Power Monster II & BlackMonolith sandwich combo for Compact?

[kamiboy]

I'll try that once I am home from work.

When you plop a PCI SCSI card into a PC Motherboard and enter the BIOS, is there not usually a way to see a bit of info on what is plugged in?

I need to try that as well.

[caius]

No, generally every SCSI card should have its own bios so during boot yould should see the manifacturer and model, at least mine Adaptec card behaviours in this way.

[lydux]

This card is a multi interface communication controller from FarSite. Nothing to do with SCSI.

http://www.farsite.com/OEM_WAN_communications_cards/FarSync_PCI_T2P_OEM_Card.htm

[caius]

As it was expected.. ;)You always know more than all , my dear Master!
I would advice to our mate Kamiboy to get a cheap Adaptec SCSI card in order to test his PowerMonsterII card.

[kamiboy]

Thanks for the information Lydux.

That extinguishes the last ray of hope.

Alas I've decided that I am not spending another farthing on this X68000 business. I have quadruple checked that the card is wired correctly to the X68000 daughter-board and I've measured each solder pad on the Black Monolith to confirm all signal lines are indeed connected to the X68000 when it is turned on.

All ground pins are connected as well, there is nothing more to do. I just sent an email to the maker asking whether he would consider exchanging the two for a single AztecMonster.

If he refuses, which I believe he will, am selling this X68000 and buying a NEO GEO AES.

Thanks for all the advice and information folks, but it was never meant to be.

[kamiboy]

So, Sakai actually took back the Power Monster II and agreed to exchange it for a Aztec Monster CF interface.

So, since that should be with me in a day or two I want to confirm the pinout in the manual is actually appropriate for the board.

Is the pinout below for the port on the Aztec Monster when looking at it head on?

[caius]

The pinout of the AztecMonster should be correct since it use a 50 pin IDC male connector.
This is the 50 PIN SCSI female connector and if you face this with the male one ,there is correspondance of signals :

[kamiboy]

Thanks, here is hoping that my Compact will boot off of this thing without any fuss.

[kamiboy]

Okay, so last night, at the post office, I picked up the Aztec Monster that Sakai agreed to replace that presumed none functioning Power Monster II with.

I have now reason to believe that the PMII might have been functioning fine.

Here is what happened when I connected the Aztec Monster to my Compact after double checking the wiring, connecting a power source and booting the machine.

Nothing happened. Exactly as with the PMII. The difference being that now I have the power to boot into Human68k using a floppy, which I did.

After launching FORMAT.X I discovered to my amazement that according to it I have a whopping 6 different hard drives connected to my Compact. One for each ID except for one. The Id that seemed to be vacant was either the ID chosen in SWITCH.X or the ID of the CF as chosen by jumpers. I do not quite remember which.

Anyway, all those other ID's that FORMAT.X would have me choose from had the right size. Once entered I could see that there was indeed already a partition present. That would be that of the official NFGGames CF image.

Alas despite this I could not boot from the drive, nor was the drive available to browse via command prompt as typing "C:" did nothing but throw up an error to the effect of stated volume does not exits.

Anywaste, after a few hours of fiddling I finally got to a point where I could boot off of a floppy and actually browse the CF disk using command prompt. Not sure what I did to finally get that to work. But it had something to do with setting the ID jumpers on the disk and SWITCH.X.

I tried to launch Akumajou Dracula by entering its folder and typing !Start, but that only resulted in a black screen with nothing else happening.

Oh yeah, I actually managed to boot off of the drive once by going into FORMAT.X, deleting the existing partition, formatting a new one sized 1000 megabytes, which I believe is the size limit.

When formatting I chose for system to be transferred. Then after a reboot the machine actually booted off of the CF disk. Alas, even though it booted off of it I still had no access to the C drive. After boot I was dumped into the command prompt on the A: drive which was empty, typing "C:" did nothing.

Something strange is going on here for sure.

Can someone help clear some thing up for me?

That SCSI ID option in SWITCH.X, what exactly does it do? Does it appoint which connected drive should be the main drive?

When I have my CF connected I can choose between 7 ID's there, is that normal? I thought I was supposed to jumper my CF with the same ID as selected in that option, but that does not seem to work since my Compact thinks there are 7 drives connected when there should only be one.

