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Sharp x68000 z - a decent alternative?

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mbliss11

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My bday is coming up so I decided to get myself a little something. I have always wanted an x68000 but I cannot bring myself to spend that much money on a single computer. So when I heard about the x68000 z I was intrigued.

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Round Up: All The Biggest Announcements From ZUIKI's Recent X68000 Z Livestream

It's an exciting time to be a fan of the old Japanese computer!
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Watched a few video reviews on it as well and it seems to be a really cool alternative to an original. I decided to go with the base pack forgoing the keyboard and mouse as I’ll just use a wireless one. But it looks like it will have a fully emulated human68k environment, support for booting from floppy sd cards (I thank that is so cool) and virtual hard drive support.

Once it arrives I’ll report back on how it works. As much as I would love an original to add to the ever growing collection of vintage tech in the office I’m hoping this will be good enough to scratch the itch…..until one pops up that I cannot say no to….

 
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.

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Well…didn’t take long for a real one to end up on the bench. Got a “good” deal on a non working unit in good cosmetic condition. Was hoping it was just the power supply as that is common point of failure. After replacing that with a pico modern alternative, replacing sram battery and servicing the floppy drives I now have a big brother to the mini. Waiting on an OSSC and keyboard adapter to come in to really test it out but so far so good. IMG_3930.jpeg
 

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Keyboard adapter came in and works great with a cheap Japanese usb keyboard I had for the mini. I also had an old lcd monitor I had purchased for raspberry pi use back in the day which turns out has 15hz support so I ended up using that instead of an ossc. There are only a few instances of 24hz games on the 68000 and getting an ossc for those didn’t seem worth it. Most are either 15 or 31 Capcom titles are usually 15. I was also able to use a Zulu scsi I had lying around and got external hard drive booting on it. Finally, threw in a 2meg expansion card to give it 4 total. It is a really cool machine and wonderful addition to the constantly growing collection.
 
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Great setup!. May I recommend a Dell P2314HT monitor?. I have several monitors 15Khz-friendly; but the Dell model is the only one capable of displaying all the vertical lines flawlessly. Does your monitor displays the full picture (specially when it comes to the bottom os the screen...).
Also, I'm using a SCSI2SD as external drive like in your rig; but, how does the ZuluSCSI work with the X68K?, any issues?
 
jltursan said:
Great setup!. May I recommend a Dell P2314HT monitor?. I have several monitors 15Khz-friendly; but the Dell model is the only one capable of displaying all the vertical lines flawlessly. Does your monitor displays the full picture (specially when it comes to the bottom os the screen...).
Also, I'm using a SCSI2SD as external drive like in your rig; but, how does the ZuluSCSI work with the X68K?, any issues?
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I’ll definitely check that monitor out! Have been eyeing up some dells and would like a bigger monitor that supports 15khz. I have a 17inch arcade monitor that I replaced with a 19inch in my mvsx that I would like to use and mount to a stand. Unfortunately the firmware on it now will not allow much vertical adjustment. I think that will also do 24khz too for those rare games on the platform.

But yea! The little monitor displays everything correctly! I adjusted the aspect ratio it will also fill the screen if it is in wide mode.

Zulu scsi was super easy to get setup. You just rename the hard drive file to HD30_512.HDA and boom it works. Has been working great with the computer. It would have been cool to also get gotek support on the x68000 but research into that shows it is a big can of worms and requires even more money to throw at the machine which I do not want to do haha.

With the mini x68000 I can install floppy images to directories on its hard drive image and then load that drive on the real hardware. I then just write it to a blank floppy. That has worked well so far. You could probably do this just as easily with an emulator on your computer too. Since getting the real hardware I have not used the mini a lot to be honest.
 

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Wow!, it rules indeed!. Having LHES (or Human) displaying the bottom funtion keys bar is enough for me :). Btw, which monitor brand & model please?

