The $69 PicoIDE Is A Game Changer For Vintage Computing

This is the PicoIDE, a brand new piece of open source hardware from polpo, AKA Ian Scott, who you may remember from the PicoGUS - the rather excellent multi-soundcard emulator that I reviewed on the channel a while back.

If you cast your mind back, you’ll no doubt remember that I praised the PicoGUS for its ease of use, low cost - I mean, it’s open source so you can even build your own if you like - very proactive firmware updates bringing all sorts of new functionality, and of course its support for a wide range of sound cards, allowing us to experience authentic sounds as per the AdLib, SoundBlaster, Tandy and more, alongside MPU-401 intelligent mode support for MIDI devices, and game port joystick emulation - all of which I showed off in that video, which you can find linked below.

But there was one feature that really caught the attention of the retro community at large - support for the Panasonic CD interface, an early CD-ROM standard provided by some of those early soundcards that was later superseded by IDE and ATAPI, of course.

Well, after seeing all of the buzz around that, as well as the somewhat-related PicoMEM project from FreddyV, which I also covered on the channel - particularly its support for hard disk images, Ian decided to roll up his sleeves once more and go all in on this optical and hard drive emulation business.

So here it is, the PicoIDE - and as we can see from the website, it’s very full featured indeed even at this very early stage. We have support for multiple CD and hard drive disk image formats, support for CD audio using the standard internal connector and 3.5mm jack just like a real CD-ROM drive from back in the day, stuff about PIO and DMA that I’m assured is very exciting even though I don’t really understand it, and a rather snazzy front panel for managing all of that stuff. Not that you need to use that if you don’t want to - the PicoIDE can also be mounted internally and managed using a web interface over its built-in wifi.

Loading up all of those CD and hard drive images is very easy indeed - you just need to drag and drop them onto a MicroSD card, and stick it in the slot.

Yeah, Ian doesn’t do things by halves.

Now, I should mention that this was provided to me for the purposes of this review, and I do indeed get to keep it - which is great, because I would have bought one anyway and to be honest, I’m going to be buying a few more for some more of my old machines, because - spoiler alert - this thing is bloody brilliant.

And as per its predecessor the PicoGUS - and unlike other similar projects on the market - this is open source hardware, so if you want to build it yourself, you will be able to once everything is finalised and the files to enable that are publicly released.

In fact, you could get one made by this channel’s sponsor PCBWay - with their 11 years of experience in the PCB fabrication business they’re more than capable of fabricating the PCB, assembling it all, and even 3D printing or injection molding this rather snazzy 3.5” drive bay enclosure.

So if any of those services are of interest for your next project - or indeed for this one - please do check out the link to PCBWay down in the description, and of course a big thank you is in order to them for all of their support for the channel and the wider electronics maker community.

But for now, you can preorder your very own unit from crowdsupply.com - in a very nice injection molded case - this one’s a prototype so it’s 3D printed - and we’ll talk about that towards the end of the video. So, with all of that out of the way, let’s get it installed.

The version I have here is the Deluxe, currently priced at $110, and it slots into a standard 3.5” drive bay. Connections on the back are pretty simple - there’s a CD audio connector - and yes, this does indeed support redbook CD audio tracks, a standard IDE connector, and a floppy drive style power connector. Personally I think I would’ve preferred the bigger molex connector as used by CD and hard drives as I’ve already had to splice an extra floppy connector into this machine for my CompactFlash adapter, but I did manage to track down a suitable adapter, and these are also available at the time of purchase for $2, so I guess I can’t grumble about that too much.

For those of you wondering whether a 5.25” version will be available, making this a true like-for-like replacement for your old CD drive, the answer is “almost certainly” - whether that be from Ian himself or from the community.

The machine that I’m using to demo is my trusty old Pentium 233 MMX, which hasn’t been featured on the channel for a while now. It’s probably best known from my video all about the S3 Virge graphics card, where I tracked down and burnt all of those games to CD-Rs, and booted up and played every single one of them - a task that would have been made a million times easier with the PicoIDE as I could’ve just stuck those onto an SD card and worked my way through them that way. So that’s a very real life use case already.

