SxSI-SCSI HDD Image v3.02

[spectreman]

For those interested in testing with their own MIDI, you can find a complete list of compatible games for X68000 and other systems at the bottom of the page.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_MT-32-compatible_computer_games

It should be noted that the list does not include the modified versions of Space Harrier and After Burner with MIDI support.

Feel free to experiment with the potential of this wonderful HDD image.

[ateam]

For those interested in testing with their own MIDI, you can find a complete list of compatible games for X68000 and other systems at the bottom of the page.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_MT-32-compatible_computer_games

It should be noted that the list does not include the modified versions of Space Harrier and After Burner with MIDI support.

Feel free to experiment with the potential of this wonderful HDD image.

Great list, thank you for sharing

Turns out I had this bookmarked, but somehow "lost it", haha...

[ateam]

I bought one of Regis' 8MB RAM + MIDI two-in-one cards for my XVI, as it's tested to work nicely in 16mhz mode and also supports Mahou, After Burner, etc.

https://www.polykubos.fr/en/vintage-computers/1-8-x68000-sram-midi-board.html

I then discovered Valis II wouldn't boot (and I'm in 10mhz mode given the reports of issues with this game in 16mhz). Works fine from floppy though.

I then reinstalled my 8MB Gal's Panic and to my surprise, same error! In Japanese it basically says there was an error and the system must reset.

The same is was working fine with my Expert, and I could have sworn it once worked fine on my XVI as well.

Both are using Henkan internals, and both have 10MB RAM total (2MB internal + 8MB expanded).

Before I try an older version of the HDD image, does anyone have any insights? Am I totally misremembering Valis II ever working from 2HDBOOT on XVIs?

Thanks in advance 🙂

EDIT: Okay, this is weird... I went to test my Expert where I definitely played this game multiple times, and now I see the same error! Guess I'll try older versions of the image to see if that changes anything.

EDIT 2: Well, the v2.x images produce the same error. Confusion level intensifies...

EDIT 3: My only guess is that somehow I have just a little less RAM than is needed for the 2HDBOOT method and Valis II. On my XVI, I tried both the original Gal's Panic 8MB card, as well as Regis' 8MB RAM + MIDI combo board. No luck. On my Expert, I'm using the Etarikashikoshi 8MB RAM + MIDI board and haven't yet tried putting an 8MB Gal's Panic board back in to test. I've tried "HIOCS /R" to potentially free up some RAM, but unsure if there are any other techniques I can use to do so.

[incrediblehark]

@ateam - first of all, thanks for testing the Poykubos RAM + MIDI card and reporting your results! Saves me from needing to order one

As for the Valis issue, I think I know the error you are referring to, I'm assuming its the generic system error that I've seen before - not on Valis, but in other circumstances while testing hardware/software.

Could you tell me if you've added/removed anything in your autoexec.bat or config.sys files? Wondering if there's any type of conflict. I don't think this is a RAM issue - you'd most likely see a bus error or similar type of message.

I doubt this will solve it, but could you try running LINER on each of the valis floppy disk images? I'll see if I can recreate the error on my end, I'll have to revert to an older image as I'm in the process of an update and my working disk has been altered from what is publicly available.

EDIT: One other thing to try - could you see if clearing your SRAM might resolve the issue?

[ateam]

@ateam - first of all, thanks for testing the Poykubos RAM + MIDI card and reporting your results! Saves me from needing to order one

As for the Valis issue, I think I know the error you are referring to, I'm assuming its the generic system error that I've seen before - not on Valis, but in other circumstances while testing hardware/software.

Could you tell me if you've added/removed anything in your autoexec.bat or config.sys files? Wondering if there's any type of conflict. I don't think this is a RAM issue - you'd most likely see a bus error or similar type of message.

I doubt this will solve it, but could you try running LINER on each of the valis floppy disk images? I'll see if I can recreate the error on my end, I'll have to revert to an older image as I'm in the process of an update and my working disk has been altered from what is publicly available.

EDIT: One other thing to try - could you see if clearing your SRAM might resolve the issue?

Thanks for chiming in!

So LINER had no effect, all images were already contiguous.

Regarding SRAM clear, for convenience do you know if there's an SRAM-clearing utility on the v3 Master Disk linked in your tutorial? If not, I can use one of the official ones. I didn't see SRAM_CLR, SRESET, or SRAMSET on the v3 disk.

EDIT: Okay, I used the EX version of Master Disk, used "SRAM_CLR CLEAR", reinstalled bootloader, and now Valis works on my Expert! Will do the same on my XVI and report back. Thanks, @incredibleshark!

EDIT 2: SRAM clear solved the issue on my XVI as well.

[kanjiology]

Anyone with a SCSI card in their unit, could you let me know your Switch.X settings please.

[3rdman01]

I think holding CLEAR on boot would also wipe out the SRAM. This command doesn't work on my Expert II but I think it would on the XVI.

[ateam]

I think holding CLEAR on boot would also wipe out the SRAM. This command doesn't work on my Expert II but I think it would on the XVI.

Yes, it's a feature on the XVI, as far as I can tell. Not Expert, like you said.

Because I only had a few minutes to attempt this fix, I just went with the method I knew that worked by using the SRAM_CLR tool, haha.

[alessiman]

I can't seem to find the New Zealand Story from the list of floppy games you can create under c:/floppygames with the current version.  I was 99% sure this use to be here in a previous version

Can someone please confirm i am not going mad

[incrediblehark]

I can't seem to find the New Zealand Story from the list of floppy games you can create under c:/floppygames with the current version.  I was 99% sure this use to be here in a previous version

Can someone please confirm i am not going mad

You are right, the game has since been patched to work on SASI and SCSI machines so it's included in the action folder and removed as a writable floppy to save space.

