Using Floppies in HumanOS
If you plan on using EX68 as a replacement for your X68000 or even if you need information on how to use floppies on your real X68000 then you've come to the right place. The X68000 uses 1.2 megabyte 2HD(double sided high-density) floppy disks. I'm not sure what format they're in, but DOS/Windows probably can't read them directly. Fortunately, unless you plan on dumping games from real x68k disks, we don't care(or maybe you do, but thats not the point :) Disk images will suffice for our purposes, the same techniques can be applied to real disks on a real X68000.

As is the case with most of my tutorials, I'm going to have you download something :) That is, of course, unless you already have it(or something similar, like the disk from JCEC). This is a complete, and I believe the only one on the net (the one at JCEC is missing quite a few things)Human68k 3.01 system disk. It has several utilities that will be invaluable to you if you intend to use it on a real machine such as switch.x and format.x. This tutorial will cover how to use format.x to format floppies and make them bootable. I will also cover basic copy commands, a more detailed look at Human68k commands will be in an upcoming tutorial.

Okay, now that thats out of the way. Unzip your new system disk, and make a copy of it in a safe place. We're going to use this copy as our example disk. Start up EX68 and put the system disk in slot 1. Allow the emulator to boot so that you're looking at the A> prompt. At the prompt type format.x and press the enter key. You'll be greeted by a blue and yellow menu like in the screenshot below.

Image 1( format.x)

The first option listed is for dealing with floppy disks. The second for hard drives and the third is exit. I'll go over hard drives in another tutorial. So, for now, pick the first one by pressing the enter key.

The screen will change to look like image 2. Here you can choose the drive you want to format and whether the disk is bootable or not. The first selection is the drive. You should have drive A: and drive B: if you have only floppy drives, if you have a hard drive you should have B: and C:. For now, lets stick with B:. The third option controls the "bootability" of the disk. If you want it bootable, then leave it as-is. If you dont, then change it to the other possible selection.

Image 2

Once you've made the decision of whether to have a bootable disk or not, and what drive you want formatted, we're ready to proceed with the format. So, scroll down and pick the fifth option. On EX68 you will see a progress indicator very briefly, I would assume this would stick around longer on a real X68000. After the format is complete you will be asked if you wish to format another disk, if you do, press Y and the current disk will be ejected and you will be prompted to insert another disk, etc.

We're just about finished. This only applies if you formatted the disk as bootable. When the format was finished, the program automatically copied over one of the necessary system files. But there's still one missing that will prevent the disk from booting. So, exit out of format.x by selecting the last option in the list. At the command line, check that you're on A: and your new disk is in B:. If everything checks out, type copy human.sys b:\ and hit enter. This will copy the other file necessary to have a bootable floppy. To test it out, eject the system disk form A: and hit reset, if everything went as planned you should be staring at a dos prompt yay! Pat yourself on the back and play some games because you're done! Phew.