• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Sharp x68000 z - a decent alternative?

mbliss11 said:
My unit arrived a few days ago and I have had some time to mess with it. So far has been cool to play around with. You can configure it to boot straight to the emulator so that it acts like a real system on power up.

In order to load floppy disk images they need to be in xdf format. You also need a fat32 sd card. You created a folder called X68000z and then throw your floppy images onto it. I have 2 cards one for drive 0 and the other for drive 1 so that I can launch multi disk games. My next step with it will be launching from a scsi drive image.

All and all a neat thing to play with. I got the product edition that only came with the unit and gamepad. I am using a wireless keyboard and mouse with mixed results. The mouse movement is not fluid and some games have trouble using it correctly (Dancing Blade). Keyboard is doing fine though don’t have all of the keys but so far not an issue.

Human68 is a lot like msdos so fairly easy to navigate around. I have tried other versions of it (it ships with 1.0 but I tried out 2 and 3 versions) and those booted up just fine. Was also able to make a blank disk and format it in the emulator which is cool should you want to save programs or other things onto a blank disk image.

View attachment 1265941
Click to expand...

how do you get the games to run? I have the SD card formatted to FAT32 and I made the folder and put the disk images in there. Where do you go from there. Thanks! :)
 
I am assuming to make a back up the HUMAN.sys SD Card, you have to do it through the OS?
 
b3l0kk said:
how do you get the games to run? I have the SD card formatted to FAT32 and I made the folder and put the disk images in there. Where do you go from there. Thanks! :)
Click to expand...
You need to make sure you are in emulator mode and not gui. I changed my boot options to just strictly boot in emulator mode. Once you have the sd card in you can either hit the “eject” button under the drive slot or just extract the card and put it back in. There should be a pop up window that shows a listing of the images you have on the card. Select it and it should boot into the game
 
b3l0kk said:
I am assuming to make a back up the HUMAN.sys SD Card, you have to do it through the OS?
Click to expand...
Never made a backup of the sd card that shipped with the unit I ended up just finding human os disk images and threw them on my sd card. I also ended up configuring sasi/scsi support and boot from an hdf on a usb drive. It’s cool that it will emulate harddrives as well as floppy
 
mbliss11 said:
You need to make sure you are in emulator mode and not gui. I changed my boot options to just strictly boot in emulator mode. Once you have the sd card in you can either hit the “eject” button under the drive slot or just extract the card and put it back in. There should be a pop up window that shows a listing of the images you have on the card. Select it and it should boot into the game
Click to expand...

How do you change it to boot into emulator mode.. sorry if I am being a pain... there is not a lot of information about this mini out there. This is the first place I found that someone else had one
 
mbliss11 said:
You need to make sure you are in emulator mode and not gui. I changed my boot options to just strictly boot in emulator mode. Once you have the sd card in you can either hit the “eject” button under the drive slot or just extract the card and put it back in. There should be a pop up window that shows a listing of the images you have on the card. Select it and it should boot into the game
Click to expand...

So I tried SSF 2 and when I go to play it the HUMAN.sys comes up and won't boot the game.. am I missing something.. like an extra file to get it to load? Its on 6 disc's. Do I need 2 SD Cards to for this game?
 
I have attached English translations of the user manuals. Have you registered your device with ZClub yet? That is where you can pull down more documentation and they have updated firmware to download.

So you get the boot screen that shows insert disk?

1710455608288.png

I would not start with a 6 disk game at first ;) Try to find one that is one or 2 discs. The order you insert and boot is important with multi disc games and generally with a 6 disc game you would just want to install that to a hard drive.
 

Attachments

  • Emulator_ver131.pdf
    793 KB · Views: 8
  • QuickStart_ver100.pdf
    1 MB · Views: 6
mbliss11 said:
I have attached English translations of the user manuals. Have you registered your device with ZClub yet? That is where you can pull down more documentation and they have updated firmware to download.

So you get the boot screen that shows insert disk?

View attachment 1275691

I would not start with a 6 disk game at first ;) Try to find one that is one or 2 discs. The order you insert and boot is important with multi disc games and generally with a 6 disc game you would just want to install that to a hard drive.
Click to expand...

I have not registered it yet.. I already signed up on the site but need to give them my special key. I have to do that tomorrow. I also see they have a firmware update for it... and I have to be registered to get it. I will try Final Fight next since its only a disc game. Thank you for your help :)
 
b3l0kk said:
I have not registered it yet.. I already signed up on the site but need to give them my special key. I have to do that tomorrow. I also see they have a firmware update for it... and I have to be registered to get it. I will try Final Fight next since its only a disc game. Thank you for your help :)
Click to expand...

So I registered my unit and grabbed the Firmware.. need to figure out how to install it. I got Final Fight working. Super Happy :) Thank You for sharing the translated Manuel
 
You are welcome :) Glad you got it working.

Here is a translated manual for updating the firmware.
 

Attachments

  • Update_ver100.pdf
    863.5 KB · Views: 3
Thank You! also I found a great program called Virtual Floppy Image Converter for windows.. it can convert x68000 games into the XDF format. I attached it
 

Attachments

  • Virtual Floppy Image Converter.zip
    563.7 KB · Views: 3
b3l0kk said:
Thank You! also I found a great program called Virtual Floppy Image Converter for windows.. it can convert x68000 games into the XDF format. I attached it
Click to expand...
Did you get the mouse and keyboard with yours or just the gamepad?
 
b3l0kk said:
Just the game pad.. I really want the Keyboard and Mouse but they are expensive...so is the mini Monitor
Click to expand...
Same although I added a real one to my collection shortly after getting the mini. Anything x68000 related is expensive
 
Anyone know the best step by step process to run games off of USB like a hard drive? I have grabbed the 2 files from the 68000z site and made changes to the boot up to SCSI0 and have gotten the USB to be recognized on boot up but the rest is fuzzy. Not sure if I need to convert the xdf files or put them in separate folders or how to access them as it comes up to A: in dos prompt. Any clear assistance would be most appreciated!
 
Malhavick said:
Anyone know the best step by step process to run games off of USB like a hard drive? I have grabbed the 2 files from the 68000z site and made changes to the boot up to SCSI0 and have gotten the USB to be recognized on boot up but the rest is fuzzy. Not sure if I need to convert the xdf files or put them in separate folders or how to access them as it comes up to A: in dos prompt. Any clear assistance would be most appreciated!
Click to expand...
Try this hard drive image:

SxSI-SCSI HDD Image v2.10

SxSI-SCSI HDD Image v2.10
nfggames.com

The x68000z site only has blank hard drive images. You would need to install the xdf images to the hard drive and then create .bat files to mount them and run off the drive. These guys took all the grunt work out of it. I use a drive image called x68000v4 which I believe was a predecessor to this one. Retrobits recently put out a video that showcased this new drive image.


The emulator guide ver131 posted above has instructions for getting hard drive images working. I think as long as you change the image linked to the same file name as the one you have on your drive now (after removing the old one first) it should just boot from there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top