If you are running your X68000 in a VGA monitor like I am, you will notice that for most cases only the 31Mhz resolution will work. Some games will boot in a different video mode (usually 15Mhz) and therefore you need to switch it back to 31Mhz in order to get the signal to show up.

Thankfuly someone from the X68000 forum went through many games and documented what video modes are available and how to switch between them. Just to make sure this info is not lost, I am reproducing it in the table below.

Unfortunately, some games don’t have a quick and easy way to switch video modes. You actually have to navigate (blindly in this case) through menus to do so. I am also adding some info to the table that will help you do this.

After quite a bit of research I got my file transfer from a modern PC to my X68000 XVI Compact nailed down. Here is what you need to do:

– An external USB floppy drive or an internal one that supports 3mode (your computer bios needs to support that as well – which makes the USB option more accessible). I my case I am using an external USB drive from Dynex (DX-EF101).

– Format your floppies using the 1.2m options – FORMAT A: /A:1024 /T:77 /N:8 /U. A tip here is that sometimes this command will fail if the floppy is unformatted. The workaround I found for that is to run the default FORMAT A: command and then run the command with the options above.

– Get DiskImage_13b. This is a software that reads and writes disk images to floppies. You can get it from here

– Many ROM files for the X68000 come in a .dim format, so you should also get a .dim to .xdf converter from here

Beyond that all you need are the actual ROM files which you can search using your preferred search engine. These .xdf floppies will be bootable so all you need to do is to turn on the computer with the disk inserted and that is it.

The advantage of this process is that you don’t need a computer running an older version of Windows. My computer is running Win 7 and it works fine (I run DiskImage and the DIM converter in XP compatibility mode though). The downside is that this will work only for the Compact X68000 since I don’t think it is possible to have a 5.25 drive mounted on a modern computer. There is another set of steps that allows you to burn 5.25 disks using a Win 95/98 computer but I haven’t got that done yet.