As I have a SCSI card in my PC it's easy to plug the external HDD and edit and image. I would also love to have an easier way to transfer software; but as you mention, these new developments (RaSCSI, FS68K, etc.) are a little bit hard to find and not specially cheap. I've also a MO drive; but I must reckon that I've never tried to use it.

Nice machine the Expert!, does this model need a full cap replacement (except 5.25" drives)?, I'm mostly used to the Compact machines and they're an absolute nightmare in every aspect!
 
Here is model number I have no idea where I got it from or when unfortunately

What’s an MO drive?

I got a cap kit and generally get them for all of my machines in the collection but generally only recap if there is an issue with it. The consensus on the x68000 community is to recap them but it is working and looking great. Power supply definitely has to go but at least for the expert and my model I didn’t notice any bulging or bad looking caps. So I am going to hold off on a recap. Everything on the board is thru hole not like Mac’s that used early smd that explode everywhere.

Compacts are bad? Do they have smd caps?
 

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MO stands for Magneto-Optical drives, kind of ZIP but more capable than it. They were fairly popular in Japan back then and you can find quite more info about using it with the X68000 than the ZIP units.

The Compacts are an absolute hell about everything. Hard to disassemble, bad SMD caps everywhere and also bad through-hole caps in the floppy drives that are also hard to disassemble. The pros are its small size and ease of transfer software thanks to their 3.5" floppy drives. They're also able to reach some stable overclocks (16Mhz -> 24Mhz), not really useful, but cool.

Thanks for the monitor info!. Google gives me a "Cocopar" japanese IPS monitor as result, seems hard to find...
 
I second the use of the Dell P2314HT with the X68000, it's a real gem that can display almost anything you throw at it...

Alternatively, I also have a pair of NEC Multisync LCD1970NX that work quite well with it too.

Luckily, the "daily driver" for my XVI is a NEC PC-TV455, which is a lesser-known tri-sync CRT monitor, which I find better than Sharp's own CZ models for the X68000.
 
Right now I am on a quest to try and get mine working on my pvm. I have an extron rgb 192 for sync stripping that I modded which works well for 15khz games. I am going to try to pair that with a vga to component box and see if I can get 31khz working on the pvm as well. It’s more of a want to set it up close to the pvm to conserve space in the office. I’ll report back when the component adapter comes in
 
I think your best bet may be to use a good quality scaler/processor (the new Tink4K for example), that can take anything in and output something the PVM is happy with, but I am sure you already know :)
 
Yea I am exploring gbs c for this now. Seems to be a good option for downscaling hopefully that will work to get it on the pvm.

I have been watching several videos on the retrotink4k looks like an amazing piece of kit! Very expensive. Modern vintage gamer tested it with the x68000 and it worked perfectly.
 
Indeed, very expensive and only justifiable if put to good use! I was curious about the support for "strange" systems, and apparently it deals with the weird X68000 refresh rates, the PC-98 24KHz mode and many other oddities just fine...
The only detail I have not seen anyone report on in great detail is how well it deals with composite signal and CRT emulation at the same time, e.g. how blurry the image is and how well "meshed/dithered" graphics show up as semi-transparent.
 
Frio said:
I think your best bet may be to use a good quality scaler/processor (the new Tink4K for example), that can take anything in and output something the PVM is happy with, but I am sure you already know :)
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Gbs-c did not like the expert unfortunately. I have seen mixed results online with others using it on different x68000 models. Not a huge deal I can always feed the pvm 15khz games and just roll out my monitor that does support it. I’ll explore other options for downscaling and x68000 support I do want an ossc or tink at some point in my setup but right now I’ll opt to save up for them
 
So I won an auction for a extron vsc100 for 25 bucks on eBay. Fired it up this morning and works like a charm! It is definitely on the fuzzy side not great for text but since I just plan on using the 68000 for games I’ll take it. That with the extron 192 I have 15khz and 31khz squared away on the pvm. I honestly would not have gone through all of this trouble if it weren’t for space constraints in the office.


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