Sharp X68000 Games Download

[Basa Benejan]

Asa Retro Arcade, Computer and Console enthusiast I think it's all our dreams to own somthing special like the Sharp x68000 which was the pinacle of 16 bit computers of the day even stomping on greats like the Amiga.

I recently purchased 2 orignal model (OG) Sharp x68000's (CZ-600CE) , one from Ebay the other from a Japanese Proxy site. The one from Ebay I found out was some guy pre listing the computer on Ebay. This is why you some times see the same item from Japan listed from multiple sellers on Ebay. You buy it from them, they then buy it from what ever Japanese site it was listed on, have it sent to them, then they send it to you.

This machine had obviously been worked on before. I'd say it's a very early model, there are a lot of jumpers and external parts added to all of the PCB's. The case has been damaged with tabs that clip the case together broken off , many screws missing, RF shielding missing, internal speaker was missing and lastly the floppy status indicator LED board missing ? other than that all boards and floppy drives present.

Before even attempting to power on the machines it's important to either rebuild the original PSU and run off a 100vac step down or in my case I used a more modern solution called X68k Pico PSU v2 created by mattsoft and is open source on github. _Pico_PSU_v2

This board was designed for later model machines like the ACE, Expert, PRO etc with the "Tetris" style PSU. The PSU was changed from the OG rectangular style to the Tetris style to make room for a SCSI hard drive.

Firstly I measured the original PSU case which has spacers already installed to screw down the PSU's internal so I've made the board larger to suit. Secondly I've done away with the screw terminals in favour of 3.96mm Molex headers and plugs which I use all the time in my Pinball repairs. I've moved the headers closer to the top right to get everything closer to the hole for the wires. The last change was adding extra terminals for the +5VSB which is Standby power which like on modern PC's is used to soft start the computer with the button on the front, it's also used for ejecting disks when the machine is in standby mode with a button on the back on the X68k.

At this point I reassembled the machine and powered it on. and from what I could tell it was booting. The Power led turns from red to green and Hi RESQ led comes on. Turning the machine off with the soft on/off buttom the green led flashes several times them goes red. A VERY good sign! unfortunately my SCART cable hadn't arrived so I couldnt verify if anything was on the screen.

This is as far as I got with this machine. Inserting a disk it would spin for a bit then eject it back out on both drives, I tried cleaning the heads, recapped both drives etc with no luck. The heads would just sit there and didnt look like it was even trying to seek. Without a working drive I was reluctant to take it any further.

Thinking what are the chances both drives could be bad I thought the fault may be on the Peripheral board however no luck there even after changing the NEC flopper controller chip and SED9420AC CMOS data separator IC still nothing. At this point I made the decision to buy another junk machine for parts.

I used 2 different Retro PC in m y collection, a 1500mhz P3 and a 386 DX40 with 5 1/4" disk drives to write x68000 disks using Omniflop on Win XP and Xfloppy on Win 98 and 95. I had doubts because I didnt have any original disks to verify if it was the issue the drive wasnt reading however I can confirm both programs work fine.

Unfortunately as previously discussed the OG x68000 model had a 3.6 volt NiCAD rechargeable battery which leaks when discharged right next to a pair of oscillators and reset circuit. We've all experienced this one time or another with retro gear.

The outputs Pin 5 and 6 were now behaving like they should however the machine was still not booting and Pin 18 on the 68000 cpu was still sitting high. Powering the machine on the reset should sit low for a second then come high.

Floppy drives at the bottom right, "Tetris" style PSU in the top left and SASI 40 Megabyte hard drive in top right. VERY neat design change to the OG model to fit everything in there without changing the case design.

This is pretty much a all in 1 board as opposed to the OG x68000. All the video hardware that was on a seperate board is now on the main CPU and the Video output circuitry has been moved on a seperate board. The battery has been also removed from this board to the Peripherals board.

The Peripheral board. Pretty much the same as the OG model except the battery that was on the main CPU board has been moved here. Battery is a CR2450, I replaced it with a CR2430 I use in System 3 Gottlieb Pinballs for the time being.

