Sharp X68000

» see sharp.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

You pressed the power button and the machine did not cut out. The screen faded to black, the sound faded to silence, and then it turned itself off. That was 1987, on a home computer, and it was a software-controlled shutdown at a moment when everything else on a desk had a switch that simply broke the circuit. The case was two black towers joined together with a carrying handle that retracted into the top, and both floppy drives ejected under software control as well.

Underneath the styling was the actual argument. The X68000 had a 10 MHz 68000 and custom coprocessors with names like Cynthia and Vsop, and what those chips did was hardware sprites and hardware scrolling on tiled backgrounds. That is not a specification for a home computer of 1987. That is a specification for an arcade cabinet, and the monitor made the point explicit by accepting every horizontal scan rate an arcade board was likely to use, from 15 kHz up to 31, over analog RGB, which meant you could unbolt a JAMMA arcade board and plug it into your computer screen. Sound came from a Yamaha YM2151 doing eight channels of FM synthesis with an OKI chip alongside it for sampled audio.

It cost 369,000 yen at launch, which was several times what a games console cost and comparable to a car repair. The operating system was Human68k, written for Sharp by Hudson Soft, an MS-DOS workalike with English commands and executables ending in.X. In the box with the first machine, along with the OS, was Konami's Gradius. Sharp shipped a home computer with a shoot-em-up as the pack-in and expected you to understand what that meant.

Sharp never exported it. Not to Europe or the United States, and not here. The machine that reached Turkish desks in that decade was a PC clone assembled from whatever was cheapest at the time, and the question in the shop was how much RAM and which sound card, never which custom sprite chip. What did eventually arrive was the output rather than the hardware: the X68000 conversions circulated as files long after the machine stopped being made, and the first time most of us saw what it could do was through an emulator on a computer it had lost to.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was actually for ~

The X68000's reputation rests on conversions. When Capcom brought Street Fighter II home to it, the port was close enough to the cabinet that Capcom also sold an adapter so you could plug in a Super Famicom pad or the Power Stick, because the games deserved better than a nine-pin joystick. Konami and Namco treated the machine as a legitimate target rather than a compromise, and the results are the reason people still argue that the X68000 had the most accurate arcade conversions of its generation.

It was not only a games machine. Human68k supported 18-character filenames when DOS allowed eight, and it was case sensitive with Shift JIS kanji permitted in filenames, all of which made its disks unreadable to a DOS machine unless you deliberately stayed inside the old limits. There were three separate graphical shells over the years, MIDI expansion boards, a networking card, and a 68040 accelerator called Jupiter-X. The last model, the X68030 of 1993, went to a 25 MHz 68030 with an optional SCSI drive.

~ what really happened ~

Nothing dramatic happened. The 68000 family stopped being where the performance was, and the Japanese desktop market consolidated onto PC clones running Windows exactly as every other market had. NEC's PC-98 line, which had owned Japanese business computing, went the same way in the same years. Sharp let the X68000 run to the end of the decade and stopped.

The unusual part is what Sharp did afterward. The company released Human68k itself, the console, the C compiler suites, the SX-Window environment and the BIOS ROM images as public domain software, freely downloadable. Very few manufacturers have ever done that with a dead platform. It is the reason the emulation scene around the machine is legally uncomplicated in a way that almost nothing else from that era is.

~ what replaced it ~

In 2022 a company called Zuiki announced the X68000 Z, a miniature reproduction of the original two-tower case, thirty-five years after the first one shipped. The nostalgia object exists because the machine has an afterlife that its sales figures never justified.

What the X68000 proves is that a market of one country can support a genuinely better machine for twelve years and still lose. Sharp built the thing enthusiasts wanted, priced it at what it cost to build, and declined to fight for anywhere else. The hardware stayed home. The software got out, eventually, in a form Sharp gave away.

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