[SuperDeadite]

Drive letters are not set in stone like on a DOS machine.

The boot drive is always A:, if you are booting off the CF, then CF card = A:,  FD0 = B:, FD1 = C:.

The SCSI setting in Switch allows you to limit amount of IDs.  Meaning if it's set to 7, you can have 7 devices.
If you set it to 6, then any device set to ID7 would be ignored during boot.

[kamiboy]

I suspected that about drive letters so I actually tested several different drives without luck.

I guess I can try to set number of SCSI ID's to 1 and then set the CF to ID 0 to see what happens.

But is it normal for the single CF card with a single ID to show up as so many different drives with different ID's?

[SuperDeadite]

I'm a bit confused by this, take a pic of the screen plz.  Need to see what you are seeing here.

[kamiboy]

Sure thing boss. I'll grab a few screens when I get back. Maybe my limited knowledge of Japanese is the culprit here. But the fact is the machine is not booting off of this CF as it should. I am starting to think that perhaps something is wrong with the Compact hardware.

[lydux]

Have you checked for the fuse I noticed on my previous post (#32) ?
It's involved with pull-up resistors packs powering on all SCSI device signals !
Without them, some SCSI devices could answer everytime or randomly to any SCSI ID request. (I have already seen this)

[kamiboy]

Yeah, I changed that fuse.

What do those resistor arrays do again? It seems every signal pin is routed through one, so they just remove a bit of voltage or something to that effect.

I have for a long time suspected something to be wrong with the connections between the signal pins and those resistor arrays. The TERM PWR pin for an example is only carrying 4.7V when I believe it should carry a solid 5V. But a while back I tested for continuity between every signal pin and pins on those resistor arrays and I managed to find a direct connection for all of them.

When the CF is connected and the Compact is turned on I measured the voltages of every signal pin via the solder pads on the Aztec Monster. Every pin except for TERM PWR measured around 2.7~2.8V with TERM PWR being 4.7 of course.

I wonder whether that is within range.

[caius]

Yeah, I changed that fuse.

What do those resistor arrays do again? It seems every signal pin is routed through one, so they just remove a bit of voltage or something to that effect.

Those resistor arrays act as pull-up resistors, they bring inputs of a digital circuit to a high logic state if  disconnected or in high impedance state.

[lydux]

Those resistor arrays act as pull-up resistors, they bring inputs of a digital circuit to a high logic state if  disconnected or in high impedance state.

HA ! My young jedi learn fast ! I'm glad !

Basically, SCSI devices signals are "open-collector". In digital electronic, that means a signal can have 2 values : 0 (0 volt = grounded) or "open" (disconnected from circuit). Wiring a pull-up resistor like this on these lines will change this "open" state to a logic 1 (exactly to a voltage compatible with the host, +5v in our case).
This trick allows multiple devices with different operating voltages to be wired together into a single SCSI chain. Pull-ups will be in charge of voltage convertion.

I have for a long time suspected something to be wrong with the connections between the signal pins and those resistor arrays. The TERM PWR pin for an example is only carrying 4.7V when I believe it should carry a solid 5V. But a while back I tested for continuity between every signal pin and pins on those resistor arrays and I managed to find a direct connection for all of them.

Don't worry about the 4.7v, there is always a little voltage drop because of various reasons. There is a pretty large tolerance with 5v ic. Unless it's not under 4v, that's ok.

When the CF is connected and the Compact is turned on I measured the voltages of every signal pin via the solder pads on the Aztec Monster. Every pin except for TERM PWR measured around 2.7~2.8V with TERM PWR being 4.7 of course.

I wonder whether that is within range.

Seems correct to me. You got ~2.7v because those signals switch between 0v and 5v very often and quickly, your voltmeter can't measure that fast and will show you an average voltage.


Sorry... I were sure it was this fuse.

The good news is that your Compact and SCSI parts works for sure. There is just a single things we don't get yet...

[caius]

HA ! My young jedi learn fast ! I'm glad !

