Sharp X68000 Expert - Figuring out a Japanese Gaming Workstation

this might just be the most beautiful machine that we've had in the cave to date hello cave dwellers this is the sharp x68000 expert a beautiful dual tower design there with a handle in the top i absolutely love that and today we're going to be exploring it because this is mine we've seen a shop x68000 on the show before a couple of years back we had the pro the desktop model long time viewers will remember that we had a live show with it as well and that was on loan so that we could explore the story of the x68000 and there's a link in the video description so you can go back and watch that if you want so what are we doing with this one today well this came to me with the help of gary thank you so much gary for fixing me up with this i really do appreciate it and of course it has to be shared on the exhibition which i'm setting up here in the cave for public consumption there'll be many people who have never got the chance to explore this machine outside of emulation and i'm determined to get it set up for them but it doesn't come without its challenges how do you make a machine that was sold exclusively in japan and all of the foibles that come with a japanese machine to work here in the uk well we'll be exploring that but first of all we'll start with the unboxing because it did come with its original box rmc is supported by monsterjoysticks.com level up your retro gaming with their joysticks featuring genuine sanwar arcade parts and oneclickprint.com for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsmen and global delivery here it is when i unpacked it yesterday the box there on the table a display piece all by itself i love that we've got that now what we've got here is the expert model one of about 19 different models and variants of the x68000 in the range the expert came out in march of 1989 alongside the expert hd which had a hard drive as the name implies the first model in the range was simply called the x68000 and that appeared in 1987 and the expert appeared in 89 but as you may well have guessed the x68000 range is built around the motorola 68000 processor or hitachi clone which runs at 10 megahertz [Music] thankfully in the box the keyboard is here so that's a great start for us for the keyboard geeks this should have alps skcl yellow switches in them which have an led recess in them so you can actually light some of the keys up and there's a game called cotton which will make them flash in time to the music so if we get a chance hopefully we can demonstrate that later today on the back of the keyboard we are missing the fold out legs they've been snapped or lost no doubt but the shape of the keyboard is such that i can't really see that being a problem as we lift the keyboard out we find this little box of disks here a little folder of disks and that's also a relief to see because i've got no hard drive in the machine so i'm depending on these to make it boot into an operating system and be of any use whatsoever these are original disks with the dust jackets and the labels on them and they look like they've had very little use but that of course is no guarantee of reliability but look at that floppy goodness they look lovely next in the box there's this power supply and i i know that's not the original and we'll see why shortly because this has had some modifications done for it so we'll just put that safely to one side for now and there's also this cable in here which i don't think we'll need this is designed to control certain functions of the monitor there was also a remote control for the original monitor but we don't have that monitor so we'll just keep that safe in case we're lucky enough to ever come across one but uh it'll be a slim chance of that ever happening let's lift the pollies inside to reveal what's hiding in the next layer and being careful not to lose some of the loose screws that are sitting on them because i suspect we'll need those and the completeness of what we've got in the box here continues with not one but four manuals all of which i'm lacking the japanese language skills to comprehend but they like the discs look to be in pristine condition the operating system is called human 68k developed by hudsonsoft there's no microsoft ms-dos in here thank you very much and so we have a manual for that os as well as a hardware manual which actually does have the ports labeled in english as does the system itself on the back so that is more useful than i was expecting to find and then there's this page here which i'm guessing tells us that uh if we have problems sharp will welcome us with open arms and we'll hug it out until the machine is repaired or something the 80s were a wild time there's also a basic manual and a software manual to complete the set and then the last thing to take out of the box is the system itself it's a machine that i've admired in magazines and photos before but only now can i fully appreciate the design from all angles it's a wonderful machine and it wouldn't look out of place if it was revealed as the next big games console in the modern day are my tastes outdated or am i right there i think it really does look that good and still that modern in the present day so what features does this machine bring to us well on the front we've got two five and a quarter inch floppy disk drives they've got a mechanical eject button and hopefully they still work and the disks will pop in and out we'll need to power it up to see if that's the case below that we've got a headphone socket and a joystick port which still have the dust cover on any joystick that you want to use will need to be an msx compatible joystick using that de-9 port of which i've got one plugged in here then there's a very purposeful looking orange power button there's a volume dial there is a built-in speaker somewhere inside this thing we'll find it shortly and there's the keyboard and the mouse ports which also had their dust covers on i've got the keyboard but unfortunately there's no mouse in the box so i won't be able to demonstrate that today so the first thing you'll notice as we look around the back is a bunch of cables hanging out and this is where a modification has been made what this is is the