Today’s tech fun!
Tonight I spent some time putting the finishing touches on an X68000 power supply repair. Once I got it all finished and put it together, it failed to function.
Turns out the floppy drives were dead. Let this be a lesson unto you: If your power supply blows, and they often do with these awesome beasts then it might fry your floppy drives also.
If your floppies die, you get an error similar to having a dead CPU: the system will power up but not power off, when you try to turn it off the power light flashes rapid-fire, and never shuts down. There is no display. Drives load and eject disks just fine, but the system does not boot or even attempt to read the disks.
I have an XVI system with someone’s failed overclocking hack and it does exactly the same thing; I was going to try swapping out its floppy drives but the fucking goddamned power supply failed as I was using it. Remember I said the PSUs on these things go boom a lot? I wasn’t kidding. On the bright side it works now, though I do now have a dead XVI system with dead floppies pulled from the one I repaired.
In other news, I’ve been putting a lot of effort into copying Nectaris (Military Madness) for the X68000. It’s a ridiculously rare game, I’ve never seen it mentioned online and I’ve never seen another copy for sale. Because of this, and the fact that I treated it poorly and accidently bent it to fuck (note: ‘bent it to fuck’ is a technical term, use sparingly) and it ceased to work, I decided effort should be applied to making it redundantly operational. After flattening the disk with 25kg of porn, I used my expert fingernail to smooth out the final wrinkle and it worked… From this original I attempted to make a copy.
Turns out it’s a real bitch trying to make a copy of an X68k game, even when you have the advanced copying software and appropriate dongle. After about 12 failed attempts, I made a working copy. After 2 more failed attempts I made a working copy of the copy. Now I feel safe about the game, and can put it back on the shelf where I’ll forget I even own it.
I’m stupid that way.
--NFG
[ Mar 9 2004 ]
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