Linoleum wrote on 2026-08-31, 01:45:

Yes, PicoMEM2 has more raw horsepower thanks to the RP2350, but that power is spread across a lot of simultaneous emulation tasks: RAM, ROM, SB, OPL3, GUS, MPU‑401, NE2000, USB HID, storage, etc. It improves on the original PicoMEM, but the first version was the real breakthrough, and PicoMem2 is the refinement and expansion of that idea. Perhaps that's why it isn’t generating the same buzz...

Hi,

There is not a lot of Buzz because I am still ramping up the PicoMEM 2 slowly, to be sure everything is fine.
Also, so far, no major Youtuber did a video on it, and none of the existing Videos Show the PicoMEM Working on a 486+

PicoMEM 2 can have Sound Blaster working on Windows 95, and it Windows 95 is working with PMDFS : See the Plugged USB drive Full files, in FAT32
The, CD ROM/Audio is in progress.
Under DOS, it can run DOOM on GUS Plus General MIDI
Or can play Quake CD Version

It will be MUCH more impressive when its full potential will be shown....

The fact that the PicoMEM emulate all "at the same time" Does not need more power, as a PC is mono core, the PC Does only one thing at a time 😀
Also, when a sound card emulation is not "needed" it is not called at all.

crusher wrote on 2026-07-02, 06:18:

PicoMEM 2 is amazing! :) […]
Show full quote

PicoMEM 2 is amazing! 😀

So much improvements, especially in the audio section.
For me the best is the added GUS+GM Support.
Very well done @FreddyV and all involved people.

I wonder if it is possible to integrate MUNT for MT32 compatibility like the MT32-Pi.
This would make it the absolutely all-in-one soundcard of my dream.

Thanks,

For Audio, I just added ArdSynth as a General MIDI Option.
Possibility to load .SF2 from Disk for later, then CD ROM/Audio is Ok

This new firmware is done mostly by the WonderMCA author, do there are other "Hidden" (Working on WonderMCA) /New fonction possible:
- USB Keyboard
- USB RJ45 Dongles

Can it act as a POST card?
Could it be also used as an early boot logger? Logging all the IO activity on ISA slot (to sd card) for example?

Do you plan to design a low profile variant for computers like the Sinclair PC200?

[quote=FreddyV post_id=1442638 time=1788457926 user_id=40631]
[quote=crusher post_id=1431556 time=1782973128 user_id=53242]
PicoMEM 2 is amazing! 😀

So much improvements, especially in the audio section.
For me the best is the added GUS+GM Support.
Very well done @FreddyV and all involved people.

I wonder if it is possible to integrate MUNT for MT32 compatibility like the MT32-Pi.
This would make it the absolutely all-in-one soundcard of my dream.
[/quote]

Thanks,

For Audio, I just added ArdSynth as a General MIDI Option.
Possibility to load .SF2 from Disk for later, then CD ROM/Audio is Ok

This new firmware is done mostly by the WonderMCA author, do there are other "Hidden" (Working on WonderMCA) /New fonction possible:
- USB Keyboard
- USB RJ45 Dongles
[/quote]

Omg.. Thank you FreddyV !!

I have mine working flawless in a Toshiba T5200 running with the T5200 XTIDE low BIOS and a Adaptec SCSI card.

Its crazy cool having wifi and USB and SD. The wifi is SOLID too.

I want to do sound next, but, I think I might be out of Irqs as i need com 1 and 2..

THANK YOU.. Soooo much fun. As I type I am copying 1.7GB of MAME ROMs over from USB. Very handy.

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-09-03, 19:51:

Can it act as a POST card?
Could it be also used as an early boot logger? Logging all the IO activity on ISA slot (to sd card) for example?

The V2 has an option for a screen so you could even display the POST codes to screen like a regular post card, but I think the init time of the firmware image may miss a signifcant amount of post events, unless it was powered indepdentently from the system and ready to go

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-09-04, 05:04:

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-09-03, 19:51:

Can it act as a POST card?
Could it be also used as an early boot logger? Logging all the IO activity on ISA slot (to sd card) for example?

The V2 has an option for a screen so you could even display the POST codes to screen like a regular post card, but I think the init time of the firmware image may miss a signifcant amount of post events, unless it was powered indepdentently from the system and ready to go

Hi,

You can power on the picomem in advance via USB

Cool

Anyone tested the picomem2 on PS2 Model 30 8086 yet? The 1.1x board I have has worked very well for the most part.
Figure might upgrade to the new one because .... well... why not? 😀
If no one knows, i'll just have to take the leap. I assume it will work just fine. Worse case... if it don't, ill have the old board to fall back to.