I'm proud to say that I've been at your school, my dear Master!Then, arcade boards widely use pull-up and pull-downs resistors, I've just pepaired a board which shown stripes on sprites, it was falut of a broken pull-up resistor network connected to address lines of  sprites ROMs 

Regarding the Kamiboy CF issue, I think it's software related and not hardware.
Instead of FORMAT.X command  I'd use tge SCSIFORMATX.X one following this guide:

http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=x68000:hard_drive_on_sasi_machine

Obviously I'd double-check also the wiring from AztecMonster to SCSI CompactXVI daughterboard with particular attention to GROUND points

[kamiboy]

I've already double checked the wiring, it is correct. In fact every time I do a wiring job, something is not right and I suspect my wiring it is never the wiring.

Every ground pin on the daughter board is connected to a ground pin on the Aztec Monster. Of course with its 50 pins Aztec monster has quite a few ground pins left over. I am fairly confident those ground pins need not be connected to anything since every ground pin on the Aztec Monster is directly connected to one another.

Of course to be sure I'll do a multimeter continuity test once I get home.

I'll also try formatting the drive using scsiformat.x. If I can get the drive to a point where I can boot off of it then I can always just use disk explorer to copy games over to the CF afterwards from a PC.

[caius]

I've already double checked the wiring, it is correct. In fact every time I do a wiring job, something is not right and I suspect my wiring it is never the wiring.

Every ground pin on the daughter board is connected to a ground pin on the Aztec Monster. Of course with its 50 pins Aztec monster has quite a few ground pins left over. I am fairly confident those ground pins need not be connected to anything since every ground pin on the Aztec Monster is directly connected to one another.


Of course to be sure I'll do a multimeter continuity test once I get home.

The important thing is that every GROUND pin of the SCSI daughterboard has to be connected to a GROUND pin of the AztecMonster.For me it didn't work until  I connected every daughterboard GROUND toghether and then tied one of these to my SCSI-->IDE converter GROUND (but I use I piggyback board adapter and not a direct cable like you)

I'll also try formatting the drive using scsiformat.x. If I can get the drive to a point where I can boot off of it then I can always just use disk explorer to copy games over to the CF afterwards from a PC.

Yes and if you will succeeded in it check the drive assignement under Human OS by command DRIVE.X.Keep us informed.

[kamiboy]

Guess what. The first thing I tried when I got home actually worked. All I did was to jumper the drive ID to be 0 and not only could I access it at C: after booting off of a floppy but I could also boot off of it directly at which point, and to my surprise, it was assigned to drive A: with the two floppies being routed to B: and C: respectively.

If, however, I jumper the ID to be 7 I am greeted by this when entering FORMAT.X:



Notice how FORMAT.X thinks there are drives connected for every ID but the one ID I actually jumpered my drive to? It is like the list is reversed. No idea what is causing this, but since jumping to ID 0 works maybe I should just count my blessings and let sleeping dogs lie.

Of course no sooner than I get this internal drive going than a few new problems crop up. First thing first, I am very dissapointed to find out that both Strider and Dai Makai Mura are in the Games3 folder, which I believe means one has to have an over 2mb machine to run them.

But even more dissapointing is discovering that a few games in the Games2 folder also seem to refuse to run. Akumajo just gives me a blank screen when I tey to launch it, via the GUI or via naked Human68K prompt.

Chourensha68K also refuses to run, it seems to complain about ~17kb of memory or something.

Space Harrier just vomits a bunch of random colours on screen, plays a few notes and stops there.

It seems all the games in the Games2 folder that I've tried have failed to run. Is there some obscure option in SWITCH.X that is necessary to run these games?

My memory is already set to 2048kb in there. Should SRAM be set to anything specific? Currently it is set to not used.

[caius]

If, however, I jumper the ID to be 7 I am greeted by this when entering FORMAT.X:

This is normal, you can't assign ID7 to a SCSI device because it's usually reserved for the SCSI Host Adapter.Is it right, Master?

[kamiboy]

That may explain it, but I am pretty sure that initially my SCSI ID was set to 1 and I got the same result, only FORMAT.X reported disks on every ID except for ID1.

In any regard, I am having flash backs to the curious nightmare that was PC gaming anno 1992. Such arcane knowledge one was forced to master in order to get DOOM to launch on my pappy's Schneider 386 machine.

I'd utter expressions such as "those good old times" only the tortures one had to endure for the humble act of playing a simple game turned me into a stone cold console gamer for life.... Until now that is.

So once again into the breach dear friends.

