Testing out the imported X68000!

this is the sharp x68000 the Japanese God computer the Amiga killer let's see if it lives up to the hype right now in episode 81 of retro bits [Music] in the last episode I won this rare machine on Yahoo auctions Japan using a proxy bidding service I unboxed and inspected the machine and everything appears to be in excellent condition but I've yet to crack it open or Power It Up I've been waiting over a month for this so let's Jump Right In New Life sharp EMA [Music] um I don't know about you but the first thing I do when I get a new machine is pop the hood and see what makes it tick so before I hook it up to everything let's do just that okay that's a good reason to have this handle here it makes the machine easy to manipulate I don't know how portable it would be considering there's normally a big CRT attached but that's a nice thing to have for moving it around the desk anyway we already took a look at all the ports on the back in part one so we won't do that today but I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that all of the RGB video stuff is here so I'm guessing the GPU will be in this Tower and the CPU and the main PCB will be in this Tower here there's also this lower section which houses the interconnect between the left and right side towers as well as provides the ports on the front and the rear of the machine so we're going to find a third PCB down here now as far as the Aesthetics of the machine are concerned it does have a very interesting and unique design but because of this split Tower and the requirement to have at least three separate interconnected pcbs this machine is a lot harder to service and to disassemble than your average beige box so there is a trade-off between having all this style and having this machine be easy to work on now I couldn't find any disassembly instructions for the machine in English so I'm not sure if we need to remove these i o slot blanking plates or not I'm not going to initially unless I find that I have to later so I'm going to start with the obvious screws first so this whole panel should now slide to the back but I've read on the internet there are some plastic tabs that we've got to release in order to do that so I'm going to push in here while I slide the panel back and there we go yep there's tabs here here and there oh yeah and you want to be real careful when you do that you can see that there's plastic catches along the top and also along the bottom and if you're not careful this plastic could be brittle and you could break those you don't want to damage your your x68000 these parts are not replaceable so we can't see very much we have obviously a cage here for the expansion slots and we also have another cage here for the RGB module but the GPU itself is hiding behind this RF shield and it takes up there's a PCB that you can just see peeking out through some of these cracks that takes up the entirety of this Tower so the GPU board is going to be this entire PCB here from here to here and then you can see the interconnect that connects the GPU board to the backing plate down here the interconnect plate at the bottom we've got a power connector and we've got an aftermarket battery that was already installed by the refurbisher yeah I'm a little disappointed that you can't see more of the GPU but you'd have to remove the expansion slots you'd have to remove the RGB module you'd have to remove this little PCB here that controls the lights on the front panel take off all this RF shielding I'm really not sure it's worth trying to disassemble this thing just to get a peek of the board under there I know it's been fully recapped I know it's been serviced I'm glad somebody else did it to be perfectly Frank but I am disappointed that you can't see more of this machine and that goes right back to the fact that these things are very difficult to work on in service because of their design and here we are on the other side removal of the case was exactly the same as the first side what we've got here is the power supply unit and power supply fan the guts of which have been removed because now we have an external DC power supply that feeds directly into this aftermarket unit here the original Supply is no longer present here we've got a space for a hard drive this is where the original hard drive would be provisioned if this was the HD model which it is not we have the two floppy drives installed here and then we've got the floppy Drive ribbon cable connecting to the back plane here we've got power and we've got the scuzzy connector on the back plane here which connects to the 50 pin centronics connector on the back but one thing to note is this is not a 50 pin scuzzy connector this is a proprietary ribbon cable that goes from the back plane and if there was a hard drive installed the ribbon cable would continue on to a 50 pin connector here this is a proprietary connector if you want to connect an internal hard drive you need the proprietary connector you can buy them for about fifty dollars online or you can make them yourself but the wiring is a little complicated it is documented in English though so it can be done it's a little difficult to see but right behind the hard drive area we have an internal speaker just peeking out right there and one last thing to note is that there does not appear to be a