Anyway, that’s all installed, so let’s get this booted up and update the firmware.

OK, so here we go - this is the PicoIDE beta firmware update page. This is password protected, which you will discover if you try to go to it yourself, this is just for those of us who are on the early access thing, helping to test this thing out. Once this does go into production properly, you will of course be able to go to the website and download the latest firmware. But while it is under very very active development, Ian doesn’t want people trying to reverse engineer it and poke around inside it which I think is very reasonable indeed of him.

But anyway, there are links to the documentation on here - and this rather comprehensive documentation site here, which Ian has evidently put a huge amount of work into already - and we have the requirements here for the SD card - so essentially we need a newer MicroSD card. Earlier revisions of this hardware did have some compatibility issues with certain models of SD card and stuff but they have by and large all been fixed now - and they are also in the process of being even further refined, which is fantastic - so I’m just going to chance it with a random 8GB card that I found lying around - and also we can see that we need to set this up with a specific directory layout - so we need a “cdrom” directory on here for our CD images, “hdd” for our hard drive images of course, and there’s also a “firmware” directory which we will be creating now as well - and an INI file with the configuration for the device itself.

Now, on this page it says that he recommends to use the SD Association’s SD Card Formatter - which I do already have on this machine - so what I’m going to do is just stick this in here. The SD card slots in this machine doesn’t work for whatever reason. I have no idea. I’m not a computer expert. I just like to play one on YouTube.

Anyway, that’s that - so we just go to the SD Association Formatter. Just checking that that’s the latest version, which it is - and this is a card that I just used for some testing with the FujiNet, the device for Atari 8-bit computers. Anyway, let’s repurpose this - and we’ll call this “PicoIDE”.

We’ll just do a quick format on this, I know this is already formatted to FAT32 - and it also recommends that you use MBR as well - so I already checked that that is the case with this card. Should be the case with your card unless you’ve been doing something weird with it. But yeah, worth checking - and probably outside the scope of this video. Anyway, let’s just format this…

Job done, FAT32, we’ve got 8GB on there, which is plenty of space to play with for this particular experiment - and we’ll just close that down and open this up in Windows Explorer. Which one is it? It’s this one - and just get this directory structure set up as per the instructions.

Right, so, that’s all downloaded and copied across to the card but before we get too ahead of ourselves, there is something else that I think I should explain - and that is how this firmware actually works and how it all kind of relates to the way that the hardware is put together - so we have a firmware for the mainboard itself that is based on the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller - and there is also a separate firmware for the front panel. Now that is an ESP32 which we will see in a second because that does run its own web interface. There’s also a utility called PIDECTL, now that’s a DOS-based application which actually allows you to control the PicoIDE under DOS. It’s completely optional. You can do pretty much everything you want to do with the thing either by editing the config file directly or just using the front panel to select images and stuff. But of course, if you have this mounted internally, you also have the option of using the web interface or the DOS utility for selecting which images are currently loaded - so absolutely loads of options here and really great to see - and again, I will stress that this is pre-production at the moment. This isn’t even the final version of this hardware. It has been finalized and it is going into production in the near future, but just goes to show the sheer amount of work that’s gone into this already. There’s also a list of known issues and things - this is beta firmware and this is all moving very, very quickly at the moment so I don’t want to go into too much detail about those because it’s the kind of stuff that will inevitably have changed by the time you get your hands on this. But we’ll just take a look at what I have done with this SD card - so we have the directory structure set up here. As per the instructions, I’ve just copied the two firmware files for the mainboard and the front panel into the firmware directory here - and also a little treat in the CD-ROM directory. I found an ISO of the original Quake from 1996.

This machine does have a Voodoo card in it and I do have GLQuake installed on here as well - so I thought that would be quite a good way to demo the CD image support and also the CD audio support - so we will take a look at that in a second once we’ve got the firmware updated.

Such a satisfying click from that power switch, I do love this PC.

