Technical questions for the MPC2000xl and the MPC2000
By Jimmy&Rac Tue Apr 21, 2020 11:01 am
Good evening,
im a newbie to this and i accidentally downgraded my os to 1.11 (I was meant to get os1.14 to get it working with my new purchased cf cards). So now im stuck with os 1.11 which does not recognise my CF reader at all. i ordered one os disk from ebay and last night i tried to get the only floppy drive on my s950 onto my 2000xl to boot up the OS but it didnt work. XL said disk read error and I put the drive back on my 950 it wont read any disks anymore, which means i fked up my xl AND my s950.... :WTF: :WTF: :WTF:

Now it is really a pain in the ass to get my 2000xl back to newer OS.. I am in somewhere remote area of Australia and shopping online takes at least 3 weeks... i am really depressed during the quarantine time rn being unable to make any beats...

I was thinking to get an external zip drive but i could not get the os onto a zip disk unless i buy another one with usb connector...
Or i buy another cheap floppy drive to try it again...
Get a scsi to sd drive to update os that way.. but im not sure if 1.11 supports it since not many news about os 1.11

Sorry for my broken english
Please any advice to get me out of this plz??? Really appreaciate any suggestions!!!!
By 2Mb Wed Apr 22, 2020 4:19 am
OK First of all. Am I understanding correctly that you took the floppy drive out of your S950 and put it in your 2000XL? They are totally different format floppy drives and will never understand each other.

Check fuses on your s950 and be sure you put the floppy cable on right way when you put the S950 back together


Lampdog wrote:On computer can you format floppy to FAT?

If you can do this, do this and pray it works, copy MPC2000XL 1.20 .BIN file (not .zip) to your floppy an give it a go.

scsi works since 2000xl os 1.0 so you can do that if it is the only way.

You can use any plain computer style floppy drive in the 2000xl.... (PC not mac) so if you can format a drive in an older pc like lampdog says, and it's not a laptop, take the drive out the pc and put that in the 2000xl. It will work.

Last option - buy a 2000xl recovery rom on 1.20 from somebody. Honestly if you are buying two zip drives only to do this , it might be cheaper to just get the recovery rom and reload the OS direct off that.
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By richie Wed Apr 22, 2020 7:36 am
2Mb wrote:OK First of all. Am I understanding correctly that you took the floppy drive out of your S950 and put it in your 2000XL? They are totally different format floppy drives and will never understand each other.


Not entirely true. The thing is that Akai S950's use either ALPS or TEAC 1.44" drives with dip pins on the back to tell the drive to operate in Shugart / ds0 mode. This is the same configuration setting / format that the Amiga needs to function.

Some of the S950 drives however lack these pins, so yeah in that case they wouldn't work in a 2000XL without physically modifying the drive.

As long as the pins on the drive are configured correctly, the drive can work fine in the 2000 and 2000XL as well as other Akai samplers.