large PCB in this Tower so I was wrong when I said earlier that the GPU was on one side and the CPU was on the other it appears that they are both on this side and that one large PCB consolidates them both now that may not have been true for earlier models of the x68000 it may be that in this model or some intermediate version that they Consolidated the GPU and CPU onto a single PCB for cost savings I have not read anything about that in any of my research so if anybody knows the answer do let me know in the comments but it does appear that this side is just accessories and if there's no overarching CPU or PCB here now here's something I didn't notice when we looked at the Box the first time in part one but a viewer clued me into this little disclaimer that appears only on one side of the Box let's get a look at that and it says that these products are strategic products subject to co-com regulations they should not be exported without authorization from the appropriate governmental authorities so this machine was export controlled due to sensibly its power or capabilities which may be one reason that the x68000 never saw sales outside of Japan interesting all right it's well past time we got this thing hooked up and tried it out because I've been dying to get it connected since I've bought it more than a month ago so the first challenge we have to deal with is the fact that it has a proprietary 15-pin RGB connector instead of a more traditional hd15 connector so what I've done is I've bought an adapter cable from a company called retro cables and I'll put a link in the description and it just converts the x68000s 15 pin DB connector to a standard 15 pin HD connector so we should be able to hook this up to any compatible VGA monitor the Second Challenge is that the x68000 can output 15 24 and 31 kilohertz RGB and I don't have a suitable display that can handle all of those refresh rates I was hoping that the Samsung LCD from two episodes ago would be fixed in time to hook it up to the x60 AK but that is not the case so we'll have to do something else instead so what I've done is I've built this and this is called the GBS control and it's a project that allows you to take a twenty dollar commodity upscaler the GBS 8200 upscaler pair it with an esp8266 Wi-Fi microcontroller running new firmware that acts as the new brain for the upscaler Chip And you get a Wi-Fi connected high-powered RGB upscaler for less than thirty dollars and I just 3D printed this case and I stuck all the parts in there there's a little soldering involved and I've also integrated a cgh8 RGB into the design as well so this will work with EGA CGA and commodore 128 RGB Graphics as well so analog and digital RGB to VGA for about thirty dollars and I hope this works with the x68000. the last consideration is the power input it's already been converted to a DC input so the original 100 volt Supply is gone and along with the machine I was sent this power brick this is a 100 240 volt 50 or 60 hert input and it puts out 12 volts at 5 amps so that's what we need to use with the x68000 now is a 12 volt DC power supply all right I've got the x68000 all connected up the RGB output goes to the upscaler which goes to this Dell flat panel everything else is connected and power is hooked up we've got a standby light there I'm going to turn it on for the first time now no YouTube trickery this is the first time I've ever pressed the power button I fully expect it to work but you never know with shipping these old machines halfway around the world so fingers crossed here goes nothing that's a good sign the light turned green we've got fan do we have video the drive zero light is flashing maybe I have the wrong input VGA and it went to sleep all right I don't know what's going on the monitor went back to sleep so let me fiddle and I will be right back with you all right status update I think the problem may be with the upscaler I've got the UI for the GBS control on my phone here and if I select a resolution the monitor comes on we see the missing disk boot screen but it's at a sync so I think something is wrong with the upscaler here I don't think it's a problem with the x68000 itself so stay tuned more fiddling okay we're making progress here and I think I know what the problem is I've got the VGA monitor directly connected to the X now and as you can see the image is stable it's waiting for a disk the problem I think is it boots into 31 kilohertz mode by default and I don't think the upscaler knows what to do when it sees a 31 kilohertz signal it's trying to upscale a signal that doesn't need to be upscaled and I think that's the problem so with it directly connected to the monitor I think we're in business to try and Boot something all right so here's the disc that came in that little pouch it appears to be a copy of the operating system so I'm going to throw this in and see if the machine Boots the one problem is I don't know which way the disc goes in the drive does it go this way or does it go this way I'm going to take a guess and put it in this way we'll see what happens well there is an error on the screen let me translate that error and see what it means okay so I translated the error and what it means basically is this is not a boot disk this is not a system disk it can't be booted it didn't detect the human.sys file on the disk so whatever