Roland SC-88 VL Capacitor Replacement

 I recently recapped my SC-88 VL.  I was unable to find the capacitor values on the web, so had to identify them all manually on the device itself.  Here is the list:

uF	Voltage	Count
1000	16	1
220	6.3	1
100	6.3	6
1	50	3
10	16	8
10	6.3	1
47	16	6

Make sure you remove the yellow glue / adhesive near the power regulators and the 1000 uF cap - over time it can turn corrosive and eat through the board.  Copious amounts of isopropyl alcohol and a little elbow grease will do the trick.

Exploring The God Computer

 I'm becoming more familiar with Human68k.  I've been tinkering with the following:

• Mounting a SCSI MO drive
• Format and write floppy images (.xdf)
• Install various audio drivers to play music via MMDSP

Next up I'd like to tweak the startup files to reduce manual commands needed for the above.  I'm also vetting the list of installed games on the V4 image to figure out what is broken, and what I don't plan to ever play so I can slim the size down.

During my testing of games, I've noticed quite a few with MIDI support will leave hanging / stuck tones upon exiting / rebooting.  This happens across multiple sound modules so it seems to be software related.  As of now, the only way to stop this behavior is power cycling the module in use.  Which is of course, extremely annoying... 

X68000 is alive!

 I finally sourced a master disk, locally, as I was getting impatient to use my new system.  With this I was able to finally boot the system and run switch.x in order to configure the memory expansion and the SCSI ID for my SCSI2SD adapter.

Thankfully after the settings change I managed to not break anything else, and machine booted the V4 preconfigured disk image many in the community seem to use.  And its working great... I've already dropped a few hours into Final Fight and Castlevania.  The Yamaha sound chip on this system is fantastic, but having MIDI support just takes things to another level.  My mt32-pi and SC-88 are working beautifully!

One thing I've noticed is while there are a fair amount of games in this disk image, the X68000 library is quite massive, so many are missing.  Further, some just don't seem to work.  My guess is this is due to some of the hacky workarounds employed to make these games launch off a "hard drive" - most are not designed to run like that.

Next I want to explore Human68k OS, transferring files to this computer, and writing floppies to test some of these problematic / missing games out.  More on this in a future post when I figure out how to do it 😀

The keyboard adapter is working nicely, but I found myself still wanting the real deal.  So after a few days I came across a junk listing at a reasonable price which needed a lot of cleaning; here is the end result:

A final, parting shot of the system hooked up briefly to an ipad LCD (this only works for software in 31kHz mode):