Mar 11, 2007
X68000 emulation on Linux
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
hen it comes to Linux, there’s really not much in the way of Japanese computer emulators. Thankfully, WINE has reached a stage where it’s much less of a piece of shit than it used to be.
I’ve had a lot of success doing X68000 emulation under Ubuntu using Wine and XM6, ytanaka’s emulator built on Neill Corlett’s Starscream core.
Updated: Please follow the WINE setup instructions in post #407 first!
First off, you need to have WINE and LHA installed, and the best way to do that is `apt-get install wine lha`. Once that’s done, download the mfc71dll.lzh file and decompress it with File-Roller (double-click to open, it will work now that you have LHA). Extract these files to any temporary folder.
Next, download xm6_206.lzh and extract it to a folder called ~/Programs/xm6 or something similar. Then open a terminal, change to this folder and run `wine xm6.exe`. You will get an error about the missing DLLs. Dump them in your XM6 folder.
The next error will be that you’re missing the X68000 boot ROMs. These have been released to the public domain by SHARP, and the Japanese Computer Emulation Centre keeps a current copy. Download the X68000 CG and IPL ROMs and extract them to your XM6 folder.
Run `wine xm6.exe`
Click Tools->Options in the menu and under System, set your CPU to “15MHz (X68000PRO w/oc)”. Next set the system RAM to “4MB (X68030)”. Under sound, make the Output Device “dmix:0″ and set a Sound Buffer Size of “120ms” and Polling at 10ms. Leave the Sample Rate at 62.5kHz or you will have no audio.
Please make sure your WINE sound support is set to 44KHz audio at 16-bits and that optimization is set to “Emulation.” Trying to use “Hardware” makes the sound in XM6 explode!
The processor demands vary by game, as they do on Windows. Emerald Dragon runs fine when my host machine is clocked at 800MHz, but the X68000 remake of Ys needs a solid 2GHz to run lagless. History of Elthlead. Die Bahnwelt and several other games were all test and run just as well as they do in Windows.
So if you want accurate X68000 emulation under Ubuntu, this seems the solution.
In the next few days I’ll work on figuring out if Winx68kHighSpeed runs–a possible way to get very good emulation on all games and within a 500MHz limit–and also a good PC-98 emulator. If you need a PC-88 emulator, look no further than Quasi88: it runs native on Linux and has a very simple compile process.
Edit: I tried Winx68kHighSpeed. It didn’t run at all. DirectDraw errors.