Edit : Bah... just went ahead and ordered it... 😀

I have maybe a stupid question.

I tried for hours to get the USB mouse to work on windows 3.11 with no luck. Works terrific on DOS with pmmouse, not at all on windows.

Did I miss something stupid ? Is there a win driver ?

kwyjibo wrote on 2026-09-03, 21:32:

Do you plan to design a low profile variant for computers like the Sinclair PC200?

No, benefit for the PC200 are not important for a PicoMEM2 LP

rasz_pl wrote on 2026-09-03, 19:51:

Can it act as a POST card?
Could it be also used as an early boot logger? Logging all the IO activity on ISA slot (to sd card) for example?

Yes, POST are displayed directly on the OLED at startup

Xymox wrote on 2026-09-06, 08:35:

I have maybe a stupid question.

I tried for hours to get the USB mouse to work on windows 3.11 with no luck. Works terrific on DOS with pmmouse, not at all on windows.

Did I miss something stupid ? Is there a win driver ?

Hi,

It can't work, there is no driver.
Serial Mouse code i spresent, I only have some work to enable it.
I don't like really this option as it take one IRQ... Need to sacrifice another device just for Mouse

FreddyV wrote on 2026-09-06, 17:33:

Hi, […]
Show full quote

Xymox wrote on 2026-09-06, 08:35:

I have maybe a stupid question.

I tried for hours to get the USB mouse to work on windows 3.11 with no luck. Works terrific on DOS with pmmouse, not at all on windows.

Did I miss something stupid ? Is there a win driver ?

Hi,

It can't work, there is no driver.
Serial Mouse code i spresent, I only have some work to enable it.
I don't like really this option as it take one IRQ... Need to sacrifice another device just for Mouse

I have to use a IRQ for a windows mouse anyway because i need to use a dedicated com port ? But with the Picomem i can use a optical mouse usb ? I would like to have a optical mouse even if it uses a IRQ i think ? I can disable the dedicated com port irq so its just a IRQ swap.

I was slso looking at a device that seems to convert a USB mouse to a COM port. This might make more sense for me ? https://www.versalent.biz/usbm232.htm

Plus i was thinking about giving a optical mouse 5v and adapters (usb mouse ) > usb to ps/2 > ps/2 > com port. But a USB mouse might talk a different protocol.

I would suggest a update to the picomem wiki under mouse driver that it will not work for windows.

So I received a package from Serdashop today.

My order includes a Picovox and a PicoMEM 2 "Black Gold Audio Edition".

Looking forward to playing with these goodies these evening. 😁

I'm going to try the PicoMEM 2 in a system that it may not have been tried in before: a Tandy 1000 EX, through an ISA riser/adapter for its proprietary 8-bit slot, that I ordered a while back on Tindie from a maker in Australia.

The Tandy 1000 EX has just 256KB on-board memory, which I want to max out using the PicoMEM 2.

Does anybody know if DOS by default allocates the free conventional memory at the lowest memory addresses first? I'm asking this, since the PicoMEM 2 can only add 256KB of zero-waitstate conventional memory, so any additional memory above 512K that I would add to the system through the PicoMEM 2 would be slower 1WS memory. In this particular system, this would be compounded by the fact that the lowest part of the on-board conventional memory is shared video memory, which will take up 32KB alone when I'm running games in 16-color 320x200 graphics mode.

For this reason, I'm thinking about pairing the PicoMEM 2 up with a Monotech 1MB RAM card:

https://monotech.fwscart.com/product/microram … ram---8-bit-isa

The idea being that I would use the Monotech card for maxing out the RAM and even adding some UMB memory all at 0WS, and use the PicoMEM 2 for EMS, mouse support, RTC, integrated hard drive on an SD card, and possibly floppy emulation.

The Tandy ISA riser can fit two 8-bit ISA cards, so that should work.

I know that in such a setup, the PicoMEM 2 would be underutilized, with for instance none of the sound support being used. I might enable AdLib/OPL3 emulation, so I can switch between the native Tandy sound and AdLib in some games. I would not be able to use Sound Blaster emulation, except maybe in direct mode only, since the Tandy 1000 EX and HX lack an on-board DMA controller. It's possible to upgrade these machines with a DMA controller through a hard-to-find add-on card. But the fact that add-on cards for these machines are rare and expensive (even the aftermarket ones) is one of the reasons why I'm going the PicoMEM route on this machine in the first place.