The PC is working - so that’s a good start! We have that 233 megahertz CPU and it’s just running through the memory test. I can’t remember how much RAM is in this system, not that it really matters for the purpose this test?

Oh it’s 256MB. Okay - and we’ll just see whether it is detected here in the BIOS. There we go: “PicoIDE Totally Legit CD-ROM Drive” as the secondary master. There is also a jumper on the board so you can select between master and slave as per a standard IDE drive as you might expect so that’s great. Didn’t show that earlier obviously I’ve just got this hooked up as a single drive. Now one thing that I should mention actually while we are on that topic, at the moment this can emulate either a hard drive or a CD drive - one or the other. There are plans in the future to add support to actually do both simultaneously so you can have this emulating two separate drives all in the one same device at the same time. Ian assures us that that is possible and it is something that he will be working on in the future but perhaps understandably he has-

Oh that wonderful Windows 95 startup sound - perhaps understandably he does have other priorities at the moment - so as we can see this is booted up we have Quake.iso showing up here on the screen. Let me just check that I think that’s - yeah that actually looks like it’s flickering on the camera. Of course in real life it isn’t. I’ve got PWM dimmers on the backlights here, I’ve got the backlight in the monitor, I’ve got this as well so all sorts of different refresh rates and stuff. I give up with this stuff and this camera but anyway that is that. Now this is my previous solution so we have DAEMON Tools running down here in the corner and I just used to mount CD images and stuff using that which of course does have some overhead, does use some system resources and you know you’ve got to take up hard drive space with all of the disk images and things.

That I can completely do away with now which is fantastic - and even on this very first early firmware that we haven’t updated yet, we can go through and we can see that the D: drive is here and we’ve got that Quake image mounted as per a completely standard CD and we’ll take a look at that in a second. Now the reason I’ve still got this laptop out is because I wanted to connect to the Wi-Fi access point that’s actually built in to the PicoIDE and run through that firmware update process. You can do this through the front panel menu as well, I was just having a look at this, where is it? I’ll tell you what, I will set up my phone and I will point it at this and see if we can get some decent footage of just going through this menu and stuff because I think that’s quite important to show.

…Perfect! Okay, that works for our purposes, this is the initial version of the firmware that was shipped with this very early pre-release version of the PicoIDE. I’m sure there will be more options and stuff in future, but I just wanted to document this, just show some of the very basic functionality - so if we go in to the menu, we have an option to select the image, of course if you have multiple image files on there you can go through and select which one you want to be mounted, and we can also eject the image which emulates an eject of course as far as the operating system is concerned, works the exact same way as your old-fashioned CD drive and pressing the eject button on there, as you might expect - and I’m just, before we go into settings, I just want to go through to System Info, you’ll notice this is quite flexible this and quite flimsy. This is 3D printed, I just want to reiterate that the final version of this is injection molded, this is an early prototype version of this device, so I’m not going to judge it based on that, and I did just want to make that clear - so if we go in, we can see this is the information for the front panel itself, so the front panel runs its own separate firmware and that is of course based on the ESP32 microcontroller with the Wi-Fi module, and it communicates with the PicoIDE using SPI, and I guess you could probably come up with your own separate interface for this if you want to control it a different way. It’s all open source, it’s all going to be very well documented, so quite exciting stuff there, but to be honest I like the look of this front panel menu and I think it works great already - so we’re just going to go through to Settings here, so we have a firmware update and we can indeed run the firmware update directly from the card using the front panel if we want to. Again I’m not going to do that now, I want to show off the web interface but just wanted to let you know that that’s an option. Display Settings doesn’t seem to be implemented yet so we’re not going to look at that, and if I just go through to Wi-Fi - like I say, these buttons are a little bit unresponsive - we’ve got the Wi-Fi Status and you can also reset that. Now by default, straight out of the box with a brand new fresh SD card, this comes configured as an access point, so it actually runs its own Wi-Fi access point which you can then connect to with a computer or other device. We’ve got the SSID and the password here displayed so that makes life really easy, and then from that point onwards you can then configure this to connect to your Wi-Fi and then you can access it as per any other machine on your home network which, I mean, how good is that!?