this is it's not a backup of the operating system all right I'm back again this time I have the original human 68k disk that came with the system we'll throw this in and see what happens oh that's promising there we go I think we've got to a command prompt I also think the command prompt is below the screen yep it is below the screen all right that's interesting we need to adjust the display a bit but good we have a booting system it seems to be working the drive works and the system boots up now let's test out the floppy eject what's kind of neat is that it shows a green light when the drive is inserted but not active and it shows a green light here on the eject button when there's a disk installed so press eject and Boop the disc comes right out I'm gonna have to make a copy of this right away so I don't use the original and one more thing I wanted to demonstrate is the soft power switch here apparently when these machines first came to Market this was a novel concept and it hadn't been seen before but what happens is if you press the power button the machine goes into a sort of soft sleep mode and empowers itself down but because you never actually shut off power to the PSU the PSU is always on unless you flip the big toggle switch in the back that seems to be one of the reasons that the power supplies are notorious for failing nowadays because they were never shut off they were on for the entire life cycle of the machine in this standby mode where they were energized but the system was off so that may play a role in why the power supplies are so prone to failure these days and what happens if we turn it back on I wonder I can't imagine that it resumes there's no hard drive there's no non-volatile memory yeah it it's back to the boot state so no resume just soft power off let's talk a little bit more about the video output from the x68000 it uses some very unusual display modes 512 by 512 at 55 Hertz 256 by 256 resolutions that LCD screens just weren't designed to handle and can't really display properly we've already seen it because we know that the command prompt is way off the bottom of the screen somewhere and if we go into the screen settings here and we go to display settings and then we go to display reset watch carefully there's the prompt below that there's even a status bar and it tries for a moment to sync up to it and to display the entire screen but it just can't and if we go here to the vertical position and we move it up to its maximum adjust range we still can't even see the prompt much less the status bar that's below it so LCD screens just aren't a good fit for the resolutions that this thing is putting out I've also mentioned that the x68000 can use 1524 and 31 kilohertz video mode so I'm going to boot into the game that the system came with and we're going to see what happens with this LCD display and there we go the display simply can't handle the resolution that the game is putting out and that's going to be the problem with a lot of modern LCD screens or even normal VGA monitors they just can't sync down to the 15 kilohertz that's needed by this game so I've tried every single display I own and none of them will work properly with the x68000 so I'm kind of in a pickle here where I can't show you anything because I don't have a proper display to do it so what about the GBS control can this upscale the game's 240p output for an LCD display unfortunately no I tried it and it just didn't work I had to enable the debug console and I found a message saying unrecognized Source format so GBS control just is not compatible with the x68000s video output and a quick Google search confirmed that as well so there's a buying tip if you want one of these systems of your own you're going to need the matching sharp CRT monitor or one of the rare VGA CRTs that can sync all the way down to 15 kilohertz otherwise you're going to need a more expensive upscaler to be able to use the system with an LCD display this is one variant of the open source scan converter or ossc and what it is is a high-powered upscaler that is known to work with the x68000 . this particular unit was loaned to me by my good friend Jason Selsey at penne Collectibles so thank you Jason for bailing me out when I had no other option to get the system working now these devices are not exactly cheap at around two hundred dollars but then again nothing is when it comes to these systems so let's get this hooked up and see if we can actually start using the computer now and through the magic of YouTube there we go we've got the full screen we've got the command prompt and the status bar and everything is nice and centered in the screen now this is a pretty Advanced device so you're going to have to read the manual because there are a lot of settings that you're going to have to go through to get things just the way you want but it can be done and the results speak for themselves yeah so it's no surprise the LCD panel had a hard time syncing to this signal I mean 568p at 55.40 Hertz just x68 000 things now let's see how the scalar handles the game that we tried earlier and just like that it works I didn't have to change any of the settings awesome and that's nice we've got a little animation and some background music playing I've seen that with other x68000 games as well so that's a nice little premium feature that you would