X68000 CompactXVI and Compact Flash card: a successful story!

The following information was kindly contributed by our forum member Caius. Thank you for the excellent tutorial and keep up the good work !

First of all I must say that this kind of mod is more difficult to do since X68000 CompactXVI doesn't have an internal SCSI connector like the other models or better yet it has an internal connector which is connected by a flat cable to a small sub-board with provides external SCSI connnector. So if we want to make a completely internal mod we have to work directly on this sub-board. If you look at the second of the following pictures you can see 30 (2 rows of 15) solder pads near the SCSI connector.

These 30 solder pads are connected PIN to PIN with the external SCSI connector so, first of all, we have to install sockets on these 30 pads. In my case I used these sockets but you can use different ones.

The pinout of these 3o pads is the following:

Black circles are GROUND, asterisk means 'not connected'. Numbers in circles are the equivalent of the 50 pins SCSI IDC connector. I took the pinout ( and some pictures) from Painkilla blog, all credits goes to him! Look at his tutorial (in korean) here:

http://kpark.co.kr/2665922

Now that we have the pinouts, we have two choices: building a custom SCSI cable which connects the installed sockets to SCSI to IDE converter (In my case a Yamaha V769970) like Painkilla made (see the above link) or building a small piggyback board adapter like I made. Click on the pictures to enlarge.

Here is the layout:

And here is the layout in ExpressPCB format:

X68000 Compact SCSI adapter layout

Obviously you have to put the pin headers soldering them on the top layer of the board ( the 30 pin headers downward and the 50 ones faced up) then you have to piggyback the board on the previously installed sockets. Connect a SCSI 50 pin cable from piggyback board to SCSI to IDE adapter and then connect it to the CF to IDE adapter. Click on the following images to enlarge.

For my test I used the great Eidis HD image which I restored onto a 1GB Sandisk Compact Flash. I set the jumpers on my SCSI to IDE adapter to SCSI ID 3. Regarding other settings I got best results with PARITY and TERMINATION jumpers set to OFF (with these ON sometimes I got random freezes or boot errors). BLOCK SIZE jumper also is set to OFF.

That's all. If you have any question, feel free to ask, I will be glad to answer! Special thanks go to Painkilla, Eidis and Dhampird for all the help they gave me!