The miracle #Hand386: it lasted all day at my table at #VCFMW yesterday playing demos with a #PicoGUS attached to it. I've always heard it draws more power than the power port can provide so it's always using the battery but it did fine for 14 hours! I kinda wonder if the IPS screen swap I did means it uses less power?

Ultrasonically cleaning the #PicoGUS boards that I’ll be selling at #VCFMW. Look at that flux pouring out of the holes on the connector!

It's been 10 months or so since I flounced out of Twitter... I should do a rev of the original #PicoGUS board that replaces all the Twitter handles on its silkscreen with names or Mastodon handles. Of course that would tempt me to make that rev able to be completely SMT assembled by JLCPCB. Chip-down RP2040 and DAC, no submodules. And a wavetable header. It'd be
*real* cheap to make. I'd be kinda duplicating the project that @mos_8502 did that does a lot of the same things, though...

Today I have discovered #PicoGUS, an ISA soundcard for DOS PCs powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico. The amount of hardware hacking going on these days is incredible. Microcontrollers were a great idea. #RaspberryPiPico #RP2040 #DOSGaming #MSDOS #RetroGaming #RetroComputing

I just added USB joystick support to #PicoGUS. So now you can play your DOS games with a Dual Shock 4, as nature intended

Just ordered 200 #PicoGUS stickers to give away at VCF Midwest 😁

Just ordered 200 #PicoGUS stickers to give away at VCF Midwest 😁

My mobile #PicoGUS development/assembly test station is working out well!

I uploaded a super quick comparison between a real GUS and #PicoGUS playing Second Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJcPF2gYWE4
I chose this part because the sine lead sample would reveal any differences in pitch, and it sounds bang on. In fact I'm surprised at how close it is. One of the switches between is perfectly seamless, and the other I think I was off by a frame so there's a tiny glitch, but that's my lack of video editing skills, not anything else...

I finally got to test the waveblaster header on the Hand386 #PicoGUS ISA adapter because my DreamBlaster S2 arrived from Belgium… I got the reset line wrong (I didn’t realize it’s active low) and left and right are swapped. Whoops! A bodge later and it’s playing canyon.mid gloriously!

Finally, it's the first new #PicoGUS firmware release since February! https://github.com/polpo/picogus/releases/tag/v0.7.0

Standout features:
* Higher RP2040 clockspeed, enabling better ISA performance and GUS IRQ handling
* Support for Hand386
* New CMS and Tandy 3-voice emulation cores, using an engine contributed by @aaronsgiles. Massive thanks to Aaron for this code!

My video on the #PicoGUS #Hand386 edition is now complete! I dive in a bit more on the hardware side than in my previous videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWUtMPxmKD8

One of my favorite #demoscene humblebrags is “apparently this is possible” in Unreal. I’m getting ready to shoot a video about the new mini #PicoGUS now that the screen on my Hand386 is perfect!

Testing out #PicoGUS on the new Super Socket 7 build by watching the demo Riprap by Exceed from 1998. It’s as true today as it was back then: coders just download stuff from Internet.
https://demozoo.org/productions/9829/

I’m going to make a video about the mini #PicoGUS that I made for the #Hand386 but the fact that its LCD went all blue is really messing up my plans. I hope I just need to re-seat the connector that brings the VGA signal towards the front half of it, but the fact that it also changes with viewing angle makes me wonder if it’s a problem with the LCD panel itself…

I made a thing… video coming soon! #PicoGUS #Hand386

First time trying #PicoGUS in an XT clone and it works great in GUS mode. Mod Master XT shows lots of CGA snow but that’s the fault of the discrete CGA clone card I have.

So next on the future roadmap for #PicoGUS is:
- investigate MVP3 issue
- try to implement the DMA cache idea I had when on a long drive
- test out the mini PicoGUS/Hand386 design I teased a while ago (boards are on the way from JLCPCB!)
- test MPU-401 improvements
- actually do a firmware release!!!

Thanks to the support I’ve gotten from supporters on Ko-Fi I’ve purchased a Super Socket 7 motherboard with the VIA MVP3 chipset so I can debug the DMA issues that #PicoGUS has on that chipset. I really appreciate that support - I otherwise can’t justify collecting boards with every chipset out there to see what can go wrong.

The 486 DX2/66 has to be fired up to give this game justice, with the #picogus soundcard