New User Questions

[blur2040]

Greets.  New user of x68K PRO here.  I got it working off of YAJ on a lark.  Seems to work 100% but the unit is a bit worse for wear.  I don't think it was treated too nicely in shipping.  (A printer connector tab was mercilously cracked! And the bottom from corner seems to be smushed in.)  Oh well.

I've done my best to soak up knowledge/try to figure things out, but I have a few questions:

1) External floppy drive usage.  Before I had access to HD Floppies, I wired up a Gotek Hxc to the external floppy connector.  I was surprised that it actually worked.  However, only a selection of the games (I limited to 1 disk only games) loaded.  For example, Gradius brought up a desktop, not the game.  Are x68k games sensitive to floppy drive ID/location?  As I recall, with Amiga for example, lots of software expected to be loaded from drive 0 or whatever the first one is.

2) Memory Expansion.  I'm content to use floppies for the time being, so 2MB should allow me to run most things.  However, 1MB expansion boards seem to be rare as heck.  I haven't seen one on YAJ in the last month or so.  Is there another source out there for these things (modern homebrew?  any store that specializes that I haven't found?)

3) Tips for the new user?  I'm trying to keep things cheap. (ha!) I bought a loose x68k, am using an MSX gamepad, hacked up a video cable to hook to a monitor, have an old PC to write disks.  I figure I'm probably looking at buying a Keyboard adapter for sure, because I don't trust myself to build one.  But a mouse though?  Can you hack/mod a PS2 or USB or serial?  Or are the signals just too different? 

[neko68k]

Welcome!

1) Many games have hard coded drive letters and will only boot if they are where they're supposed to be. Usually A: or drive 0. They can sometimes be patched or worked around. Others know more about that than I do.

2) Memory is _expensive_. No one is making new RAM at this time. Sourcing the connector for internal RAM is difficult. Bulding IO slot RAM should be not that difficult but no one is doing that at the moment.

3) There is already a thread regarding keyboard and mouse adapters.

[SuperDeadite]

The original Gradius floppy boots into a Human68k GUI Shell, you then manually launch the game from the gradius.x file (mouse required for this).  But there are many alternative images that just autoboot the game.

The 1mb upgrade board you need is only used by the Pro and Ace, so they are not the most common item, but they aren't so expensive usually due to unpopularity.  Note the Pro and Ace versions have different brackets used to mount the 1mb board properly, but the boards themselves are the same.

As for drives, be aware that on Japanese computers, drive A: is always the boot drive.  If you boot from FDD unit 3, then unit 3 = A:.   While unit 0 = B:, unit 1 = C:, etc.

Oh, and there is no such thing as a cheap X68000 setup.

[Pinwizkid]

Oh, and there is no such thing as a cheap X68000 setup.

Truer words never spoken, but when it's finally all together and setup, it's worth it!

[caius]

1) External floppy drive usage.  Before I had access to HD Floppies, I wired up a Gotek Hxc to the external floppy connector.  I was surprised that it actually worked.  However, only a selection of the games (I limited to 1 disk only games) loaded.  For example, Gradius brought up a desktop, not the game.  Are x68k games sensitive to floppy drive ID/location?  As I recall, with Amiga for example, lots of software expected to be loaded from drive 0 or whatever the first one is.

Gotek and other FDD emulators like HxC are not yet able to emulate some proprietary X68000 FDD signals so they are not going to work fine with most of games.