…and back to this excellent documentation here on the PicoIDE website, we’ve got the web interface and everything documented here, of course I am going to lose my internet access in a moment when I connect to this hotspot - and there it is, “PicoIDE-FrontPanel”.

Connect automatically, I guess, why not, enter the network security key: frontpanel123.

This is genuinely my first time looking at this - so we have the image browser here, “Path: /cdrom”, so we can select which image we have currently mounted. There we go, we’ve got a “Load” option for that - I guess if we had more images they would all be listed there. We can scan for networks here, so we can see available Wi-Fi networks. I’m not going to do that at the moment - and we have “Firmware Update: Check For Updates” - so we’ve got “Current” and “Available”. Current and available. It looks like they are picking those up from, yes, this is picking it up from the SD card. Although I see there is also a “File Upload” option here - so I’m guessing we can upload images and firmwares and stuff directly using the web interface. I say I’m guessing, I know that that’s a thing - so, yeah, really useful.

Let’s just go through, we’ll update the panel…

“Are you sure you want to update the front panel firmware? The panel will restart.”

Hmm, well, not ideal! That took its sweet-ass time. I think it took about five minutes and has actually failed with this error, “ESP_ERR_INVALID_CRC” - so I’m not quite sure what the issue is there. I’m going to have to check the checksums of the firmware update file and stuff. Just while I’m here, I will attempt to update the main board itself as well. Or maybe we need to do that before we update the front panel - that’s come up very quickly, actually.

“No disc loaded.”

“Waiting for the board to reboot.”

“Now running 0.7.0” - so that’s very interesting, actually.

Evidently something didn’t quite work with that front panel update. Maybe if I try it again now…

“Do you want to update the front panel firmware?”

Well, that’s just typical isn’t it? So, I re-copied the files onto the SD card just in case something got corrupted somehow, thought that might be worth a try, and I also noticed while I was doing that that this PC had actually frozen up as well which is probably not surprising of course the PicoIDE rebooted - essentially the same as disconnecting the power to the CD drive while the computer is actually running which isn’t advised with these older machines - and while it was booting back up I thought I’ll just have a fiddle with the front panel just to see what the firmware update process looks like, that wasn’t recording unfortunately, but I just hit the “Firmware Update” button on there, it took all of about two seconds and it is now fully up to date so I guess something went wrong when I was copying the firmware file onto the SD card, it must have got corrupted. But that is now fully up to date - so there we go!

If only I’d taken that opportunity to actually record that and show off the front panel firmware update process, but at least I can say that I’ve tried it and it works!

So now we’re all up to date, of course it is time for a bit of a demo and something that I wanted to show off on this particular machine - so this machine has an original Voodoo card in it, I think I mentioned that, I don’t know there’s been a bit of messing around since then but one thing that I have installed on this Windows 95 machine is GLQuake which is the Voodoo version of Quake of course, it runs super smooth, super high frame rate, has some quite nice graphical effects and stuff and this would have been really really impressive back in the day just as a tech demo of what this Voodoo card was capable of. Now the trouble with this is…

…it doesn’t have any music, it’s installed to the hard drive and you need the actual CD in the drive to play the CD music. Now you might think - “But Rees, you have a Quake disc image mounted via the PicoIDE so what’s going on here, why is this not working?”

…and this is where I ran into a very interesting caveat and I wanted to point this out because this might end up tripping someone else up, someone who is also not very smart like me - so if you go into My Computer you can see that we have the Quake CD mounted here, this is version 1.01 so this is the initial release and if we fire up the CD Player here in Windows, go to Accessories, Multimedia, CD Player - “Data or no disc loaded on drive D:”. Drive F: is my DAEMON Tools virtual drive so we can ignore that, in fact I’m going to uninstall that and stop using it now I’ve got this thing, but that’s not really the behaviour that we were expecting - so what we need to do is actually load a different version of the disc image.

Allow me to explain.

