XM6i

While checking out the NetBSD emulation page, I came across this interesting emulator, XM6i, which can run the x68000 NetBSD port.

Wasting no time, I downloaded it, and quickly found out it is all in Japanese… But hell that is what Google translate is for!  Just be forwarned that it’ll translate things like:

# memswitch -w boot.device=ROM; memswitch -w boot.romaddr=0xeac000

into

# Boot.Device Memswitch-w = ROM; Memswitch-w = 0Xeac000 Boot.Romaddr

I was able to get all the system bits, and get it to boot up the ROM!

Sharp boot logo

As you can see, I’m emulating a 68030 with MMU, running at a blazing 25Mhz with 12MB of ram! No doubt this is top of the line!  So I generated the boot floppies as described on the XM6i page, and booted NetBSD.  The boot loader on the x68000 looks kinda cool:

Boot with the daemon!

And after waiting for an eternity, like a real machine I booted up, swapped disks, read some more and then watched the kernel initalize:

NetBSD 5.1 68000

Installation is pretty straight forward, it is like any other NetBSD platform.  Although it is *SLOW*, even after I discovered the ‘turbo mode’ … As shown below:

Turbo mode!

Even in this mode, I’m running 220% faster than the real machine… I’m sure there are more tweaks to do, but my not being able to read Japanese isn’t helping any.

I figured for future’s sake, I’d just 7zip up what I have so far, maybe it’ll save some time for me later if I try this again.. Getting & generating the ROMS was kind of involved.

After an hour I had a base machine installed!

Of course it runs NetBSD!

All my work is here, and my NetBSD 5.1 install (to save yourself an hour+) is here.  Both files will blow out a 2GB disk image… FWIW.

Also if you’ve never used a Japanese keyboard before, they aren’t quite QWERTY with symbol layouts… This cheat sheet will help!

If you don't know where the colon is, vi can be impossible to use.

One thought on “XM6i

  1. I have done the same, except I am struggling with getting networking to work. The xm6i documentation (http://www.ceres.dti.ne.jp/tsutsui/netbsd/x68k/NetBSD-x68k-on-XM6i.html) says that for windows hosts you need to install TAP network adapter from open VPN so I installed version 2.1.4.

    I configured the IPv4 settings just as they did in the documentation: 192.168.2.1 and netmask 255.255.255.0 When I boot NetBSD and “ifconfig 192.168.2.17; ifconfig netmask 255.255.255.0; ping 192.168.2.1” I am unable to reach the host. I am not even sure if XM6i is recognizing the adapter (which I renamed to TAP01) and put TAP01 in the settings under Neried -> TAP Win32

    Did you ever get networking to work? Please email me at [email protected] if you have any helpful suggestions.

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