Add Modern Storage, Networking, Audio, and Peripheral Support to Your Vintage PC With the Raspberry Pi Pico-Based 8-Bit ISA PicoMEM 2 Card (30-60 mins)

Emulation, Hardware, Modification, Software, Utilities

Task: Add Modern Storage, Networking, Audio, and Peripheral Support to Your Vintage PC With the PicoMEM 2 Card

Needed: PicoMEM 2 card, micro-SD card, Vintage PC with an 8-Bit ISA Slot

Time: 30-60 minutes

Introduction

There have been a variety of modern solutions for upgrading the RAM of your vintage PC, adding an emulated sound card, or adding other features such as an SD card-based emulated hard drive. The PicoMEM 2 card from FreddyVRetro brings multiple expansion cards onto one circuit board powered by the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller. The PicoMEM 2 is compatible with vintage PCs through the 8-bit ISA slot that was common on IBM PC/XTs and compatibles as well as the IBM PS/2 Model 30, for example. This is a plug-and-play solution with hard disk and floppy disk images loaded onto an SD card.

The PicoMEM comes with a user-friendly setup utility (photos at the end of the post) that allows you to configure the memory, disk options, audio, and other tools. According to the texELEC site that sells the PicoMEM 2, features include:

  • Replace multiple ISA cards with one device
  • Run Sound Blaster, GUS, OPL3, and General MIDI in DOS games
  • Add NE2000 networking (wired or Wi‑Fi)
  • Mount USB drives or MicroSD cards directly in DOS
  • Emulate EMS/XMS memory
  • Use modern USB controllers for DOS gaming
  • Add RTC functionality to systems that never had it
  • Expand with QwiiC modules or front‑panel displays

This is an amazing device that great expands your PC and is super easy to use.

Instructions

I purchased my PicoMEM 2 from texELEC in the USA for $90 plus taxes and shipping. There are other suppliers such as this site in Europe.

You first need to prepare a micro-SD card for booting the device. Instructions and images to get your started can be found on the GitHub. Briefly:

  1. Format your micro-SD card as FAT16, FAT32 or ExtFS
  2. Create two directories: HDD and Floppy
  3. An HDD image (.img file) with DOS 3.3 is provided on the GitHub. Place this in the HDD folder. You can find lots of floppy disk images in .img format on archive.org. For example, goodolddays has lots of games and utilities in .img free for download. Here is a .img from archive.org for Windows 1.0.
  4. Insert the PicoMEM 2 card in a free ISA slot and insert the micro-SD card.
  5. Boot your PC. You should see the PicoMEM BIOS screen. You will be prompted to hit “S” to enter the setup utility.
  6. Once in the setup utility arrow over disk and arrow down to HD Drive 0 and hit enter. You should see your .img file. Select it and hit ESC. Your PC should now boot into that image. You can also select floppies for booting in the same way.

Comments

I haven’t had time to play with the RAM and audio options or the joystick / mouse ports. Will do future posts one those features as I have time to explore and learn. Have fun!

Below are the setup screens for PicoMEM 2.