The MZPico card

Name: MZPico
Brand: MZPico

An open-hardware storage system for the Sharp MZ-800, powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico. No cassette tapes, no original floppy or Quick Disk drives — a Pico, a small PCB, a few solder joints, and the machine loads anything in seconds.

MZPico boards — The MZPico family — Frugal and Deluxe boards.

What it does

MZF program loader — loads .mzf tape images straight into the MZ-800. Instant, no audio cassette involved.
Floppy disk emulator — mounts .dsk images and emulates a floppy drive.
Quick Disk emulator — .mzq images, or the on-the-fly mode where a plain directory behaves as a Quick Disk.
RAM disk emulator — SRAM boot disk, paged RAM disk and PicoRD, with instant system boot via SRAM emulation.
Sound over I2S (Deluxe board) — both MZ-800 sound sources rendered to an on-board I2S DAC: the SN76489 PSG with stereo panning and the 8253 beeper.
WiFi cloud storage (Pico W) — the card browses this catalog over WiFi as a cloud:/ device. Every title on this site, loadable on real hardware without touching a computer.
Highly configurable — one firmware for all boards, an INI-style config file, user-defined I/O ports, multiple instances of any virtual device.

On the machine

MZPico boot menu on the MZ-800 — Customizable boot menu with favorite programs.

MZPico file explorer on the MZ-800 — File explorer with directory trees and fast search.

Two boards

MZPico Frugal board — **Frugal board** — the simplest option: a Pico soldered directly to a very small PCB. Internal flash for storage, optional microSD socket, no level shifters — solder & go. Works with the original Pico (2 MB) and 16 MB “purple” clones. KiCad design →

MZPico Deluxe board inserted in an MZ-800 — **Deluxe board** — the full-featured build: level shifters for guaranteed 5 V safety, microSD slot, I2S sound card, fits the MZ-800 upper slot rails, and takes a Pico W for WiFi and cloud storage. KiCad design →

Getting started

Build a board from the open KiCad designs (basic soldering skills are enough), or start with just a Pico on a Frugal PCB.
Download the firmware .uf2 for your board from the releases page, hold BOOTSEL, and copy it onto the Pico's USB drive.
Upload MZ-800 software over USB mass storage — or grab it from this catalog — insert the card, switch the machine on. Done.

Full documentation, configuration reference and build notes live in the MZPico-firmware repository. Hardware designs are working; firmware is actively developed. Boards are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, the firmware and this catalog are on GitHub.