pico psu a conversion that's taken out the original psu from the machine so we've just got some empty holes there and then there's a power brick that sits on the floor it's quite a tidy modification actually although it doesn't look that tidy right now we've got two choices we could encase it externally or we could find space somewhere in there to tuck it away safely and given the size of that psu and the size of the psu that should be quite an easy task we'll we'll get to that shortly so let's tuck that out the way and we'll see what else we've got at the back here ports of interest on the rear for me include the analog rgb video output for our display there's also a tv control port which is only useful with the official monitor and that was the purpose of that other cable that we found in the box that would connect to the official monitor but there are the original dust caps once again on many ports the tv control port the stereoscopic port which is used to connect a pair of stereoscopic glasses and get that perception of depth on certain games and various other ports including the joystick ports the scuzzy port the image import they all had dust covers on this is in such pristine condition it's fantastic there are two very interesting ports on the back here though one is the expansion fdd or floppy disk drive and the other is the hard disk port which is scuzzy well it's not actually because it's something called sassy so it's compliant with the scuzzy standard it was just very very early on so we can use a scuzzy drive with it now what can we get out of these if i was using um for example a gotek could i use the external floppy drive board well yes you can but it requires a lot of modification to get the external floppy drive working as the primary floppy drive it's not that simple a modification and actually i really like the built-in five and a quarter inch drives with their mechanized eject button and just the whole it's almost like putting a vinyl record on isn't it putting a big old five and a quarter inch floppy disk into the front of this thing so if that works then we're just going to stick with that i'm not going to go check it however i am going to make full use of the hard disk sport now if you watched my cd tv trash to treasure series you'll remember that i made an external scuzzy box and i put a scuzzy to sd in there so a sd card converter that acts as a skzzi hard drive as well as the gotek but we don't worry about that so i think as an experiment we'll use that very same box from the cdtv we'll plug it in and we'll see if we can get an external hard drive working and if we can we'll come up with its own permanent solution in the longer term just like the cdtv has and that will give everyone access to all sorts of games and one last thing to point out here is that despite the fairly diminutive nature of the tower there are two i o slots one and two so there is room for expansion cards to be installed while this has a reputation for being a fantastic games machine because it was the very platform on which many of those old capcom and other japanese great games were created on it is still very much a workstation computer it is a pc that just happens to be brilliant at playing games so that's why we've got these i o slots here the big question though is does it work and there's a lot to do because the really interesting thing about the video output on this is that it outputs in 15 24 and 31 kilohertz so you need a multi-sync monitor like the original monitor to get an image out of it or some kind of way of adapting that output so that's where we're going to start with does it power up and can we get an image out of it and then we'll go from there let's uh let's get it powered up on the bench [Music] ordinarily this is where we perform some pre-flight tests to make sure that it's safe to turn on but this is an unusual arrival in that the power supply has been recently replaced and i'm told that it powers up safely so don't think me too hasty for just plugging it in here i'm assured it works so in goes the power video on the other hand is a different matter owing to the range of output frequencies that come out of this machine to tackle that i'm using the ossc a line doubler that will take the inputs and spit them out to display modes that we can use on a modern display or the most commonly found crt monitors which accept a 31khz scan rate and higher again that setup wasn't quite as easy as i'd anticipated i've got hold of a db15 to scott cable that would take the signal from the shop and put it into the ossc and it's quite easily available as a readily made up cable specifically for the x68000 so i grabbed a display to test it out with and then i powered it up for testing with this cable initially things looked good the machine has no hard disk so it's prompting us to insert a floppy disk to boot here and of course we had those in the box so let's slot them in and the first disk drive is good which is a huge relief it boots up into the human os but i can immediately see a problem with the image there's this ghost-like banding across the screen which i'm just unable to get rid of no matter how often i change the settings on the ossc there's just something not right here and i suspected the cable so i had a rummage through my spares to see what i had and i made up a new cable this new one has the de15 svga plug at one end this is a handy little connector that lets you quickly screw cables down into it without breaking out the soldering iron which makes it great for a quick test but it's not especially well shielded so we might get some noise on it despite my makeshift copper shielding around the inside it does help trust me and i'll include the links to the wiring diagram in the video description so you can make your own now let's test this out and that's good there is some noise if you look up close so i want to look out for a nice shielded cable in the longer term but it proves that the scar cable just wasn't suitable for putting through the ossc with this machine it's a good lesson learned there and we can continue testing now a flat panel that's all well and good for testing but we need a crt if we're going to give visitors the full x68000 experience so here's another black