I'm wondering: how feasible would it be to emulate an add-on 8237 DMA controller on the PicoMEM 2 for these Tandy models and other clones where DMA is optional?

One period-correct sound device that would fit well in these early Tandy 1000 systems would be the Disney Sound Source (DSS). It would be a PCM output device that would complicate the 3-voice Tandy synthesizer quite nicely in games that support both. A Covox Speech Thing takes too many cycles to use in most games. As a buffered device, the DSS should be a lot less demanding on slower CPUs.

Any chance you can add DSS support to the PicoMEM and PicoMEM 2? You can use the firmware sources of the Picovox as a reference for that, since its based on the same chip.

Hi,

I'm using a Victor Vicki 2721-2 (8088 cpu). After a lot of troubleshooting I managed to narrow my picomem2 lockup issues (crashing when using sd drive, copy, moving, sometimes just changing directories, lots of "busy" on screen, lock on init after reboot, etc) with CPU speed. When I setup my jumpers to 4.77MHZ and IO address for clock frequency register (whatever that means) to 100-10F all is working perfect, sound, wifi, using uSD, but when I revert to "default" setting of my Vicki which is 7.16MHz and 260-26F for freq register (seems they work in pair) the lockups are appearing again.

Any idea if I can do something to use my XT on 7.16?

Thank you!

P.S. not using any kind of memory emulation from picomem
P.P.S is there anything from picomem that might use that address space? 260-26F? seems related to this
from the setup utility I have:
picomem 2a0-2af
rtc 2c0-2c7
ne2000 300-31f
adlib 388-389
tandy 1e0-1e7

Hi @digger

For tandy 1000 EX, you should keep only the IRQ3 wired. Only 2,3,4

Picomem 2 multiplexed irq is still only on IRQ7

FreddyV wrote on 2026-09-07, 16:09:

Hi @digger

For tandy 1000 EX, you should keep only the IRQ3 wired. Only 2,3,4

Picomem 2 multiplexed irq is still only on IRQ7

Hi @FreddyV. Got it. IRQ3 only.

What exactly do you mean with "Only 2,3,4"? Those can't be IRQs. Do you mean "remove jumpers 2, 3 and 4", since I should only have jumper 1 in place for IRQ 3?

I'm going to try it tonight and share my findings here.

Thanks!

Oh my goodness, I have it working!

But in a super-janky set-up, with two passive adapter/riser cards! 😁

Sharing the pictures below.

First, look at the wonderful goodies that I received from Serdashop. Quick shipping, as usual! It helps that I live just one country over. 🇳🇱 🇧🇪

By the way, congrats on the new site, @dreamblaster!

Okay, for quite some time, I had the Tandy 1000 EX ISA adapter/riser card lying around. I ordered it a while back, but I hadn't even opened the package yet. I ordered it from Cybernetic Systems on Tindie. This Australian seller makes some cool gadgets and adapters for retro systems, including the Tandy 1000. Unfortunately, most items are currently out of stock, including the ISA adapter.

This ISA adapter/riser requires brackets to be either removed or, in the case of a metal bracket, have the top part bent straight. I have not yet unscrewed the blastic bracket, but I noticed that it was going to be a tight fit with the audio output being towards the top of the bracket. Even with the bracket removed, the audio jack will be both pushing against the back of the case and obscured. Thankfully, there are also output pins on the card. And also, I'm not using the audio capabilities of the card in this set-up. It already has Tandy 3-voice sound, and it doesn't have a DMA controller, so it wouldn't support Sound Blaster anyway.

I didn't want to bother with trying to remove the bracket and squeezing the card in like that yet, so instead, I used another ISA riser board that I had lying around for years (I don't even remember where I got or salvaged it from), and plugged that into the ISA adapter. And then I plugged the PicoMEM 2 into that. 😅

...and it actually worked! 😂 At first, the card didn't appear to do anything, but of course after reading the documentation on-line, it turned out that I had to upload firmware to the card first, via its USB-C connector. Once I did that, the card worked, and I could access the configuration menu.

I haven't tested a lot yet, since it was quite late at night at that point, but booting floppy images and hard disk images from the SD card seems to work at least.

Even though I only had the IRQ 3 jumper in place, the menu still reports that IRQ 3 and 5 are enabled, and the card itself is using IRQ 5. Not sure if that's as intended?

Anyway, I'll share more of my findings and results here as I play with it more.

Any requests for things for me to test with this configuration in particular? Let me know!