IT FINALLY CAME!!! More Sharp X6800 maddness

Well yesterday it arrived. my X6800 came in one piece. IT was packed with great care and I’m very happy wit that, packed in a nice box with expansion foam. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I found the Mouse and keyboard from the same seller on Japanese Mercari. That came in one piece as well. Big win as far as I’m concerned.

Now I’m familiar with the fact that the power supplies in the X68000 are not very reliable and need to be recapped or often repaired. I fully expected my unit to be in an inoperable state. I wanted to do a quick visual inspection and function check. I was able to get the side panels off after some careful persuasion. I found some dust but nothing significant or alarming. I also didn’t find any other goodies than the SHARP CZ-6BM1A midi module I peeped hanging out in the back of the unit in the listing. No Blazing Star BONUS! ram upgrade modules (Neo heads will know what I’m talking about) when I checked for it, more on that later. I plugged her into my step down converter, said a little prayer and flip the switch. To my surprise she whirled to life without hesitation, no pops, smoke or burning metal smell. Heck, when I opened her, I most likely would have smelled the caustic fluid right away for those who repair old electronics, that smell is all too familiar.

The drives needed a small amount of motivation but they work. they’re most likely due for a good service. I had noticed in the photo from the listing it looked like there were dust inserts in the drives but, when I popped them out, turns out it was a homemade copy of New Zealand Story. So Blazing Star BONUS! for an unexpected game. after getting info on the drives and Power supply I quickly ordered the parts I needed to service the power supply and drives.

since I didn’t know if I had any RAM goodies in this unit, I held off from getting a ram board for it. Luckily the Ram board I was eyeballing online at Suruga-YA wasn’t the only one that hit the proxy hunting ground. An I/O Data PIO-6834-2/4M-1 made it’s way on to the auctions and scooped that up for cheaper than the Suruga-Ya board. I had started to hunt for the 1mb ram expansion for my unit thinking it was going to be a waiting man’s game when I did a quick google search and found that a modern replacement exists and I snagged that as well, giving me a total of 4mb of Ram which is the right amount for me to tap into a bigger chunk of the library.

Anyway, more to come mostly next week as stuff starts to trickle in and I can start my service and build.

#X68000 #RetroPC #RetroJapanesePC