expect given the price of the system and the price of the software too and this game is running at 260p with 61.44 Hertz vertical and 15.97 kilohertz horizontal that's funny it spits out the disc once the game's done loading [Music] [Music] oh yeah [Music] before I forget I want to make a copy of the original system disk onto this blank floppy that came with the system so let me do that now the first thing we need to do is to format the second disk which is easy just Lake Doss right and now that that's done we can use the copy all command to copy everything from a colon to b-con and just like that we'll create a full duplicate of the original system disk onto this blank you know I really like the dual disk drives in this machine with the two LEDs and the two eject buttons they really have a premium feel to them but you would expect that on a machine that costs this much now in terms of cost though there's another machine which is lurking right there in the background the Macintosh classic 2 which adjusted for inflation was really in the same ballpark as the x68000 in 1991 when both of these machines were on the market so if you think about it in terms of what you got for the money the Macintosh is a black and white machine that doesn't have any of the fancy Graphics or sounds that the x68000 does but they really cost almost the same so if you put it in that perspective this seems like a pretty good deal all right there we go the copy is done so we can eject our original we won't be needing to use that anymore and we can put the copy into drive zero and hit the reset button and there we go it's booting we have a good copy in terms of software that came with the system we have the human 68k which we just made a copy of we've got the SX window GUI which we will take a look at in a little bit and then over here we have the Japanese language word processor and the dictionary for the word processor so let's take a look at this one for a minute and there we go we have our graphical word processor and it's Mouse driven I can't really understand what any of the menu icons are but we do have a full user interface here and one neat thing about this is that the keyboard lit up as soon as the word processor loaded up the lights came on on the keyboard showing the different character sets that we're in so if we hit the different buttons here you can see that the screen updates to show what character set we're currently using which is kind of neat yeah so I clearly have no idea what I'm doing but it's kind of fun you can change between the different character sets and remember that full with half with key there's the L character with the key turned on if I turn it off there's the L character with the key turned off so we have one that's a full width character and then we've got a half with version of the same now if I turn off all of the special characters then I can just type in Roman characters so with the caps lock key so that works as expected but yeah all these other keys I really don't know what I'm doing with this word processor now all these different character modes seem awfully complicated to me as I understand it one reason there were so many Japanese specific systems in the early days of Home Computing was because the Western systems just didn't have support for all the Japanese characters that was required or the way to input them so think about the Commodore 64. it just didn't have all these capabilities in its Single Character ROM set so the Japanese had their own systems until PCS became more ubiquitous and supported that sort of stuff now floppies are all well and good but the system has a built-in scuzzy controller so we should take advantage and for that we have a lot of options the first of course is spinning rust but this is 2023 so we're not going to do that another option is a Japanese product called the bancho which is designed specifically for these old machines and supports scuzzy and Sassy but it's about a hundred dollars plus shipping and I think we can do better a third option is the ra scuzzy or Pi scuzzy Project which was originally designed for the x68000 and also provides networking to the host machine so that might be something we can look at in a future episode there are also the scuzzy 2sd devices which are known to work with the x68000 but also cost around a hundred dollars and finally we have the newcomer to the scene called the Blue scuzzy which is quite affordable at 50 or less I purchased this external V1 model from Joe's computer Museum and while it works fine on my Macintosh I couldn't get it to work reliably on the X Joe kindly sent me the latest V2 model to test out and I'm happy to report that it works perfectly what's really nice about blue scuzzy is that it uses disk image files instead of native partitions like the scuzzy2sd does that means you can easily go back and forth between your emulator and the real Hardware speaking of which here's the xm6 emulator which we can use to create the drive images for our blue scuzzy in the tools menu select image then make a new scuzzy hard disk give it a name then select the size up to one gigabyte which is the maximum supported on the x68000. once that's complete we can add a new scuzzy device in the options and point it to the image we just created finally we'll mount a freely available human 68k floppy disk image reboot