This Quake ISO that I downloaded - of course, perfectly legitimately - as I mentioned before, it just says “Data Track” just there - and I noticed that this file is actually only about 100MB - and if I go through and we just eject the image, “No disc image loaded”, we can see that that’s vanished from Windows now - so as far as Windows is concerned, it’s just been ejected as per any other drive.

But if we go back in to “Select Image” from the menu on the front here, I now have another version of Quake, which is actually in a folder - and the reason for that is because it consists of .bin and .cue files - so we have separate files for each of the tracks.

Of course, I was well aware that this was a thing and I was well aware that ISO files don’t support audio tracks - and I should have downloaded this version instead. I was just in a rush to get something up and running - so yeah, lesson learned there. But if I just select this:

“Quake [1996]”, and we can see we actually have some slightly different icons at the bottom here indicating that this is data and audio together on this particular version of the image - and we can see in the CD player application here immediately: “New Artist”, “New Title”, “Track 1” - so it has actually detected that there are audio tracks on that CD - and spoiler alert, if we hit Play…

…we get that wonderful Nine Inch Nails soundtrack that of course Quake is very well known for.

As you might expect, if we launch GLQuake from the shortcut on the desktop now, wonderful 3Dfx splash screen, we’ve got the click of the relays there as the Voodoo engages and we have music, wonderful, wonderful music and it is running from the PicoIDE itself, we’ve actually got a status indicator on the front here that shows which tracks playing and how far through we are on that. You could of course also - I’m going to turn that down a little bit because it is quite loud and I’m having to shout.

You could also of course rip your audio CDs to .bin and .cue format and you can load a load of those up on an SD card and you can actually play those and the operating system will recognise that as if it is an audio CD.

If we go in and just start up a new game. Of course, id in all their wisdom chose perhaps the loudest and most energetic track for the demo level. Most of the music in Quake is this kind of ambient noise, these ambient kind of electronic and spooky noises. I love the soundtrack in Quake, I think it adds an awful lot to the game and it is well worth having and this is probably now the easiest way to do that on original hardware - so yeah, when I say that this thing is a game changer, I think you can take that quite literally.

Now, as mentioned earlier in this video, of course the PicoIDE isn’t a one-trick pony, it doesn’t just do optical drive emulation, it can also do hard drives. With the caveat at the moment that you have to actually go in and edit the config file manually to tell it to boot into IDE mode. In the future it should be able to support both types of devices simultaneously, I believe based on the information that I’ve seen. But for now it’s one or the other and you have to go in and edit that config file. Of course you could have multiple SD cards - you could have one full of CD images and one full of hard drive images and just use it that way. Or I guess you could reconfigure it using the DOS-based configuration tools or whatever. But I thought it would be a cool demo to take the CompactFlash card out of this machine - so this is in place of the original mechanical hard drive that was in this machine, this was in a CompactFlash to IDE adapter and it’s what that whole Windows 95 setup has been running from for years. I thought I’d image this, copy that image to the SD card and then be able to boot from this. Trouble being that this is a 16GB card and this one’s only 8GB and it would have taken a very long time to image this and copy it all over and I’m also very impatient - so I went onto my NAS and I found a backup of the CompactFlash card that I use to boot my 486 which is only 2GB and that made my life a lot easier - so I’m genuinely trying this for the very first time, I’m not sure if this is going to work, not quite sure what’s going to happen here and of course the image on here isn’t configured for this specific PC - so wish me luck!

Right, so, first up this is very promising indeed, it is showing the correct file name for that image and also the correct size, it seems to have detected everything okay, got all the drive geometry and stuff displayed on there as well which is very nice.

So we’ll just see… “PicoIDE Hard Disk”, so indeed that has changed mode, that said something about “Totally Legit CD Drive” or something before, last time we booted it up - so that’s very promising and - “Starting MS-DOS”, okay!

We have a CD driver here, at the moment I don’t have the CD drive connected so it’s not going to detect that and of course this can’t emulate both at the same time so it’s not going to pick up the PicoIDE as a CD drive, that’s to be expected. Also the ESS AudioDrive sound card I have in my 486, it can’t detect that because this doesn’t have one of those so this is all totally to be expected but this is my MS-DOS 6.22 setup from my 486 machine.

