PicoMEM - One ISA card to rule them all. HDD/Floppy/RAM/Mouse/WiFi/POST Code

Some make LEDs flash with these microcontrollers and others build such wonderful expansion cards. Sincere respect and high esteem!

As far as retrocomputing is concerned, these are great times to live in, with all this new clever hardware!

Old Net/Sys Admin here... WOW! Nice video. That card would have been nice way back in the day. I haven't seen 4DOS in decades.

Looks like a great project! Given that it has WiFi support, a NetDrive client would be a nice addition, too. This way one could boot an old PC off the network, using a remote hard disk image, with no need for client-side drivers.

I'd love to see a 16-bit ISA version, for faster Data I/O transfers. And maybe a VLB version too.

Blows my mind that we can use an advanced miniature computer as life support for a much older one.

this is an real love to retro computers, it was nice to watch this video , don't know why I enjoyed so much to watch this video , but indeed I did. So thank you for sharing this with us.

Thank you, Erik, for putting together this most excellent video!

Wow!! Thats so cool, I need this for my 286 as it's rather limited at the moment

This is awesome, and would be fantastic for my future 80286 project that I have in mind. Thanks!

Quite interesting what people are getting up to with micro controllers these days. Wonder if the PiStorm route would be doable as there's only so much bandwidth on the ISA bus and the cost of bit-banging the CPU might be worth it. As a side note, you're NOT limited to what one micro controller can do, you're just limited to how fast they can talk to each other ;)

CTRL+ALT+ESC = BIOS at ANY time (well mostly) I had its big brother, the EURO XT with a 20Mb HDD :) That was my first pc, where I saw my first 2400Bps modem being installed which started my computer related career :) (Side note, killed that modem by running it at 9600Bps for about 6hours, too long for it not to burn due to overclock hehe)

Thanks for the great video. It explains a lot and will help me use my PicoMem card to the fullest. I hope it will work with the EuroPC 1 in the future as it currently unfortunately doesn't.

Some of you maybe saw that the i used version 2.0 of USE!UMBS, this could be the cause of my instability when using UMB. In versjon 2.2 of USE!UMBS is clears the memory (i beleive) before it uses it. I will do more tests with USE!UMBS v2.2

Well, to get around the lack of CD image support, in most cases with older titles, you can simply copy them to a hard drive. In this case, either using a software like dosbox to create a hard drive image, and mount both it and the CD image, copy the contents, and then move the image to pico mem and mount as an additional drive. Or create a new hard drive image with the pico mem, and use networking to copy the CD contents from another PC over the network into the new drive image. Or even simpler, for titles that don't need to be seen on another drive letter, and don't care that they're just in another folder on the drive, forgot the 2nd drive image and just use the network to copy them from another PC to a folder on your existing drive. Though there are some titles, esp copy protected ones that are smart and will look for themselves on an optical drive only, at which point, you'll have to wait for CD image support unless you can do it from whthin DOS.

Amazing what this pi pico can do. More power than the actual pcs at the time, but that is beside the point. 😅

I never owned one of the DOS PC's, because i did realtime hardware development, and disliked the idea of all those jumpers and stuff, so i had a z80 system, then a motorola VMEbus Unix box, then a Mac.... but, great project, very original thinking, and something that one could probably design for similar functions in the "original" Macintosh.

do you have a 286 you can try it on? ive been waiting for the card to be fully opensourced for use on a 286.

PC XT Forever! Thanks!

Nice project I hope it succeed, I don't think I can get one but this kind of project would help a lot with old computers