Hi all,
I bought x68000 CZ-600ce on ebay which hangs during boot. Black display and when Interrupt button is pressed some Japanese text is displayed.
When floppy I disconnect floppy drive, then on display appears floppy logo.
I did some research about this problem. When pin 17 (err disk) is disconnected from floppy connector, floppy logo appears.
When I tried manually insert floppy (remove floppy eject motor and manual insert floppy), machine boots up but message "It was not possible to start system" appeared. When I press interrupt button message appears "Interrupt switch pressed (SR=$2004 PC=$00FF601E)".
I've tried many floppy images but with same result.
I have some questions.
What can be wrong with floppy when signal err disk is asserted to 0V?
Which floppy image can I use for test?
What cause "It was not possible to start system message"?
Is some where described floppy boot process? On which address is boot sector from floppy loader?
Many thanks for help.
Hi Snua12 !
I once had similar symptoms and there were two causes for it.
First case was because the riser (that thingy where expansion cards are plugged in) did not have a firm contact with the motherboard. I reseated it and the computer started to boot.
The second one was bad floppy cable. The system accepted disks fine but would not boot and the screen was allways black. I took an old PC floppy cable, carefully removed the connectors from X68000 cable and crimped a new cable.
Full BOM can be found in the following thread:
HD pins on a X68k ACE?
http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5429.msg36889#msg36889 (http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5429.msg36889#msg36889)
Alternatively you can try gently twisting and bending the floppy cable while your system is powered on and the floppy disk is inserted. Both of the drives need to be connected at the same time for the system to boot. If it is a bad connection, at some point it should start reading the disk. In my case it refused to boot even from HDD when there was no proper contact with the floppy drives.
Another possible cause for the black screen could be a lack of SCSI termination which is discussed in the following thread:
Super HD : Soft Power on/off problem
http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5494.msg37701#msg37701 (http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=5494.msg37701#msg37701)
Try booting Motos and let us know how it went.
Keep the scene alive !
Eidis
Thanks for links eidis, I've check floppy cable connection.
I think that my problem is different.
I connected leds to floppy drive signal and found out, that DRIVE_SELECT_1 is always down.
DRIVE_SELECT_1 activate 2nd floppy drive for communication.
I think that expansion board has broken X090CE SICILIAN ASIC chip.
DRIVE_SELECT_1 is also down when I power on only expansion board.
Another issue is x68000 hangs during boot due FDD/INT pin low value. When I disconnect this pin from floppy,
message asking for floppy insertion appears.
When I have only first floppy drive connected and manually inserts floppy (automatic insertion does not work),
x68000 tries to boot from floppy but message "It was not possible to start the system. Reboot" appears.
I have this exact same problem now with my ACE HD which had broken PSU powered on it. It will just boot to black screen, but if I remove the first floppy drive it starts and gives me the floppy image. But when I try to boot with the 2nd floppy drive it will just give that "It was not possible to start system. Reboot"
It also finds my SD2SCSI but that also gives "It was not possible to start system. Reboot"
Did you get yours fixed and if so what was the broken part?