A X68000 arrived

[alexh]

See you have a MIDI card.

Midi card is the one that needs the super rare Yamaha chip and i dont have that.

YM3802 ?

[terriblefire]

Midi card is the one that needs the super rare Yamaha chip and i dont have that.

YM3802 ?

Wrong chip. Its the YM3802-X

[HigashiJun]

Nice !

They cost a lot even here in Japan.

[Higgy]

@terriblefire regarding SCSI it might work. People have success with a number of devices. But the BlueSCSI V1 is like £32. Best to then flash with some Japanese firmware for great compatibility. People have had issues with BlueSCSI V2 and that runs on different hardware (RPi 2040)

Regarding the bios sockets I was thinking you might need to run some code at boot, then they could be stored in them, but then I remembered there are Accelerator cards already, so they must auto configure.

Jumping the gun greatly here, I guess you might initially be using the 68000 socket to test the TF536 so I was then going to say I could provide internal space dimensions for a OG 600CE and an Expert 2. But ultimately having the card in an Expansion Slot would ensure compatibility/user base across most of the X68000 Range.

Regarding MIDI, there are a few recent cards. There is a great one from France, which also incorporates 8mb of RAM, but I don't think that is Open Source. Uses FPGA so no actual soundchip as such.

Looks like a RPi accelerator is in the works too, but 030 is going to be the sweet spot. Not many 3D games and Demoscene is nothing like the Amiga.

I guess the ideal card would be a triple; 030+memory+midi.

Does your Pro have the 1mb expansion? As I think they just came with 1mb as standard. With 1mb total you will be quite limited in running software.
Some of the memory expansions can address 1mb of the expansion to get you to 2mb. I think this 1mb-2mb area is in a different address space and must be full first before the computer will 'see' other memory.

[terriblefire]

Cool. i'll look at a BlueSCSI. I want to see if the whole machine boots first.

Yeah i was going to do the 68k replacement thing to start with. Since its pretty much a plugin in job.

There is a ram expansion card in the bundle but its anyones guess what size it is.

[terriblefire]

I dont suppose anyone has ever seen an english translation of the Technical Reference manual. :lol:

[Higgy]

There is a ram expansion card in the bundle but its anyones guess what size it is.

What is the PCB number/marking, there are not that many memory expansions so should be able to find out what it is.

Looking at your pic IMG_0170, the 1mb expansion connects to the Vertical connector in the top left. So completely different from the Expansion slots simple PCB edge.

'Papago' is your best bet for translating.

I expect there is some nice black ooze coming from those PSU caps. I've only seen cap leakage from PSU (very bad) and on the disk drives.

This is about repairing a Pro: https://www.target-earth.net/wiki/doku. ... _pro_fault

If you don't have a method of writing 5 1/4" disks I can send you a Masterdisk with the SCSI bootloader, which is installed into SRAM, when you need it. (Although the guy maintaining the HD image seems to have a method that gets around that I believe).

[terriblefire]

I'll take a look tomorrow for the ram expansion card card. its got zip ram on it and what looks like a scsi connector. Connects up by the keyboard connector.

For the PSU i'm going this route..

https://github.com/leaded-solder/x68000-pro-picopsu

PCBs already ordered. But i have an ATX PSU adaptor to do testing in the meantime. I've no battery so need a solution for that.

Thought occured why the SCSI driver cant be put in the optional extra rom?

[Higgy]

I don't know if battery circuit on Pro is a rechargeable one or not. The original 600CE was rechargeable but the Expert 2 was not. You can use a plain coin cell holder or an Amiga 4000 style one with the diode if it is a rechargeable circuit.

You will need the battery to save the SRAM. Without setting SRAM the computer will give allsorts of strange behaviour and it might seem broken. SRAM setttings is so is so important to X68000.

You can replace the SRAM with non-volatile chips used in Sega Saturn mods. Some extra wires are needed, I've not done this yet as X68000 Towers are a pig to take apart, and I need a little break from doing that :)

The Masterdisk with HD Bootloader is needed. You load in the Bootloader, configure it then save the SRAM settings (along with extra memory config as I don't think it fully autoconfigs).

I did burn some Custom ROMs, when you change the jumper to use them the onboard ones are not used. I could not work out the settings/config but I am not a software person, I expect you could work it out. But I don't know for certain if the Bootloader could be added, there is other stuff that can be removed like Serial Debugger, Printer.
I will try and find the custom ROM links.

If you have a 5 1/4" PC drive, Omniflop on PC works well to write X68000 disks.

You have a good Xmas rabbit hole to go down 😃

UPDATE, added links:

Custom ROM or IPL in X68000 speak:

https://stdkmd.net/xeij/iplrom16.htm#burn

https://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5503.0

https://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=7232.0

Software Dev:
https://www.target-earth.net/wiki/doku. ... 8_devtools

https://github.com/FedericoTech/X68KTutorials

[terriblefire]

I don't know if battery circuit on Pro is a rechargeable one or not. The original 600CE was rechargeable but the Expert 2 was not. You can use a plain coin cell holder or an Amiga 4000 style one with the diode if it is a rechargeable circuit.

Yeah its rechargeable.

If you have a 5 1/4" PC drive, Omniflop on PC works well to write X68000 disks.

I dont actually have any PC floppy drives at all. I'm pathelogcally allergic to magnetic media thesedays.

Ram card i have is this one

IMG_0178.jpg

Can the X68000 drives not be used directly?