The Best Gaming Computer
you don’t know about. Yet.
By Carl Williams
X6800. To most reading this, that is simply a weird combination of a letter and numbers. For a select few it is
recognized as one hell of a computer that we never got in
North America, the Sharp X68000. Released in 1987, and
upgraded over the years, the X68000 evaded coming to
North America much like the FM Towns Marty did. Reasons for this probably originate around the fact that anything that was not IBM compatible was pretty much dead
in North America as proven by the Commodore and Atari
line of computers– both of whom were fighting an obviously uphill battle and losing it badly.
that do not know, Hudson was
also involved with creating the
PC-Engine/Turbo Grafx-16 and
subsequent NEC platforms
while somehow being cozy
enough to Nintendo to be able
to create various computer
games based on Mario. Side
note here: Hudson was purchased by Konami a few years
back but we have yet to see anything come of that buyout.
The Sharp X68000 is upgradeable from the CPU to the
RAM and hard drive, after all this is a computer. The
fastest CPU that was made available for the X68000 was
a 25 mhz 68030. RAM maxes out at about 12 megs but it
is a waste since almost no games require more than a couple of megs. It would be pretty cool to see what this little
thing could have done had it lasted longer than it did.
Companies were supporting the X68000 with some heavy
hitter titles from Castlevania to Super Street Fighter II.
Original titles were made available too including Aquales
(similar to Cybernator) and Knight Arms (you just have to
see it to believe it).
Capcom used the X68000 for developing games for their
CPS arcade platform for many years. Interesting.
On paper, the X68000 looks quite underpowered till later
in its life but this thing kicked out some major gaming
goodness. Importing is probably out of the question for
most people which is eased a little bit by the fact that the
operating system, tools and other required parts of the
software are freely offered for download without fear of
legal action. Everything from the BIOS to several of the
operating systems available have been released as freeware which means they are free to use by anyone that
wants to download them.
One interesting fact about the X68000 is the involvement
of Hudson Soft, who developed the computer for Sharp.
Hudson has been quite prolific in retro gaming. For those
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