the emulator then use the built-in format command to prepare the drive after that it's just a matter of using copy all like we did earlier on the real Hardware now we can format an SD card FAT32 works but exfat is preferred next copy one or more Drive images to the cart blue scuzzy supports up to seven files each representing a separate device finally we'll rename each of the images with the prefix HD and a number from 0 to 7 that represents the scuzzy ID on the bus removable media such as CD-ROM drives are supported as well ultimately I want to install an internal drive but I need the proprietary cable to do that so for now I'll use the external port with this Centron X2 db25 adapter cable it'll get the job done for now but it is a little bit clumsy and just like that we're booting off of the blue scuzzy V2 on the image we just created now I don't have much software on here yet but I did put patched versions of certain commands on here such as format which is now translated into English which makes it very useful when you are navigating nested menus that have many complicated options in them so that's a good thing to have on here we can access all of our disk images using the different Drive letters from the command prompt but let's say we want to boot to a different operating system to do that we'd run the switch command which is essentially like the BIOS on your PC and all we have to do is go down to the boot device and change it from standard which is first the floppy and then the first hard drive to whichever hard drive device we want to boot to so in this case let's say we want to boot to scuzzy1 now all we have to do is save the changes to non-volatile memory and reboot the system with option control and delete and just like that we're booting into SX window the graphical environment operating system for the x68000. now we looked at this a bit in the Mr episode and I figured I would at least build the hard drive image and install the software as a remedial exercise but I don't have anything really on here to look at right now and it's quite difficult to utilize because everything is in Japanese here I will say that the UI is pretty nice and works well so it may be worth another look in the future what I've got here is a scuzzy hard drive image of action games that I've downloaded from the internet and it's got this menuing system here and it says the 90s sexy Computing yeah absolutely so here under games one we have all the games that will run on an unexpanded system and as you can see there's quite a few of them and I've tried them all here under games two we have a bunch of games that need to be run outside of the menuing system and I've tried all these as well and then finally we've got games three down here which are all games that require four megabytes of ram which I can't play yet because this is only a two megabyte system so once I upgrade it I'll be able to play these last few games that are here under games three I was testing out some games so I hooked up the controller that came with the system and this is the arvel joy card and I noticed some text on here that I didn't see originally and it says this Joy card will make you a better player and provide hours of fan good luck well thanks arvo I'm looking forward to having hours of fan however this controller while it works fine is not really the most ergonomic it's really not the best controller for playing games so I'm going to set this aside instead I'll be using this Mega Drive Genesis 6 button controller which should provide a better gaming experience now back in the original day of this system Capcom and some others made an adapter that would let you use this controller on the system more recently you can buy a cable and I got this from the same company that made the video cable and so this will allow me to use all six buttons with games that support it such as Street Fighter 2 and a few of the other fighting games so that's what we're gonna do thank you [Music] the x68000 is often credited with having arcade perfect ports while this is true a good number of them are titles from the 8-Bit era remember that Street Fighter 2 hit the arcades in 1993 so games like Bubble Bobble here first released in 1986 were really the system's contemporaries [Music] thank you laughs [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well not an official part of the series this Homebrew version of galaxian is a bullet hell homage to the original pretty cool remix and only available on the x68000 foreign [Music] there were certainly a handful of later more advanced arcade titles on the system as well when we looked at Street Fighter 2 running on the misters x68000 core it suffered from a sound glitch that caused the PCM audio to stop playing after a few seconds no such problem running the game on real Hardware though [Music] who's [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] round one [Music] Capcom wasn't the only one to bring its high-end fighting games to the platform there are a handful of others as well but in reality the number of truly impressive 16-bit era arcade titles is somewhat Limited it's not all that surprising due to the relatively small Market the system existed in so it's fun to think about what could have been had the sharp been sold worldwide instead of holy in Japan okay [Applause] [Music] in the last episode I