gateway crt just like the one that we used in the mr build series it's new old stock and i loved it so much that i bought a second one from the same ebay seller and this time i used the game twin b from floppy disk which is a two-disc game so that proves that both of our disk drives are working and also their eject mechanisms are working fine this machine is being incredibly well behaved so far i did however notice that there is a chunk of the screen being chopped off at the bottom and i wanted to try and fix that you can see the white box is being chopped along the bottom of the screen there after some head scratching i found that the solution was to go into the sampling options of the ossc that advanced timing on the 640x512 resolution in this case and increasing the vertical back porch setting i took that up to 35 and our missing pixels magically appeared on the screen so we're not missing out on any of the action now we're in a great place now a good display a working disk drive and i dug out an msx compatible joystick which is absolutely awful to use but it works next on my shopping list is a monster joysticks msx adapter so i can use my monster stick with it but this works for testing and also inducing a huge amount of rsi my thumb is in agony using this thing [Music] as fun as this is my very limited selection of floppy games won't give the people a great deal of choice so it's time to get that hard disk working if we can to try and get the hard drive working i've taken an sd card i've written to it a hard disk image with a selection of games on it using a program called win image the file system won't be readable on your modern computer so once that's written we just have to trust that it's ready to go the scuzzy 2 sd adapter which i'm using to fool the x68000 into thinking the sd card is a scuzzy hard disk that needs some tweaks to make it work namely setting the scuzzy id to three for it to work externally and the sector size has to be modified here to work with the image that we wrote to the card so we just make those quick changes and then write them back to the scuzzy to sd device and things have been going so smoothly today that i just expected to be able to plug it in and start gaming but sadly it wasn't quite that simple you can't just plug it in and expect it to boot from the hard disk and that's where this handy master boot floppy comes in if i lose this i'm in trouble so i will take a backup of it what this does is it allows us to install the sassy bootloader yes a sassy bootloader for a sassy machine and then we tell the machine to use that bootloader there's no bios as such to update the settings on it we use a program called switch which is also on the floppy disk and then i can update all of those settings tell it to boot from the sassy bootloader and tell the machine that it has two megabytes of ram which was standard for the expert model it doesn't automatically detect how much ram it has and i have to specifically tell it and with that we can reboot and cross our fingers and sure enough we're now booting from the sd card which is fantastic i can explore a whole library of games or at least the games that need up to and including two megabytes of ram we need more for some titles but that's a project for another day and there's loads more than the few that i had on floppy here and that means that we've got a really great setup for people to come and enjoy get a real feel for the machine and try out a machine that they likely haven't seen before let alone experienced in a way that they'll have very little opportunity to do anywhere else [Music] when i could drag myself away from the gaming it was time to tidy up the pico psu so i popped one side off this the lesser populated side of the machine containing the floppy drives and the hard drive connector and the speaker here which pumps music into the gap in the middle of the two halves of the machine so now we know where that sounds coming from as expected there's plenty of room where the japanese psu used to live and i think given that there's nothing to really bash into or obstruct or short out on and all the heat will be generated in the external power brick we'll go for a nice simple tidy up the pico psu goes into an anti-static bag which i'll secure with a cable tie and then the power input cable can pop out the bag and nearly so very nearly fits perfectly into an existing hole in the case it just needs something slightly larger than the original washer to make sure that it doesn't pop back through the case [Music] that's tightly secured while still being careful not to over tighten it and damage the plastic that's so much neater now and i can get back to some atomic robo kid i then took a break for a cup of tea and when i came back the system had gone into standby as indicated by those lovely light up keycaps blinking away what a nice touch well it's certainly proven to be a very interesting test drive today these machines feel so alien especially these japanese machines that don't even present an operating system in our language that you understand and yet with a bit of perseverance and a bit of help from your friends thank you to gary and to chrissy and to everyone else who gave me their input other owners of the x 68 000. we managed to get this going and i feel a lot more comfortable and a lot more familiar with it and i feel much happier putting it on the exhibition space with that pico psu tucked away and with the hard drive so people can really enjoy some games on it as soon as we get that space set up through our monthly diy episodes you'll see it in situ and hopefully we can share it a lot more with you i hope you've enjoyed figuring it all out with me today and if you've got one yourself do check out the video notes because i've put as much as i can in there to help you out and to get over all of the hurdles in getting this to behave as always thank you for taking the time to watch i hope you've enjoyed it and see you next time bye [Music] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 83,826

Keywords: japan, only in japan, japan exclusive, japanese arcade games, sharp x68000, rare computer, retro computer, retro games console

Id: EQWE67jsfOc

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021