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X68K Guy · Guest

Japan had its own rival to the Amiga, the Sharp X68000, released in 1987,
about 2 years after the original Amiga.

Like the Amiga, the Sharp X68000 obviously used the same CPU architecture as
the Amiga and the Mac. ...the good 'ole 68000. Like the Amiga, the Sharp
X68000 had custom graphics & audio chips that made it far superior to the
Mac. both X68000 and Amiga were a paradise for game creators. X68000 is
just far more obscure and was limited to Japan.

I just found some cool X68000 mainboard | motherboard and chip pictures:

http://img145.exs.cx/img145/2116/boardx6800010xr.jpg
http://img145.exs.cx/img145/3853/boardx6800025an.jpg
http://img145.exs.cx/img145/4285/boardx6800037mr.jpg
http://img228.exs.cx/img228/5175/boardx6800040xb.jpg
http://img228.exs.cx/img228/3236/boardx6800050wf.jpg
http://img228.exs.cx/img228/2509/boardx6800067uo.jpg

its on ebay [http://www.tinyurl.com/6ov9y]

in the 4th image you see the chip called 'Cynthia'. this is probably the
coolest of X68000's custom chips.

from what I understand X68000's "Cynthia" is the equivalent of Amiga's
Copper,
or maybe the entire Agnus+Copper+Blitter.

although Cynthia is different because it is a true hardware sprite
generator.

quote:
"Like most computers of the time custom chips in the X68000 series were
given fanciful names. In the below chart you can see how these chips were
changed from model to model, sometimes to fix bugs or add new features,
other times to combine functions into fewer parts."

http://nfg.2y.net/games/x68k/

this page names the custom chips in X68000 and their functions, across some
of the major models
(X68000 spanned 20 models from 1987 to 1993)

X68000's custom chips, or at least some of them, and X68000's OS, were
created by Hudson Soft, the same company that designed the chips in the
8-bit|16-bit NEC PC Engine aka TurboGrafx-16, and the 32-bit NEC PC-FX.

X68000's OS was called Human68k, an MS DOS-like OS developed by Hudson and
the SX-Windows GUI
(which has nothing to do with MS Windows)

X68000 was probably the most powerful home gaming platform of the 1980s,
aside from the more powerful 32-bit Fujitsu FM Towns of 1989 which was
probably closer to the AGA powered Amiga 4000 released in the 1990s.

X68000 was home to many arcade ports that were basicly identical to the
arcade games, and also many fairly faithful conversions of more complex
multi-CPU arcade games.

the X68000 ports of the less complex (yet still very impressive) arcade
games like Strider, Final Fight,
Alien Syndrome, Street Fighter 2, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, R-Type and others, makes
the Amiga versions look like C64.

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