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!

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:

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

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:

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!

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!