Ian Scott's PicoIDE Turns a Raspberry Pi RP2350 Into a Feature-Packed Hard Drive and CD Emulator

Ian Scott, vintage computing enthusiast and maker of the Raspberry Pi Pico-powered PicoGUS soundcard and CD drive emulator for classic computers, has teased a new creation designed to add easily-controllable storage to IDE-based systems: the PicoIDE.

"All I can say about PicoIDE is this," Joe Strosnider, who plans to resell Scott's latest invention, says: "It's going to be the biggest thing for vintage computers. Ever. Take Platinum Filament, Retrobrite, BlueSCSI, PicoGUS, and PicoMicroMac combined. Then multiply that by about 20."

The PicoGUS project began as a board powered by Raspberry Pi's low-cost Pico microcontroller development board: connecting to a vintage computer's Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus, it emulates a range of audio hardware — including, of course, the Gravis UltraSound that gave it its name. A redesign in 2023 added more functionality, moving away from using a full Raspberry Pi Pico in favor of integrating its RP2040 dual-core microcontroller directly on a custom PCB.

The PicoIDE is, unsurprisingly, based around similar hardware — though moves from the first-generation Raspberry Pi RP2040 to its more powerful successor, the RP2350. Rather than emulating sound devices, though, it concentrates on storage, connecting to a host machine over the Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) bus and acting like an IDE hard drive and/or ATAPI-connected CD-ROM.

Disk images — .ISO and .BIN & .CUE for CD-ROMs, .IMG, .HDA, .VHD, and .HDF for hard drives — are stored on a microSD card, accessible at the front on a panel designed for installation into a spare 3.5" drive bay. A four-way controller next to a 1.3" 128×64 OLED display provides a method to switch between disk images on-the-fly, and there's even a jack for CD Audio playback — plus an MPC-2 header for wiring it into a compatible soundcard. Wi-Fi connectivity completes the feature-set, providing a way to control the device remotely — including uploading and managing disk images without having to pull the microSD card.

More information on the project is available on the PicoIDE website, and in Scott's Mastodon thread; neither a launch date nor pricing have yet been disclosed, beyond the promise that "it's ready" and "coming soon." No mention has been made about licensing yet, but the PicoGUS is made available on GitHub under the permissive variant of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2 with software primarily under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 2.