before I begin with another epic write up here's a progress report on my Sega CD rescore project

Game 1- Fatal Fury Special- DONE!
Game 2 Samurai Shodown- In testing
Game 3- Final Fight CD (J)- in Progress
Game 4- Yet to be determined
Game 5- Yet to be determined

and on to the main part of the show

A look at the Sharp X68000



What is it?

Released in 1987 it was LIGHT YEARS ahead of the NES, Famicom, PC Engine and the Mega Drive which would hit a few years later, And slightly more powerful than the SNES.

Specs

* CPU / Clock speed:

Motorola 68000 / 10MHz (X68000 models).

Motorola 68000 / 16MHz (XVI models).

Motorola 68030 / 25MHz (X68030 models).

* ROM:1 MB(128KB BIOS,768KB Character Generator)

* RAM: 1-4 MB (Expandable up to 12 MB)

* VRAM: 512 KB graphic + 512 KB text + 32KB Sprite VRAM

* SRAM: 16KB Static RAM

* Screen Resolutions:

256 x 240 / 256 x 256 / 512 x 240 / 512 x 256 / 512 x 512 / 640 x 480 / 768 x 512 / 1024 x 1024

* Maximum colours on screen:

512 x 512: 65536 non-indexed colors on screen, or 256 indexed colors with 65536 palette and 128 sprites.

1024 x 1024: 16 indexed colors ,65536 palette.

* Sprites number:128 sprites, 32 sprites per scanline

* Sprite Size: 16 x 16

* Sprite colors: 16 colors per sprite/palette ,selectable from 16 palettes

256 total colors for the whole 128 sprites

* Graphics Hardware:Hardware scrolling, priority control, super-impose

* Sound chips:

Yamaha YM2151 (eight FM stereo channels)

OKI MSM6258 (one 4 bit PCM mono channel)

* Expansion: 2 card slots (4 on Pro models)

* I/O Ports:

2 MSX compatible joystick ports, Audio IN / OUT, Stereo scope/3D goggles port, TV/monitor Control, RGB/NTSC Video Image I/O, Expansion (2 slots), External FDD (up to 2), SASI/SCSI (depending on model), RS232 serial port,parallel port,headphone and microphone ports.

* Floppy Drives:

two soft-eject 5.25 floppy drives, 1.2MB each two 3.5 floppy drives, 1.4MB each (compact models)

* Hard Disk: 20-80MB SASI/SCSI (depending on model)

* Operating Systems: Human68k (MS DOS-alike developed by Hudson), SX-Windows GUI

* Power Input: AC 100v, 50/60Hz

* Weight:~8kg (~10kg Pro)

Quite a Beast by 1987 Standards. It's sound was amazing and Graphics were far ahead of anything on ANYTHING at the time, not even the highest end DOS PCs could compete with what the X68000 could do.






Various models came out over the years some with hard drive others with out. HUDSON yes HUDSON developed the OS which was heavily based on DOS (typing DIR with a disc inserted gives you the contents of the disc much like what it would do if you were playing DOS) Games were on these things called Floppies...what are those they were discs and they were floppy and quite large later smaller discs were made available that actually held a few KB more of data.



The Game shown in the image above is What I believe to be THE BEST version of Castlevania, it was later ported to the PS1 as Castlevania Chronicles. It was the first game I tried out on the system. Konami games on the system just oozed quality. While the X68000 COULD HAVE handled snatcher you won't find it on this platform, a shame because it could have been amazing.







Being as powerful as it was it was in fact a development platform while you may have never played an X68k you've played games made on it.....Final Fight? Street Fighter 2? Strider? All made using the X68k. Versions for the computer do exist and aside from different music they are identical to the arcade games, right down to the warnings. It might be feasible even that the development code was what was released on this computer.Other games made for the X68K may have been running on arcade code developed on this thing as well.



This being a computer......

2 words HENTAI GAMES

Shangrlia 2 is heavily recomended if you can read Japanese. Can Can Bunny also has a few installments and original games like Lipstick Adventure were also made.

There are quite a few emulators for this wonderful machine head over to zophar and pick one out YOU WILL NOT Be Disapointed. Its criminal this computer never left Japan.