Lu

PicoGUS adds CD Emulation

Posted on by Lu

Ian Scott, the developer of the PicoGUS, has added another new feature to the device. That is the ability to emulate a Panasonic CDROM drive, therefore acting as an ODE.

With PicoGUS you can now plug in a USB drive with CDROM images onto the USB port of the PicoGUS. Supported image formats are ISO and BIN/CUE and there are two modes of CD-ROM emulation available. A Sound Blaster mode and a USB mode.

    • Sound Blaster mode supports more features like CD audio, SB DSP, OPL sound, CD and MPU-401 emulation. The emulated drive is around 2x speed. This mode is very demanding and may cause stuttering in certain games.
    • USB mode drive speeds are at 3x-4x. This mode is less demanding on the Pi Pico so you will not experience the stuttering issues of the Sound Blaster mode, howerver you will need a separate sound card for this mode.

To swap disc images, you can use PicoGUS’s initialization program(pgusinit). For multi-disc games, you can remove and reinsert the USB drive to advance to the next disc image. On the PicoGUS GitHub there are detailed instructions on getting the CD-ROM emulation to work in DOS and Windows 9.x.

The PicoGUS is an open source ISA card for retro PC’s. Powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico, it can emulate several sound cards, allow USB gamepads to act as gameport controllers and provide CD-ROM emulation. The sound cards it can emulate are:

  • Gravis Ultrasound (GUS)
  • Sound Blaster 2.0 / AdLib (OPL2)
  • MPU-401 (with intelligent mode) – outputs MIDI data on 3.5mm MIDI TRS connector
  • Tandy 3-voice
  • CMS/Game Blaster

If your retro PC doesn’t have an ISA slot but contains USB ports, then you can try out the USBODE project to get CD-ROM emulation.

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