While we cherish the joys of playful microcomputing, during the late 80s and early 90s, with the Atari ST and the Amiga 500, the Japanese enjoyed themselves with the PC-88 / PC-98 but especially with the Sharp x68000 released in 1987.
With its 68000 Motorola processor clocked at 10Mhz, 1MB Ram, 65536 colors displayable on a max resolution of 768x512, this machine literally puts a slap at all the existing computers in Occident. Capcom will even use the hardware base for its CPS-1 arcade system and will develop on the Sharp bike to produce its various mythical games that have had the success we know.
Many conversions of arcade-perfect arcade titles will emerge on this medium but it is also thanks to this machine that studios like Wolfteam, Technosoft, Succes and many others will know the glory and will carry their games inferior on the different machines of the time.
Small table of the different models of this microcomputer, with the dates of outputs and its specificities:
The bowels of the beast:
The X68000 had a basic MIDI output but could be enhanced with the Roland MT32. Models based on 68020 and 68030 will be released some time later before slipping away to let place to the pc and other current Macs. The o.s was developed by Hudson Soft around a DOS kernel.
There were no CD-ROM drives released during the commercial operation of the machine. However, there was a strong community of users in Japan (nearly 1 million machines sold) who worshiped similar to our amiga and atari users here.
With the X68030 based on 68030 25MHZ and after the shutdown of the manufacture of this machine, these enthusiasts created, through small companies, (in the same way as the amiga 1200 in its time) cards of extensions Materials. This is how a cd-rom extension was created but also a USB card, Ethernet and much later DVD-rom (yes, you read well) and finally an accelerator card with a proc 68060.
For the record, elders of Data East developed a portage officially sold Road Avenger, in 2006 !!