (78 03 > 78 02) for my euroPC. With the AGI 2.917 update, the plantronics patched cga_graf.ovl and the Tandy-music via picovox I am now lightyears ahead from what I had back in 1988...unbelievable. Hopefully there are still some more tndylpt/plantronic patches possible for an XT without TSR and not everybody buys a picomem2 to be the star of the machine instead of the machine itself.

so thank you jansakos, carlos, mate, benedikt and all the others for that great work and inspiration!

I have planned to at least patch one AGI 3.xxx version but haven’t had time yet.

Also, I think I’ve patched one SCI0 driver you can use the TNDLPT in a lot of games.

The AIL2 driver you can use on all games that use the Audio Interface Library 2 like Dune 2 or Legend of Kyrandia, just as examples.

AIL2 targets more 286+, there are very little CGA games that run well on XT with AIL2 soundengine.
SC0 could be interesting though, but I am using MU50/RA50 RS232 on SC0 with support from cloudschatze on this setup.
AGI 3 would be nice, because Manhunter will work then 😉

I received my new Picovox, along with a PicoMEM 2 and an HDD Clicker from Serdashop. And some stickers too.

Quick delivery, as usual! 👍🏽

So I too will be able to do some testing, experimenting and playing with the Picovox now. ☺️

Would be nice, if we have a list of patched working games with different sound-options.
Actually I am thinking about BBStros with Adlib support to patch to picovox opl3 support.