I somehow managed to get Akumajou Dracula to run; it was either setting the parity termination jumper or the taking out and reinserting of the midi board that did it.

By, the by, how do you save in that game? Is there a standard way to exit launched programs? CTRL-C or X do not seem to do the trick.

I also managed to get Courensha68K to run, all I needed to do was kick the file browser to a low mem mode by pressing ESC and choosing the scond option. But I do not understand how exiting it completely did not work. Or maybe I do not know how to exit the file browser properly.

Also, how come in the standard file browser mode my free mem is reported as low as 1425k? That is pathetic, what is eating up the remaining 500k? Is there anything in the Eidis image Config.sys and Autoexec.bat that can be safely removed to free some additional kilos?

You know, a short primer with a few vital information about this or that would be a huge time saver. Does such a thing already exist? I dont remember having come across such a thing.

Lastly, since it seems I need a memory upgrade to play some of my favourites, could someone guide me through my options. I know there are these cheap memory expansion boards you can get to plug into one of the expansion board slots in the back. There are also the super expensive and rare internal upgrades specific for each system.

So ignoring the expensive internal upgrades, can any of the expansion board memory upgrades be used with a Compact IV?

[SuperDeadite]

You are correct Caius ID7 is reserved for the SCSI controller.  And 0 should always be used for a primary boot drive.   

Too free up space, simply quite LHES, push ESC and select the first menu option.  This will put you into DI, which uses less memory, and another escape will put you to pure prompt.  But you will need more RAM for a lot of stuff.  Some games will only work from pure prompt no matter how much RAM you have though.

You can only save in Dracula when you get Game Over.  Konami did this on purpose, as a Game Over resets your score.  Meaning you have to 1cc the game for the big points.

[kamiboy]

Ah, I see thanks.

I think my midi board is bad. Once again Akumajou started getting stuck during startup, but I got it working by taking out the midi board. I noticed the game would hang right around the time where you would get the soundtrack select menu. I guess it checks for the presence of a midi board to see if the menu is needed or not and that is where things go wrong.

I already replaced the caps on that board, so I am not sure what is wrong. It has two jumpers on it, one for selecting between board 1or 2, which I set to 1 since that is the slot I put it into, and another of unknown function.

The part number is CZ-6BM1A.

I guess I can live without midi tracks for now.

On another note, I have a pro tip for any who wants to stick a Aztec Monster in their machine and likes their wiring to be neat.

The Aztec Monster does actually not seem to use the TERM PWR input pin. If it was designed to, like the Power Monster II + Black Monolith, it could have powered itself from that 5V input.

So here is what I did, I neglected to connect TERM PWR from the daughter board to the designated Aztec Monster pin. Instead I just soldered that wire to the solder pad for the external power supply molex connector. Now the Aztec Monster is being powered by TERM PWR instead of letting that useful 5V go to waste. No need to butcher the PSU/Motherboard connector to tap 5V.

It works fine. Anywaste, thanks for all the help guys. I think I am just about ready to start closing up my Compact for good. I'll wait a few days just in case though.

[SuperDeadite]

Midi board 1 or 2 is needed for when using two midi boards at once (needed if one wanted to have a 32 channel midi file), the other one switches between Midi Out 2 or Midi Thru.

[caius]

Of course no sooner than I get this internal drive going than a few new problems crop up. First thing first, I am very dissapointed to find out that both Strider and Dai Makai Mura are in the Games3 folder, which I believe means one has to have an over 2mb machine to run them.

Yes, Strider and Daimakaimura requires 4MB like Chourensha68K and others.
Space Harrier runs fine with 2MB but it has to be launched under DI or pure DOS like all other games in Games2 directory.Read here for more informations about:

http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=x68000:sxsi_disk_image_with_games_and_lots_of_mdx_files

[kamiboy]

Chourensha68k is a 2meg game, I got it running by quitting the browser.

As for Daimakai and Strider, well. I suppose if I had two working floppy drives I could run them off of a disk. Strider needs you to have several drives, but you could run Daimakai from one disk drive in a roundabout way. Just put in disk one and whenever the screen comes up with a file error just pop in the other disk and press space or enter. Keep doing that and eventually the game loads fine.