[alessiman]

I can't seem to find the New Zealand Story from the list of floppy games you can create under c:/floppygames with the current version.  I was 99% sure this use to be here in a previous version

Can someone please confirm i am not going mad

You are right, the game has since been patched to work on SASI and SCSI machines so it's included in the action folder and removed as a writable floppy to save space.

Thank You!

[rezb1t]

So I'm a big fan of Aquales, and was always disappointed that the game reboots after beating any Stage off of HDD. Well after a lot of time and effort, I managed to create a patched AXMAIN and ENDING that should defeat all of the copy protection plaguing Aquales. I played through the full game beginning to end 3 separate times off the HDD image to test, and found no issues.

Attached is a floppy disk image with the modified AXMAIN and ENDING executables. Boot into incrediblehark's HDD image in this thread, mount the floppy disk image, and copy over AXMAIN and ENDING into D:/Action/Aquales(E)/AQUALES, making sure to overwrite the older files.

From there, reboot your X68000 holding Shift, select the Aquales CONFIG.SYS when prompted, then boot Aquales normally. You should be able to play through the entire game and view all the cutscenes.

Let me know if anyone encounters issues and I will try to address them.

[incrediblehark]

@rezb1t this is awesome! Thank you for fixing this! I will test it out on my end and incorporate into the image. it's great to finally have a 100% working from HDD version of aquales. I think I've played that first stage a hundred times by now in my testing

Guess I should stop dragging on getting an update out.

Edit: just wanted to add for anyone interested. The BEEP rerelease of Aquales is the exact same game, down to the individual files. so any rumors of these disks lacking copy protection are false.

[spectreman]

@rezb1t Congratulations, it really works well at 16MHz (it will be a bit fast) and 10MHz.

It would be nice if something could be done for Cyber Core; on the hardware side I have done many tests with different RAM models and addresses, but the audio glitches remain if you have more than 8MB of RAM.

Unfortunately, as you will know, if the RAM is reduced to less than 10MB, Valis II will no longer work in 2HDboot mode.

[rezb1t]

I think I fixed the Cyber Core issue, at least the fix worked for a quick test on my system. Attached is another disk image with a patched Y.X, copy over to the Cyber Core folder on the HDD and overwrite the old Y.X.

This one is really weird. There's a PCM address table in the executable that seems to be all correct, but it gets overwritten at runtime by.. something(haven't figured out what yet) and the invalid value 0x00808080 ends up in the table. Later on this value gets used as a source address to copy memory to the PCM hardware via DMA. This happens no matter how much RAM you have... but if you have more than 8MB, the DMA ends up reading uninitialized data which comes out as harsh and unpleasant audio. If you have 8MB or less RAM, I think it just reads all 0s which is completely silent.

Anyway this behavior is completely broken and I did try to figure out a more proper fix, but ended up just going with a quick hack that falls back to a known good entry in the table if the address is equal to or larger than 0x800000. This seems to work, but I don't have enough familiarity with this game to know for sure that I didn't break anything.

Testing would be appreciated, let me know if you find any issues.

EDIT: Tested over a couple of levels and everything seems to be in order!

[incrediblehark]

@rezb1t Amazing! Thanks for the quick fix!

I'm sure it's not as popular but Castles has a similar issue where the game will not progress past the intro if you have more than 8mb ram installed. I wonder if it's doing something like that.

[spectreman]

@rezb1t I tried three levels of Cyber Core, and I didn't encounter any problems, both at 16MHz and at 10MHz, even using different RAM.

What can I say? Congratulations again and thank you!

For those who aren't familiar with Cyber Core, it has 8 levels; during the game, you need to collect power-up orbs of the same color as your spaceship, up to a maximum of three power-ups.

[rezb1t]

Fixed Castles!

Basically, the game tries a DOS malloc call, asking for 8MB of memory. It expects this call to fail and return the amount of memory that can be allocated, which it can then allocate and continue on. As for why the game fails when this call succeeds, I'm not entirely sure. But I'll leave that for another day.

According to this page:

https://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=x68000:doscall

"If LEN is greater than 0x1000000 it is always an error and it is possible to check the maximum number of bytes that can be reserved."

So I just replaced the constant 0x800000 with 0x1000001 and everything appears to be working.

[incrediblehark]

@rezb1t you're awesome! Thank you again! Looking forward to adding all of these fixes to the image.

[UD2]

I bought one of Regis' 8MB RAM + MIDI two-in-one cards for my XVI, as it's tested to work nicely in 16mhz mode and also supports Mahou, After Burner, etc.

FYI the RAM doesn't operate at full speed in 16MHz mode, the I/O slot bus always runs at 10MHz. If you don't want slow memory past 2MB, you need a RAM expansion that goes in the slot near the CPU. These only go up to 8MB (6MB module + 2 onboard) but in practice that's fine because nothing actually needs more than this.

[ateam]

FYI the RAM doesn't operate at full speed in 16MHz mode, the I/O slot bus always runs at 10MHz. If you don't want slow memory past 2MB, you need a RAM expansion that goes in the slot near the CPU. These only go up to 8MB (6MB module + 2 onboard) but in practice that's fine because nothing actually needs more than this.

Very interesting, thanks for the info!

By the way, you actually do need more than 8MB if you want to load certain games from this HDD image (e.g., Valis II) due to the extra RAM they consume with virtual floppy mounting. Granted, those are just a handful of titles.