Okay, I have gotten well and truly carried away over the past hour or so. I’ve been going through, I’ve been firing up lots of games, I’ve been trying lots of stuff out and it’s seamless, I’ve had no performance issues whatsoever, I’ve had no stability issues whatsoever. You forget that you are running the entire system from an image. It really is very impressive indeed - apart from the fact that it doesn’t make all of the right mechanical noises, the experience of using this old machine is no different to using it from, you know, original hardware. Well, I guess it’s also quite a bit faster than a mechanical hard drive as well, but one thing that I did do was just go in and I just made a quick change to the graphics driver for Windows 3.1 just to get that booting up. Of course, it’s not detecting the network card and stuff from that other machine, this whole setup was designed for my 486 machine with a completely different set of hardware - and that is not the fault of the PicoIDE, obviously.

But yeah, it just goes to show that the image file support works perfectly. It’s seamless - and I can see some very real use cases for this as well - so, for example, this 233 MMX here, ideal machine for running DOS natively for lots of those old DOS games. But of course, it can run Windows 95, which is what I tend to run on it. It can run Windows 98. You could run various different early Linux distributions and amongst all of those, you can have different configurations of them as well, of course - and to have all of those just in the form of a menu, switch the machine on. You can say, “OK, I want to run Windows 98 today” - and you just pick that from the list and your Windows 98 setup just boots up.

It is even more convenient than my previous solution of having these CompactFlash cards and just kind of swapping between those - and as a YouTuber, someone who plays with various different bits of hardware and games and software and stuff, I can have my base configuration on here for kind of day to day use - and when I have something new to test, I can copy that. I can mess around with the copy to get whatever it is working - and once I’m done filming and want to go back to the original configuration, I can just go straight back to that without having messed up the original version, without having to use an extra CompactFlash card or take a backup or whatever - so there’s lots of really kind of compelling use cases for a setup like this - and yeah, as mentioned, even at this very early stage, it’s seamless, it’s fast, it’s stable.

I am blown away by this - and I know I haven’t shown much in this video so far, but I want to go away and play with this a lot more and kind of really explore its performance and its capabilities and things in a lot more detail - so let’s get this video wrapped up, get this one edited, get it uploaded, and then I can go back to playing with the PicoIDE on various different bits of hardware.

…and that is a quick whistlestop tour of the two major features of the PicoIDE. Now, this thing is moving very quickly - there have been 7 major firmware updates in the past couple of months alone and Ian isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Of course he’s a very well known and respected member of the open hardware community thanks to his work with the PicoGUS and for that reason I have no issues whatsoever with recommending this project - it really is what it seems to be and it’s a device that we in the retro computing community have been desperate for for a very long time now.

What I am going to do is to continue to test this with various bits of hardware - my Japanese PC-98 for example has been requested - and there are others out there who are testing this thing with vintage Macs and all sorts, as well as channels far smarter than this one really putting the PicoIDE through its paces with benchmarks and the like - so I’ll link to some of those videos down below with a lot more information, and for more coverage of the PicoIDE and more from the vintage computing and gaming world, please do make sure that you’re subscribed to the channel.

Now, the important point for this video is that the initial run of PicoIDEs over on crowdsupply.com doesn’t have long left at all, so if you want to be one of the first to get your hands on the final version of this, make sure you check out the link down below. There’s the deluxe version that I’ve shown in this video, which is $110 and available with a black or white 3.5” ABS injection molded case, or if you want to mount it internally and use the wifi or DOS-based configuration tools to manage it, there’s a base version which is only $69 - and of course you can pick up a power adapter cable and an SD card at the same time if you like.

But that’s all I have for this video - so big thanks to my supporters on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and YouTube channel memberships for all of your support, and massive thanks to Ian Scott AKA polpo again for sending this over to me for review. I’m about to head over to Crowd Supply to pick up a couple more for some other machines I have here so I’ll leave it at that, and hopefully I’ll see you all the next time.