nfg.forums

Quote from: kamiboy on September 30, 2022, 07:13:57 PMAbout then years ago or so there was a Compact XVI disassembly video on YouTube. Not sure if it is worth anything, but you might give it a peek.

I've found a total of two, one from a guy who stands roughly two meters away and pulls the shell apart without any detail (and I suspect there's clips missing/broken).
The other was made four months ago from a Japanese owner who I think lost the footage of the part I'm looking for, so no help there sadly.

Yeah the write protect is off (no label).  And the attribute for config.sys is writable very strange.

About then years ago or so there was a Compact XVI disassembly video on YouTube. Not sure if it is worth anything, but you might give it a peek.

Apologies for necrobump, happy to have this deleted and make a new topic if deemed necessary.

Anywho, I'm currently trying to open up my compact and progress has halted at removing the front face-plate. The clip up the top, next to the power & interrupt buttons doesn't want to let go. I'm cautious of breaking it permanently, so does anyone have any advice?

The wiki says to "lift" it, which I've tried with a jeweler's flat-head screwdriver - barely - since there's not exactly much room to get anything under the clip to lift with and I'd prefer not to use the buttons as a brace to lever the clip in case the buttons break.

Can anyone offer any advice?
Cheers!

No, i have the same problem before recaping the PSU, but i will check voltages.

Oh, yeah. Once upon a time, many years ago when I last had my Compact XVI open I do remember there being that FPU socket on my internal memory expansion unit. What is the name of the FPU module that fits inside that thing. If they are reasonably priced I might as well purchase one and pimp out my beloved machine.

Edit: After a bit og googlefu it seems what I am looking for is MC68882RC50A PGA chip. They are not too expensive, given the retro computing market in consideration. Of course they are all from chinese sellers, which conjures the "doubt" meme expression on my face. But I might give it a go, then never actually use it, as is par for the course for most of my retro purchases.

Xak II and Crossfire EX both look for FPU on boot and will load float3 if the chip is found.

If you have a 10mhz machine, no point really, but XVI has a dedicated socket for it on the mobo (compact xvi has socket on the internal ram expansion board).  For me I just run float3 from boot.  Few games benefit, (Prince of Persia did iirc), but I had the socket and got the chip for peanuts, so why not?

Almost no games make use of floating point arithmetic, so the fpu is next to useless. Of the tiny minority of games that do use the FPU I can only remember, eh, Geograph Seal, I think.

And if memory serves me right float2 gives software emulated floating point functionality, which the few games can make use of while float3 is designed to make use of the FPU.

I actually have an FPU card myself, somewhere, though I never used or messed around with it.

I own a X68000/16 with an physical FPU.
Does Float2. or float3.x something to the performance ?

Human68k might look like DOS, but that is only surface level. Under the hood it is completely different, written from scratch and designed different. Human68k doesn't have the 640k program space limit that DOS was originally hampered by, which makes sense as the lowest end X68000 hardware came stock with 1 megabytes of memory. As for no cut CPU upgrades, the only way I can think of is by buying an accelerator like the Excellent cards. Otherwise you are going to have to get your hands dirty. The crux of the upgrades is bypassing the stock crystal which clocks the 68000 processor to 10mhz with one that overclocks it to 16mhz, along with a switch to let you toggle speeds. I am just speculating here, but I suppose you could permanently overclock your machine to 16mhz by soldering out the old crystal and swapping in a faster one.

I do believe there is more to upgrading the X68000 to 16mhz than that. I have seen mods done to the crystal of the floppy controller as well, either to speed it up, or to have it keep pace with the higher clocked CPU, can't say for sure.

The downside to overclocking your x68000 permanently is that some games don't work well, or at all running at 16mhz.