nfg.forums

i use instruction from https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/sharp-x68000-z-a-decent-alternative.1244932/page-3
v.2 image is work

Quote from: spectreman on January 22, 2025, 09:23:48 PMMy advice is to only use the Roland SC-55 MkII, which emulates the MT-32.

Badly.

Hi @arananet is there any plan to have a new batch shortly?

Thanks!

@z964 @NFG

Thank you both for the quick answers. That's disappointing, but understandable.

I'm curious, are these disk all doomed to fail on a somewhat general timeline, or is this kind of storage media where if you use it from time to time it will 'refresh' it in a sense? I think I've heard some type of storage media does that but can't remember if it was floppies.

Anyway, it sounds like a copy will have to be my ultimate answer at this point. I don't have any blank floppies or a drive that can write. Do you happen to know of anybody that is willing to write disks and ship them, for a fee of course?

What a real shame to see these things on their way out.

Thank you again for the help. Very much appreciated!

Quote from: sorimanis on February 13, 2025, 12:29:55 AMPlease , help! how install this image SxSI-SCSI HDD Image v3.01
to x68 mini? i write in INI
[pscsi]
ID0=SxSI-SCSI_v301_disk1.hds
ID1=SxSI-SCSI_v301_disk2.hds
ID2=SxSI-SCSI_v301_disk3.hds
ID3=SxSI-SCSI_v301_disk4.hds

but it is not work.

I don't have X68k mini so I'm throwing guesses- are you missing SCSI BIOS files? Is your switch.x configuration correct? Maybe it will be best if you post a screenshot of your switch.x configuration and hopefully someone will help

Nice work! I made one of these a while back for people without working floppies to use so they could load up the sxsi drivers before installing my image. I never got any feedback from it so hopefully yours gets a lot more use than mine did!

Ah, I went ahead and read some stuff about it and apparently it's even easier than I thought. Apparently Human68k needs at least 2 drives to boot up so the hack is pretty easy for that- you create a 2nd partition and there you go. I went ahead and created a 40MB SASI image which is the limit for this standard, created 2 partitions and copied all tools from MasterDiskV3 and here you go. This image boots using a real ArdSCSIno on a X68000 without any floppy drives (as well as with floppy drives). It boots up right away, no SXSI driver or anything else required, just a working system. On-board SRAM battery is not needed. It can be dead (but please remove it as soon as possible nonetheless) or non existent. You can run switch.x or any other diagnostic tools straight away which is tremendously helpful for system troubleshooting. If anyone is interested you can get it here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13F_iCj9OMuhK8PherqYWMolGYimlPxlg/view?usp=sharing

More tools and software may be added in the future. As far as I can tell ArdSCSIno is the only open source project that can run real SASI images using the real old protocol. Apparently it can also run SCSI files as the name suggests but I haven't tested that functionality yet. In case you use ArdSCSIno then the file needs to be named HD00_256.HDF and you need to configure a proper "scsi-config.txt" file on the SD card. You can read more about it on the web but if anyone is in the need I can give detailed instructions

I guess how you solve this depends on what your goal is.

For example, you don't need to re-write the original media.  If you make a working copy, play from the copy and frame the originals or something.  Original disks are going to go bad on their own, unless you were playing them very recently it's entirely likely the disks just died on their own, or the drives got fussier, or both.  I sold a lot of my X68k games like six years ago and I got a few complaints that some disks didn't work even then, and they'd been in their boxes for a decade. 

But if you really want to rewrite them, overriding the write-protect switch probably won't be too hard if you open up the drive (but I don't know deeply it's buried in the X68000 mechanisms).

You'll surely never open the disk up to remove the magnetic bit.  As @z964 said, it's glued.  Or, just as likely, heat-pressed together to melt the flaps down.  You probably could slice it open and glue it back together but that's a hell of a risk to take.

Definitely give your drives a clean and see if that helps too.

Short answer is you're kinda screwed. 

Long answer is:
A lot of games usually have copy protection on them, likely including those two.  It might be tricky to copy, although using greaseweasle can copy the copy protection in at least some cases.  You could otherwise write a cracked image, but then you wouldn't have the official software anymore.  Also, I'm not aware of a floppy drive that will write to disks like those that don't have the write protect square cut out.  The x68000 floppy drives sure don't.

Replacing the physical media in the floppy disk would be extremely difficult to do without damaging the sleeve since it's glued together, and you'd no longer have an original piece of media.

People still buy even known non-functional original x68000 games just to have them on their shelf.

As a final note, make sure it's not your floppy drive if you can.  Try each disk in both drives.  Try copying the contents in LHES.