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

fosterwj03 wrote on Yesterday, 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 Yesterday, 04:53:

fosterwj03 wrote on Yesterday, 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 Yesterday, 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?