I finally got it! Now what?

[elmer]

In one of the world's worst cases of delayed-gratification, I finally received my "new" X68000 XVI today from Japan.

I bought it 8 months ago ... but had to keep on buying just-one-more-thing so that it didn't get shipped until March.

So, now ... I know that it's got a bad Power Supply.

Do I try to fix it myself ... or is there anyone close-or-in the Los Angeles region that I can persuade/pay to help get it running and do whatever capacitor replacements it needs?

Any advice?

P.S. It looks like the programming books that I bought actually still have their floppy disks, does anyone (but me) care about getting scans/dumps of these things?

[neko68k]

Scans maybe not so much for me. I already have the C books and a couple others. Are the disks things we don't already have? I might be interested to see those.

[elmer]

Scans maybe not so much for me. I already have the C books and a couple others.

Which C books do you have ... the books that came with the official Hudson/Sharp compiler, or some other ones?

Are the disks things we don't already have? I might be interested to see those.

I can't find any sample disks on the FTP archive ... can you please point me to the ones that already exist?

The books that I got were ...

Inside X68000
SOFTBANK's X68000 Assembly Language Programming : Introduction
SOFTBANK's X68000 Assembly Language Programming : Graphics
SOFTBANK's X680x0 Game Programming with GCC

Only the 2nd and 3rd come with floppies.

The GCC book looks like it comes with the actual GCC compiler setup (which is already on the FTP site) ... but I hope that there are also some example programs on the floppies.

Basically, since I don't read Japanese, they're just all sources of example code to see how the system calls are supposed to actually be used in a practical program.

I know that there's already a scan of Inside X68000, but scans of the other books would make it easier to grab/edit some of that sample code.

Has anyone tried to OCR the scans of Inside X68000?

[neko68k]

Which C books do you have ... the books that came with the official Hudson/Sharp compiler, or some other ones?

The newer official ones.

I can't find any sample disks on the FTP archive ... can you please point me to the ones that already exist?

I can't think of anything off the top of my head other than the official C compiler stuff.

Has anyone tried to OCR the scans of Inside X68000?

I have. OmniPage does a pretty good job of it.

[elmer]

Has anyone tried to OCR the scans of Inside X68000?

I have. OmniPage does a pretty good job of it.

I had a local Print Shop cleanly cut the bindings off all the books so that they can be scanned/ocr'd.

I have Acrobat Pro X, which I believe is supposed to do a decent job on Japanese OCR ... but it's still missing quite a few kanji, even with a 1200dpi scan on a fairly simple page of text.

Before I go out and spend a lot of money on OmniPage, would you mind trying to OCR a page for me to see how well it does?

Do you have the regular OmniPage or OmniPage Ultimate (which claims better Japanese OCR)?

<EDIT>

OK, never mind, I found the Trial version of OmniPage Ultimate and it's definitely better than Acrobat Pro X.

Perhaps I can make a hi-res PDF scan of Inside X68000 with Acrobat to preserve it, and create a separate editable DOC file with OmniPage.

I really don't want to pay the high cost for OmniPage Ultimate, though!

[neko68k]

Inside X68000 is already scanned. https://archive.org/details/inside-x68000

[elmer]

Inside X68000 is already scanned. https://archive.org/details/inside-x68000

Thank you, I do know about that, but it's a 300dpi JPG scan of a black-and-white image with lots of page bleed-through.

It's infinitely better than having nothing, but we can do a lot better if we want to.

And since I want to get as-high-as-I-can-get accuracy on the OCR, I definitely to want to scan at a higher resolution.

[elmer]

And since I want to get as-high-as-I-can-get accuracy on the OCR, I definitely to want to scan at a higher resolution.

All 4 books are now scanned and available as 600dpi PDF files (without OCR).

OmniPage wouldn't let me scan at any higher resolution than 600dpi, but at least that results in nice manageable PDF files.

"Inside X68000" looks one heck of a lot cleaner than the scan that's here, and it's only 12MB for the whole thing.

I'm not sure how much the OCR is going to help ... it really looks like it needs to be manually guided for every page in order to reduce "garbage".

I suspect that my "trial" period with OmniPage will expire before I get too far into that process.

Anyway ... now that they're scanned, does anyone else care about these?

[neko68k]

You should upload them here.

[elmer]

You should upload them here.

It'll be another few days ... I tried scanning in Acrobat today, and it does a much better job of deskewing and cleaning up the images than OmniPage, so I'm re-scanning Inside X68000 at really high resolution to get the best quality, and then I'll try OCR'ing in OnmiPage again to see if it does a better job this time.

When Inside X68000 is redone, I may scan the other books again, too, even though they don't look anywhere near as useful as Inside X68000.

[elmer]

You should upload them here.

I've uploaded the first 3 books in PDF format as 600dpi scans with OCR ...

X68000 Assembly Language Programming : Introduction
X68000 Assembly Language Programming : Graphics
X680x0 Game Programming with GCC

There are 2 versions of each book ... one with Adobe Acrobat OCR and one with OmniPage Ultimate OCR.

The OmniPage version is smaller and the Japanese OCR seems much more accurate, but the Acrobat version seems to do a better job with the English source code that's in the books, so it's probably worth having both versions.

So, now ... I know that it's got a bad Power Supply.

Do I try to fix it myself ... or is there anyone close-or-in the Los Angeles region that I can persuade/pay to help get it running and do whatever capacitor replacements it needs?

Any advice?

No answers to this? Is the "Los Angeles region" the problem here, or am I just going to have to try to fix it myself?

[neko68k]

Thanks for the uploads. Sorry I can't help with your PSU.