DOS-side setup tools for the PicoGUS sound card. PGINST is a TUI wizard that picks a mode (GUS, SB16, SBPro, Tandy, CMS, MPU), nails down ports/IRQ/DMA, writes the right SET BLASTER= / SET ULTRASND= lines into AUTOEXEC.BAT, and patches CONFIG.SYS. PGSETUP does the same kind of work after install when you want to retune live. PGBUNDLE is a self-extracting bundle that ships everything you need to a DOS box in one EXE.

What's in it

• PGINST.EXE — first-run setup wizard, ~65 KB
• PGSETUP.EXE — live settings manager, ~58 KB
• PGUSINIT.EXE — PicoGUS init utility, from polpo/picogus
• PICOGUS.UF2 / PG-NE2K.UF2 — main + NE2000/WiFi firmware
• CTMOUSE / SHSUCDX / UIDE / UDVD2 — FreeDOS helper drivers
• Gravis UltraSound v4.11 + Pro Patches Lite 1.61 patches, baked in to the full bundle. GUS-mode install extracts to C:\ULTRASND\ automatically.

Editions

Every release ships in three flavours.

SFX bundle (PGBUNDLE-vX.Y.Z-pg-vN.M.O.EXE, ~14 MB). Copy to a DOS box, run it, point at C:\PICOGUS\, done. The installer launches from there. This is the easy path.

Zip distro (PIGWIZ-vX.Y.Z-pg-vN.M.O.zip, ~13 MB). Same payload as the SFX but as a plain zip if you'd rather expand it yourself.

Floppy edition (PIGWIZ-floppy-vX.Y.Z-pg-vN.M.O.IMG, exactly 1.44 MB). A FAT12 disk image that fits on a real 1.44 MB floppy. Setup wizard + firmware + helper drivers + small GUS driver configs. Drops the 11 MB of .PAT audio samples because they can't lossless-compress below ~9 MB and LZMA on 16-bit DOS is impractical (256 KB minimum dictionary, 640 KB conventional memory). For non-GUS modes the floppy is fully functional. For GUS mode it sets up the env vars, creates C:\ULTRASND\, drops ULTRASND.PPL and ULTRASND.INI in place, and leaves MIDI\ empty for you to populate from elsewhere.

Install

From the SFX bundle

Download PGBUNDLE-*.EXE from the releases page. On the DOS box:

A:\> PGBUNDLE.EXE

It prompts for an extract path (defaults to C:\PICOGUS\), drops everything there, then cd C:\PICOGUS and PGINST.EXE does the rest.

From a floppy

dd if=PIGWIZ-floppy-v0.0.1-pg-v4.0.0.IMG of=/dev/fd0 bs=512   # Linux

Or write with Rawrite/Rufus on Windows, or imgmount a IMG -t floppy in DOSBox. On the DOS prompt:

A:\> INSTALL

INSTALL.BAT extracts the firmware, copies the EXEs to C:\PICOGUS\, then launches PGINST.

Build from source

The DOS EXEs are built with Open Watcom v2 (16-bit DOS, large memory model). The bundling is bash + standard archive tools.

./build.sh    # compile PGINST.EXE, PGSETUP.EXE, PGBUNDLE.EXE
./bundle.sh   # assemble zip, SFX bundle, and floppy image

bundle.sh pulls the latest PicoGUS firmware from upstream, the helper drivers from ibiblio's FreeDOS mirror, the GUS patches from archive.org's mirror (skip with GUS_PATCHES_URL= to build patch-less), and the DOS Info-ZIP UnZip + CWSDPMI. Outputs land in outputs/.

CI uses the pangbox/openwatcom-action container for the compile step and ubuntu-latest for bundling. See .github/workflows/build.yml.

Hacking on it

• pginst.c — the install wizard, ~1200 lines of plain C with a hand-rolled TUI (tui.c / tui.h)
• pgsetup.c — settings manager, shares tui.c
• pgbundle.c — SFX stub that reads its own appended payload via a 12-byte trailer (PGZ1 + dir offset + file count)
• pack-bundle.py — append-payload step that wraps pgbundle.exe with a file directory + raw file data

Run ./demo-pginst.sh, ./demo-pgsetup.sh, or ./demo-pgbundle.sh to launch each in DOSBox-staging against a temp drive.

Credits

• PicoGUS hardware + firmware — polpo/picogus
• Gravis UltraSound v4.11 driver — Advanced Gravis Computer Technology (1995, abandonware)
• Pro Patches Lite 1.61 + anti-loop fix — Tom Klok et al, community-maintained
• Info-ZIP UnZip for DOS — Info-ZIP project
• CWSDPMI — DJ Delorie
• CuteMouse — Nagy Daniel
• SHSUCDX — Jason Hood / Eric Auer
• UIDE / UDVD2 — Jack Ellis
• Open Watcom v2 — for letting us still build 16-bit DOS EXEs in 2026

License

PIGWIZ source itself: see LICENSE. Bundled third-party binaries keep their own licences, summarised in PIGWIZ.TXT inside the bundle.