Playing with my floppy.

[NFG]

I picked up an XVI Compact the other day.  Sexy damned thing, not as cool as the Manhatten twin-tower systems, but it's really mega small and superbly well built with an expandable base, perflectly flat sides and exceptional contruction quality.  As a bonus (or so I thought) the thing sports a pair of 3.5" drives instead of the 5.25" units common to the rest of the series.

I have no 3.5" software for this system.

So I bought a pair of external 3.5" drives.  Came in an external-HD-alike case with a 50-pin port on the back and a switch for 2DD/2HD or 1.44 (what's the difference between 2HD and 1.44??).  In digging around I found a cable I bought years ago that happened to have the ultra rare din37 connector for the X68000 and the 50pin connector for the drives.  So I'm set, right?

NEG!

When I power up with the drive connected and powered the X68 (an XVI) won't boot at all.  If I have the external drive plugged in but powered off it does the same thing: nothing.  If I boot the system first then plug in and power up the drives, the 5.25" ejects itself and the system seems happy enough to do nothing, trying to access the drives (any) results in a lockup situation.  Cursor blinks, but the system never seems to time out.

So what's the deal?  Incompatible drives?  How can a floppy be incompatible, I ask you?  =/

[Followup]

I found another drive, this one a 5.25" unit.  I yanked the 5.25" and shoved a 3.5" in its place to no avail, I got almost the same results.  This time with the new drive powered and attached the internal drive would load and spit out the boot disk (the X68k has soft-eject drives, if it doesn't like your disk it'll literally spit it out).  This is in contrast to the dual 3.5" drive that simple froze the system.  Loaded floppies stayed loaded.

It's late, I'm going to bed.  Tomorrow I'll smack myself for not trying the 5.25" drive while it was still attached.

[AlbX]

Bah! Sharp Corporation of Japan had to put standard drives inside that beautiful system, no soft eject... and standard connectors !!
Anyway you know i'm also trying to find a software solution.. let's see
ciauz:)
A L B X

[NFG]

I'm hot on the trail of a solution, found in my library some バックアップ活用テクニック magazines with pinouts and cable diagrams for external floppies and X68k systems.  I'm thinking the buffers and other assorted chipery in the drives I've got are confusing the system, they're prolly not used for the X68.  I'm gonna wire up a direct cable link, I should have more than enough parts to do it.

Diagrams and results coming soon.

[Aidan]

If the XVI Compact has it's own floppy interface internally, then you shouldn't need any buffering between the external port and the floppy drive. If you are willing to get inside, you might well be able to trace the floppy connections through.

Personally, I'd be a little bit surprised if there was any need for buffering on the floppy drives, as most floppy controllers in the last 20 years or so have been able to handle that.

[NFG]

Update!

I've dug out the full pinouts of the XVI and the XVI Compact.  I've made a cable for the XVI; the pinout on the interface board these drives had before was TOTALLY wrong, completely bass ackward.  I've bypassed it and connected the X68 directly to the floppy...

With the floppy installed the system fails to boot.  If I unplug it, it boots immediately.  I think there's a conflict between this drive and the existing drive B; if I plug this new drive in while the system's on and booting, then try to read or format drive B, the system accepts that there's a disk in the drive and tries to do what I ask, but fails.  Drive just spins, system never times out.

Now to figure out how I can tell the system there's a third floppy...  =)

Update:  It seems there's a floppy driver I need to dig up, EXPFD.X

I don't seem to have it, and shuttling files is the reason I'm f**king with this in the first place.  =)

[Aidan]

The drives may have a set of jumpers to select which drive select line the drive responds to. Check for jumpers labelled DS0, DS1, DS2 or DS3. Don't ask me what other jumpers may mean, there's just so many I haven't got a clue about!

Alternatively, check to see what happens if you disconnect the disk select line for the external floppy. If the connections are correct, then the machine should boot if you disable the external disk select line.

[AlbX]

:lol: Who told you that the EXPFD.X isn't available??

http://shq.dyndns.org/x68pub/x68tools/disk/floppy/expfd.lzh
http://shq.dyndns.org/x68pub/x68tools/disk...ppy/expfd03.lzh << newest version

I hope that it works for you !
AlbX

[NFG]

I hope that it works for you !

While lovely, getting files transferred to and from the PC and X68 is part of the problem here.  =D


This is the cable I made.  Luckily, and no doubt because it was planned this way, the cable was incredibly easy to make.  You can see the little pins from the floppy drive end on the desk, it was easier to pull those out than peel a bunch of wires out of the cable.  There's a mess of pins on the X68 connector that aren't used in normal drives, like LED-blink, Eject, etc.  They'd be connected to GND on the normal floppy, so I just disconnected them.

[AlbX]

Uhm.. that file transfer problem is getting boring.. anyway do a look at this page(translated) :

How to exchange data in x68k and the Windows environment

There are some better info about file transfers
Still working about
Ciauz .

A L B X  

[AmeNeko]

I haven't tested it, but... if the information on that page is correct, you could potentially transfer disk images to your X's hard drive(if it has one). Is there any image writing tool for X? If not, I wonder how hard it would be to port an exisiting app or to write another app. I did get the C compiler working at one point in time and it seems to still be functioning. Any information would be awesome, but I doubt theres gonna be much in english.

I'd also like to add that there seem to be a lot of UNIX apps already ported to X, if a copy of 'dd' was around, you'd be set for reading and writing, then transferring would be up to the instructions on the aforementioned page.

[Computolio]

   Isn't it possible to write X68000 disk images back to real disks on a PC?

[NFG]

Isn't it possible to write X68000 disk images back to real disks on a PC?

Getting dangerously close to a piracy discussion, but..

Yes, it's possible, but you can't do it with XP, and you'll need a 5.25" floppy drive and special software.

[Matarick]

Hey, I have a spare PC/Intel based 5.25 Floppy disk drive and I wonder if it would be possible to use a floppy to USB enclosure within a Windows 2000 environment?  Or are there any floppy to paralell since I only have one floppy port on my motherboard.  I thought that if I am able to read X6800 games on my PC, I can just buy the games without buying the computer that is out of my budget for the time being ^^()

[NFG]

It's my understanding that in order to read or write X68 disks you need low-level access to the floppy, and external adaptors (and Win2k+) don't allow it.

[Aidan]

Not knowing anything much about the X68, I presume the thing uses a different way of laying out the disk, either in the form of a different layout for sectoring, or variable speed drive or something!

[NFG]

That's right, it's a non-standard format in the tracks and sectors it uses.  XP has removed the ability to command the floppy directly, and all commands must be passed through XP's own routines.  Naturally MS didn't have any need for obscure Japanese computer compatibility, so you just can't get at the drive to say "Whoah, not like that, like THIS!"

Or something.  Anyway, yeah, it's different.  

It's interesting to note that the 3.5" drives on the X68 had the same capacity as the 5.25" ones - 1.2MB instead of the normal 3.5" capacity of 1.44MB.  Most, but not all drives can handle the different format as long as the OS lets you.  =)

[Aidan]

All versions of Windows based on the NT line disallow access to the floppy controller. You'd only be able to do those tricks under DOS. However, people used to say there was no way that the PC floppy controller could read Amiga disks. It turns out there's a really subtle trick you can pull with the floppy controller that involves a tiny bug in the silicon.

Net result is that it might actually be possible to read, but not in a straightforward way. No, I'm not even going to think about doing it!