Trouble is my floppy drive, despite having been aligned to read some previously written Human68K disks perfectly, still refuses to read any new disks that I write. So a pro tip on head alignment, try many different disks from different sources.

In any case, my comment about ram upgrades for the IV got lost in the shuffle.

Are there any affordable way of upgrading the RAM to 4?

Will something like this work in a Compact IV for an example?

http://www.gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=x68000:sh-6be-2_4m_-_memory_expansion_board

[BlueBMW]

I have some of those super rare 6mb internal compact xvi ram boards.  Let me know if you need one.  That would put you at 8mb ram which should be plenty to run everything.

[caius]

I have this 4MB RAM expansion for my CompactXVI paid , if I remeber well, 5000 yen :

https://imageshack.us/scaled/large/580/1002968o.jpg


Model is 'AICZ6BE4'

[kamiboy]

Thanks guys. There are none AICZ6BE4 board on yahoo right now, but at least now I know that they exist.

And BlueBMW, I will most certainly take you up on your offer if it is within my price range. With 8 megs I may even be able to run the baller image, though if I remember right that one was made for 12mb machines.

[BlueBMW]

Very few games actually need more than 8mb.  Only some of the 5+ disk games running in floppy emulation.

[kamiboy]

Why does a game like Daimakaimura require more than 2mb to run again? When launched on disk it runs fine one a 2 meg machine. I am guessing it refuses to run from a hardrive so you have to use some sort of floppy emulator which eats up significant amounts of memory?

[caius]

Why does a game like Daimakaimura require more than 2mb to run again? When launched on disk it runs fine one a 2 meg machine. I am guessing it refuses to run from a hardrive so you have to use some sort of floppy emulator which eats up significant amounts of memory?

Not properly.If you look at Daimakaimura directory (as well other) you will find all the content of the disks extracted (using DiskExplorer) so launching the game in this mode will require more memory than executing it from FDD.Then, there are other methods to launch game from HDD, some of them will require also floppy disk simulator (2HDSIM.X).Give a look at this wiki on how to install games to HDD:


http://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=x68000:installing_games_to_hard_drive

[SuperDeadite]

Daimakaimura is programmed to run straight off HDD on a 2mb machine.  It fully recommends HDD installing the game.

How this works is make a directory "daimakai" on the root of the HDD.  Then copy all files off both disks into this directory.

To boot you would then put just the game's system disk into the drive.  Upon booting from the floppy, the game will find the directory and boot off HDD with only 2mb of RAM.

The catch is that the game is heavily copy protected.  If you don't have an original disk, you need to run a protection emulator which fools the game when it preforms the disk check.  This takes some memory the original game didn't need.  Still though, if you download the Disk A image with the crack, I believe you can then play the game with just one floppy and 2mb of ram.

And yes all 5 capcom games support HDD install with a boot disk.  When doing so, you can play all of them with just one floppy drive and an HDD with just 2mb of RAM.  (Except Super SFII which needs 4mb).  You just have to copy the files to the correct directory name.  Super SFII actually has a real install utility, the other 4 are all done manually.

[caius]

The catch is that the game is heavily copy protected.  If you don't have an original disk, you need to run a protection emulator which fools the game when it preforms the disk check.  This takes some memory the original game didn't need.  Still though, if you download the Disk A image with the crack, I believe you can then play the game with just one floppy and 2mb of ram.

Are you referring to this protection emulator, perhaps:

http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=4610.msg30422#msg30422

It will extract some files from original disk called type.x and type.dat which you have to put into the copied disk modifying the config.sys to run them.
Anyway for Daimakaimura , Eidis got the solution:

http://nfggames.com/forum2/index.php?topic=4394.msg31592#msg31592

[SuperDeadite]

That disk image is the one with files on it already.  So yeah if you put that image on a floppy, you boot with that and run the game off HDD on a 2mb machine.  But files must be moved to A:\daimakai\     

And yes it is a "protection emulator"  The typex file isn't pulled off the disk.  Proemu searches the disk for unreadable sectors, then generates the .dat file and the typex driver needed to run it.  The driver is booted before the game, and it feeds the .dat file when the game preforms the protection check.   It emulates the unreadable sectors, the game has never been truly "cracked."

Sadly there are still a few games where the protection has never been broken.  I hold my breath every time I boot up Y2...