mentioned that the mouse can be turned into a trackball for games that supported however I wasn't sure how to convert it exactly so a number of you commented on it and I think I know now how to do it so the first thing is you have to flip it over and when you do that the ball Falls towards the front of the mouse then you flip the switch to T from the M setting that will keep the ball locked in place so when you flip it back over the ball does not return to its lower position next you have to turn this knob and then you can remove this whole piece from the top which will expose the trackball however mine seems to be kind of stuck in place and no amount of gentle persuasion will get it to come off so I'm going to resort to my favorite tool the old plastic spudger and we're going to give it a little bit of a assist here if I can get it in and pry it up a little bit easier said than done oh there we go just like that and there we go now we have a trackball that we can use for games that support it so let's give that a try [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you may have noticed that we're only looking at action games there are many Japanese visual novels and RPGs that I didn't try due to the language barrier among the 170 plus titles I did test about half of them seem to be Shooters which unfortunately really aren't my thing if they're yours there are many excellent ones to choose from with great music graphics and unique gameplay mechanics [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] had severe graphical glitches on the Mr core but it looks great on the real Hardware the level 4 space flamethrower is super op though watch how fast it tears through the stage 2 boss oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the x68000 is a 2d Powerhouse but 2.5 and 3D are not among its strengths the system has no Hardware Sprite scaling so it's not really well suited for Sega super scalar titles whether because of the hardware limitations the market or the developers themselves there simply weren't a lot of good racing titles for the system [Music] fire [Music] when the x68000 first launched I was still using a Commodore 8-bit with 64k of RAM and 16 fixed colors of course I only paid 125 dollars for my system brand new still I can only imagine what it must have been like to have this experience at home in the late 80s [Music] welcome to the fantasy Zone get ready foreign I was going to do some a b comparisons between the x68k and the Amiga but I realized that wouldn't be totally fair some of these titles were made by the original developers whereas ports to other Home systems were thrown together hastily by Third parties on a shoestring budget so instead enjoy a few more titles I thought were interesting [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] by now you should have a pretty good idea of the graphics and sound capabilities of the machine but let's briefly take a look at another music player for the system this one was included with the disk image I downloaded and contains tracks from many well-known game developers some are from the x608k itself but many are Renditions from arcades or even other Home systems [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] outrun was an unfinished work in progress that was never released on the system at least we know it would have sounded amazing if it had been [Music] 256 color VGA was introduced the same year the shark came to Market but the x68000 could display all 65 000 of its colors at the same time foreign [Music] and finally full motion video it's going to be fun [Music] so what can I say about the sharp x68000 so far well as you've just seen it's a very impressive system with Best in Class graphics and sound that feels surprisingly modern and easy to use there are of course a few caveats first the obvious they're expensive to buy you'll also need a special display or upscaler that can handle the unusual refresh rates and resolutions the system uses further their Rarity outside of Japan means that finding English language support can be a challenge if you're thinking of upgrading your sharp be aware that certain accessories are highly sought after and can carry a hefty price tag as well the same is true for the more popular software titles a Commodore 64 this is not it's not all bad news though there's a very active x68000 community on Twitter it's largely in Japanese but thankfully we have Google translate these days there's also a large library of public domain and homebrew software that I have yet to explore much of it is archived on the nfg game site shown here link is in the description so there we have it a first look at the sharp x68000 what do you think was this super home computer worth the high price tag we've still got so much more to look at too Hardware upgrades video editing other operating systems emulators heck there's even a python interpreter all stuff for another time I hope you enjoyed this bit thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time on retrovis [Music] thank you

Channel: retrobits

Views: 46,518

Keywords: retro, vintage, computer, computing, sharp, x68000, diy, video game, gaming, capcom, bluescsi, blue scsi v2, ossc, gbs-control, open source scan converter, japanese, japan

Id: QdEwjLT2sB8

Length: 50min 4sec (3004 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023