X68000 Vs Amiga

[Suyay Escarsega]

Aftertaking a good long look at the games on 1987's Sharp x68000 home computer, it's pretty obvious that this machine is the superior gaming platform. It's pretty insane actually. Aside from the diskette drives and the audio, this thing beats the stuffing out of the OCS Amiga machines (albeit it was released two years after the original Amiga 1000).

I love my Amiga too - got a 1200 in my collection - but the X68000 is just a fun machine. There are great arcade ports, a good amount of which near-perfect, there are games with improvements over other ports, and the music is awesome in a good amount of games.

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari (River City Ransom) - I like the NES/PC Engine versions of this game, and the X68000 one is another good one. There's more color, and more stuff to the game like a bigger world.

Akumajo Dracula (Castlevania) - It's a sweet game, it's perfectly playable with no japanese knowledge, the soundtrack with MIDI or the FM is great, and I find it a bit more enjoyable than the NES version because of all this.

Cameltry - This game is fairly simple, you try to navigate a marble through a maze which you turn. It's all gravity/physics-based and a fun enough game. If you check out the tracker, you'll see that I'm always tacking some more time onto it because I like to beat my own times.

Apart from those, you have a good list of good ones. Daimakaimura is always awesome - I love the soundtrack and it plays great, SION IV is fun, but I've only ever got it to run on my X68030, never tried too hard on my XVI-HD.

Also, a tip that you probably know if you've read around, the power supplies in the X68Ks like to fail a good bit. I went through two to get a good one on my X68030, and the XVI-HD had a working one with it. You can mod an ATX PSU into the thing, but I never tried. It's a fun computer, and if you can get one for a good price (epay probably won't work, you may need to look into Yahoo Auctions JP) then have a blast with it. If you can't find one but want to try an emu if those are OK, WinX68K High Speed is the only one that I've messed with and it works good enough. Have fun with the computer, and explore the library - it's a computer that I love, probably the Japanese computer that gets the most use out of me behind the X1 Twin or PC-98, and should be pretty cool to you.

So you could've afforded four Amiga 500's or two Amiga 2000's for the price of one X68000. I'm sure the Sharp dropped in price, in particular as newer models arrived, but so did the Amiga (and Atari ST).

The X68000 is a cool gaming machine that still is expensive, but one shouldn't mix apples with oranges. Just consider how many gamers in 1987 that even had 1500 USD to spend on a single machine, and that would've bought you half a Sharp...

It is truly upside down from Europe, where computers tended to be cheap but underpowered. Generally it is said that the American market was more willing to spend big bucks on quality, but in comparison the Japanese seem to have been even better equipped. Of course the lower end Japanese market was covered by Famicom, MSX, possibly SC-3000, FM-7, Sharp MZ series and X1 (which I didn't find a note about launch price for).

I like the X68000 quite a bit. It seems to be a lottery though on whether or not the games work. I've received quite a few that were dead. Been lucky enough to get my money back on them though with no questions asked.

It's amazing how much is in English but when they aren't I have no idea what to do. I have a fatal fury game and it gives me a message in Japanese and I haven't been able to figure out how to play it so that one has been on the back burner for a while.

There's still a big following of the x68k today due to the quality of the arcade ports. I've come close to pulling the trigger on one a few times, I'd probably go w/a setup where I can just play the warez instead of having to deal with all the floppies. It's one of those systems that's under the radar unless you're really hardcore. I can't imagine what it would've been like owning one of those BITD.

This thing is too rich and too old for me, but their version of Star Wars: Attack on the Death Star seems like something special. I haven't gotten around to playing this on a Sharp emulator, but I intend to.

The Amiga was built from scratch with a specific budget in mind. It may not have been as powerful as the x68000 but for its price it offered great value. The x68000 was far more expensive and didn't offer that much more.

I imagine anyone introducing the FM Towns overseas would've had a marketing issue on their hands. Should you pit it as a HDD-less mid-range PC against Dell and Tandy, or as a gaming home computer against Commodore and Atari, which technically were inferior but far cheaper? Of course there also were lesser, cheaper PCs like e.g. the IBM PS/2 Model 30 that was estimated at $1000 (not sure if it refers to the 8086 or 286 model), but it'd be just as unfair to compare it to a 16 MHz 386DX gaming computer as if you toss in an Amiga 2000 against the FM Towns.

Macintosh SE: 7.18 MHz 68000, 1 MB RAM (expandable to 4 MB), one built-in floppy drive plus an external one, and a built-in 9" mono monitor was listed at $2899. Optionally you could get a SCSI hard disk, but I suppose that cost more than an external floppy drive.

Now I seriously doubt a Mac SE is any more powerful than an Amiga or Atari at half or a quarter of the price, and clearly the Sharp has much more interesting games hardware compared to a Mac, but given that there was a market for the Macintosh computers, possibly that is where Sharp should have challenged.

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.

The Amiga is advancing our medium on all fronts. For the first time, a personal computer is providing the visual and aural quality our sophisticated eyes and ears demand. Compared to the Amiga, using some other home computers is like watching black-and-white television with the sound turned off.

After that magical year of 1983, when Commodore had briefly become a billion-dollar company and briefly been even bigger than Apple, there had been little but bad news on the financial front. 1984 had marked a gradual cooling of the excitement surrounding home computers. That was a problem for many companies, but few more so than Commodore: Commodore represented fully 60 percent of the home-computer hardware market by that point, and had long since axed all of their more expensive machines. For them 1984 brought the failure of the eminently fail-worthy Plus/4, an alarming buildup of Commodore 64 inventories, and a disappointing Christmas that failed to come close to the previous one. And yet their troubles were only just beginning.

The 68000 Wars is one of my favourite stories to tell when someone asks me more about my vintage computer collection. I was an Atari ST user at the time because I bought into the 68000 era very early. Had I waited, the Amiga would have been my machine because it had the same spirit as my beloved Atari 600XL.

For some reason Los Gatos tried to block the Fat Agnus, they even claimed it would be impossible to make it work. Commodore achieved the impossible, which I think annoyed Los Gatos. The Amiga was great but Los Gatos and Commodore both made mistakes. Commodores biggest mistake was they should have had chunky pixels and a strategy for 3d in 1990.

For whatever reason, the actual impact that the legal battle had on the Amiga tends to get inflated these days. It was an annoyance and a concern to Commodore, especially given their perilous financial situation, but I see no reason to believe that the history of the Amiga would have been all that substantially different had it never happened.

You also needed the $200 memory expansion to expand the Amiga to 512 K to do much of anything at all with the machine. The ST came with 512 K standard. So, in all you were getting close to $2000 for a usable Amiga, almost twice the cost of the color ST system.

On paper, the Amiga, Atari, x68000 and Genesis MegaDrive were all attempts at designing the all-singing, all-dancing 16-bit multimedia wonder-machine. And all give testament to the concessions their designers made due to cost projections, corporate viability estimates, changing market conditions etc.

The Amiga world premiere video that you had linked was pulled from YouTube (I just thought you might like to know). On a related note, thank you for embedding so many images and videos with your articles! They add so much to the experience, especially to your younger readers who are a bit too young to have experienced everything at the time.

During the course of its life, Castlevania had many ports, remakes, and re-releases. A few of the remakes (such as Vampire Killer or the Sharp x68000 Castlevania) tried to reinvent the game, adding new stages, new ideas, and a reworked concept to give the game more depth. Other entries, such as the port for the Commodore Amiga, hewed closer to the original game.

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