[caius]

And yes it is a "protection emulator"  The typex file isn't pulled off the disk.  Proemu searches the disk for unreadable sectors, then generates the .dat file and the typex driver needed to run it.  The driver is booted before the game, and it feeds the .dat file when the game preforms the protection check.   It emulates the unreadable sectors, the game has never been truly "cracked."

Sadly there are still a few games where the protection has never been broken.  I hold my breath every time I boot up Y2...

Have you ever tried this Proemu on a real machine with original disks?Which are the supported protections?
I remember I tried it once but it never stopped to read the disk and most of times it generated always the same .dat and typex regardless which game was in the FDD.

[SuperDeadite]

How's your Japanese?  When you run Proemu, you'll notice the 10 categories, these refer to the locations of unreadable sectors used, and you'll see company names besides them.   Most companies choose one style and stuck with it, so you can jump ahead to scan certain sectors.

Most of the games that Proemu supports are already available online.  But for fun I've ran some of my originals through it, I was able to generate files for all the Capcom games, Phalanx, Genocide II.

If I remember right you own a Compact correct?  If you are writing images to 3.5'' disks, Proemu will not find anything.  It searches for actual unreadable sectors on the disks.  This is hardware, not software.  The sectors only exist on the original factory made floppy disks.  Proemu doesn't work for you because your disks don't contain the protection sectors.

Doujin game makers got creative and came up with new protection forms that nothing is able to reproduce (Y2 and Last Tempest).  I have an original Y2, and absolutely nothing gets past the check besides the original disk.  But what's interesting is that it's on standard Maxel disks that you'd buy in a store, Torimu must have created their own authoring program to write it with, and it's super sensitive, out of the 30 or so times I've booted the game, it failed the check once, gave me a damn heart attack, but a reset and it passed...

Oh, I've been trying to get Xak II to run off of HDD, game is not protected, using SUBSTs I can get the game to boot and play the intro fine, but when I start a game, it just hangs.  After trying this in an emulator, it seems the game is still expecting the files to be on the floppy drives, even after using the SUBST.  (When it hangs if I "insert" the disk image into the drive, it reads it and loads the game).

[caius]

How's your Japanese?  When you run Proemu, you'll notice the 10 categories, these refer to the locations of unreadable sectors used, and you'll see company names besides them.   Most companies choose one style and stuck with it, so you can jump ahead to scan certain sectors.

My japanese?Very bad..




Also Phalanx and Genocide II?So, did you install these fully on HDD (without the installer and the need of the system disk, I mean).I tried in all ways to install these two but I was only able use 2HDboot with these two.

If I remember right you own a Compact correct?  If you are writing images to 3.5'' disks, Proemu will not find anything.  It searches for actual unreadable sectors on the disks.  This is hardware, not software.  The sectors only exist on the original factory made floppy disks.  Proemu doesn't work for you because your disks don't contain the protection sectors.

Yes, I own a CompactXVI and obviously I knew  Proemu works only on original 5.25" disks and neither 3.5" or 5.25" copied ones.But I tried also on my Expert with the only original disk I have, Bomber Man  by System soft and it didn't find any unreadable sectors , maybe this game doesn't contain ant kind of protection

Doujin game makers got creative and came up with new protection forms that nothing is able to reproduce (Y2 and Last Tempest).  I have an original Y2, and absolutely nothing gets past the check besides the original disk.  But what's interesting is that it's on standard Maxel disks that you'd buy in a store, Torimu must have created their own authoring program to write it with, and it's super sensitive, out of the 30 or so times I've booted the game, it failed the check once, gave me a damn heart attack, but a reset and it passed...

Oh, I've been trying to get Xak II to run off of HDD, game is not protected, using SUBSTs I can get the game to boot and play the intro fine, but when I start a game, it just hangs.  After trying this in an emulator, it seems the game is still expecting the files to be on the floppy drives, even after using the SUBST.  (When it hangs if I "insert" the disk image into the drive, it reads it and loads the game).

Xak II?Isn't already included in Eidis image?Anyway, I'm going to try to HDD install it, as you know, there are other methods than the SUSBT one...


P.S.
I forgot..The Last Tempest (and also Racing Champ) protection has been bypassed  ,look here (there is also a mention about you):

http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1092