It's been awhile since I've updated this thread. There's certainly a lot of stuff I would have liked to cover first like floppy drive servicing but seeing as I had a heap of soldering to do, I thought I'd get stuck into the ram expansion now that I've finally collected all the parts.

Where do i start with the Retro PC's! besides the X68000 i have an FMTowns, An MSX 1 and MSX 2, Sinclair, Oric, Atari, Amiga, TSR-80, Spectravideo and numerous other machines.

Here are some images. It came with 2Meg of RAM installed as well a SCSI2SD. The unit has been converted to run off 240V but unsure if its a PICO PSU

Those will a keen eye will noticed Dtack is on pin 1 which is a input and MSK is on an I/O pin. They should be the other way around. CEM 5 was added to enabled the extra SRAM for a max of 12mb, 2 on machine and 10 on card.

4. Added 74AHCT1G07QSE-7 non inverting buffer into the DTACK line. It's been suggested that adding other boards into the system using DTACK could cause issues. All unconfirmed mind you but doesnt hurt adding this in.

Please note this revision as of 02/11/23 is untested so use at your own risk....it should be fine though. I'd like to get 5 made up asap...it is a shame to waste the remaining 4 blanks ? Geting them made up in ENIG with gold chamfered fingers is expensive.

I'll also create a version using a DIP 22V10 GAL. I'd like to easily be able to play around with the fuse maps for stock 1Mb x68000's and mush easier to program without needed special adapters. I'm also considering extending the board to make it easier to remove.

1. Larger footprint for easy installation and most importantly removal. Yeah at the time of posting this it costs $10 AUD more per board but I don't care. It's about the same footprint as the midori midi interface board. When I was testing and working out the DTACK bug in the v2.0 board, I had to tear the side off the machine so I could easily remove the smaller board...Very annoying.

2. Reverted back to a DIP 20V10 Gal and added back the MSK jumper pad which is tied to ground. Did this for 2 reasons, easier GAL to source than the TSSOP SMD 20V10 and can be removed if somebody wants to play around with the GAL equations. I think part of the original designers goal was to make these work on a stock 1mb x68000. He never got as far as to writing the equations for the GAL to implement this, I honestly don't know if it's even possible. All ram expansions, old or modern require the machines base memory to be upgraded to 2MB. The MSK jumper looks like it was implemented to select how much base memory you have but as I mentioned above it's not implemented in the fusemap for the GAL.

I'd avoid. stick to something thats reliable unless you got money to burn. I think the XVI is probably the best over all because you can switch between 10 and 16 mhz however it has the same sorts of issues as the x68030 with leaking SMD caps so you'll want to make sure its working.

With the OG models you can get them cheap but its a gamble with the battery. I'd probably recommended getting a EXPERT and above, they started using lithium coin battery's at this point. Super and above have full SCSI compatibility which gives you a wider choice with SCSI emulation devices however I highly reccomed BLUESCSI or PiSCSI, both support SASI for older machines. I'll do a write up on these eventually.

I wasn't happy with the first revison of my hybrid board so chucked it in the bin ?. People had commented that the original design by stas2k should have a line buffer for the DTACK line to prevent issues with other boards installed for example a midi interface, so this is exactly what I've done.

1. Added back in J1. Not really needed however could be useful if the implementation of the ram upgrade is possible on a stock 1MB machine. When I get time I'll have a play with the GAL equations and see if it's possible.

The Sharp x68000 is the one computer system I wished I had the opportunity to own and I only discovered it via emulation and going through the retro computer listings on eBay and other sites. The x68000 systems were only released in Japan and where I live in Australia, the most popular systems at that time were the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, which I used myself.

A great article! I saw one in use at the 2018 Vintage Computer Festival SouthEast in Atlanta, USA. The graphics abilities and the game ports it received make it a contender for best 2D graphics / 16bit CPU goodness on a personal computer.

It's difficult to state exactly how many games were released for the X68000, since after being discontinued by Sharp in 1993, both professional and hobbyist (or doujin) developers continued to produce software for it. For research purposes, we found over 640 commercial releases and over 1000 doujin or homebrew releases. Wikipedia, meanwhile, gives a single figure of over 820 games. We asked Joseph Redon of Japan's Game Preservation Society about this number, to which he replied:

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