Not sure how this flew under my radar, but this thing is pretty sweet: Most of the best ports of arcade games that were available at the time came out on this computer. Space Harrier, After Burner (2), Super Hang-On - all those games were faithfully ported to the system. I just got around to playing Space Harrier on an emulator, and I was pretty amazed that they were able to port so much. The music is very faithful to the original, the digitized voice clips are the originals, and the graphics are (I think anyway) the same as the arcade version. Something you don't normally see during the 80s, heh. I also heard that a lot of people from NicoVideo put MIDI music rendering in real time on the system using some sort of sequencing program. I wonder if people normally used this PC to program Megadrive music and games? I sure would. I was digging around the Space Harrier Floppy Disk image and came across two documents written by "Yu-You" (music programmer) and "KAIHATSU", here's one from the music programmer: And here's one from someone else, don't know who Kaihatsu is: They both seem pretty interesting, too bad I don't know much Japanese. Google Translate seems to hint that these are just reflections on the development process from both developers. I have more games with more stuff like this that I can post if there's interest. Also, the PuyoPuyo port has FM MIDI files, maybe from the original game's production. Some of the music is of course used in Mean Bean Machine, so that's pretty interesting too.
Heh, what timing. I was remembering Castlevania Chronicles (the Playstation port of the X68k Akumajou Dracula) and was curious about what other games the computer had. Apparently it had quite a lot of arcade ports - Super Street Fighter 2 probably looks the most impressive of the bunch. It must've been a sweet computer to have at the time, although now MAME easily eclipses it.
Like I said, X68000 was also good for music composition for the time. http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm7244206 I think you could also get a upmix converter attachment to play with a wider ranger of instruments, there are some videos of those around NicoVideo. I looked at PuyoPuyo and the music that plays during the game sounds exactly like the arcade version. The MIDI files are indeed FM, and I was able to load them in FL Studio and fool around with them and everything, so they should be the original music files. If anyone wants them, here! Another cool thing I found was a huge FTP pub filled with x68k software. You can find all sorts of crap here, from audio editors like the one used in the video above as well some attachments for said programs, graphic editors, stuff for networking, programming, etcetc. They even have a small mini archive of "disk magazines" from long ago. I haven't been able to open any of them up in my emulator, so I don't know what could be inside. They even have some freeware games and other interesting junk. http://shq.dyndns.org/x68pub/ This would've been a goldmine for me if I were growing up in Japan during the 90s. :P
It might be outclassed by it's arcade brother, but if anything it does a damn good better job of a console port than the Mega Drive version. Oh, especially the music - it's just like a CPS1 port.
According to wikipedia, many cps1 games were in fact developed on the x68k. That would make ssf2 be an arcade port of a x68k game.
By the way guys, if you're wanting an emulator to play these games in, try Win68k. Being a Japanese computer it'll be difficult to set up at first but hey - anything that has both Yamaha output and MIDI output is good by me.
I have one of these. FYI The Fantasy Zone port has an exclusive level not featured in any other port (or even the arcade version) - it's literally stage 5 from Space Harrier, complete with boss.
Wasn't Super Street Fighter II a CPS2 game, though? Anyway, the X86k does look pretty awesome (especially in black). I've heard of the X68000 before (from looking up Strider), but I never cared to research it.
I don't know if this an official release by Hudson or something, but there's a very accurate version of Super Mario Bros. on the X68000 - definitely a port from the original Famicom code (I did a few comparisons with Hex Workshop and a lot of data matches with the original). But I don't know if this is some kind of emulator, or whatever. But I do know that there aren't a lot of files on the floppy, and none are bigger than an actual NES rom. I couldn't find a video of this port anywhere on the web, or any discussion on it. I tried to play it on my emulator, but I couldn't find a way to press the Start button without the software keyboard. And even then, I can't even move Mario! The music sounds different obviously, but it might be the original sequences but only sound different because of the audio hardware. It might as well be, because everything else is dead on accurate. Very neat.
The filename has a "[p]", which means it's a pirate. Some similar Famicom ports were made for the PC Engine, as well.
Yeah I noticed that, but I thought that the only reason they marked it as such was because that there were modifications to the game itself. There are two revisions total, and both had files going far back as 1989. Were there roms and emulators all the way back then? :\
I really hope you tried to use the joystick because practically all games use it. Back on Sega ports, did anybody try After Burner 2? Once you play it with the mouse you don't want to use a d-pad again ever o_o Now we really need to emulate the analog joystick on the MD. I found out how it works but I'm still unable to figure out the button layout, only the axes (wtf it has support for 4 axes, not 3).
I did, no dice - unless im doing something wrong also here are the files from this version, I still don't know what to think of it. it might be emulated, but I'm still not sure either what I'm looking at.
This computer platform was pretty slick for its time. I found out about it when looking up Thunder Force II. The X68000 version is pretty darn close to the Genesis version, but it has two extra levels!
Ever since I found about this computer I just had to get me one at all costs. And now I am one of those few lucky ones who do. Just got mine today. Now I have to make a VGA adapter cable and everything would be set . This thing really is a beauty and a very powerful beast.
Sorry to bump this topic but the x68000 kicks ass so whatever. I recently got into listening to MDXs and stuff, and they sound awesome. There's a huge pack filled with tons of MDX files from here. You can play these with this, which I personally use but there are other players out there. Someone made a really spot on MDX version of Sonic 1's music. The snares sound like the snare that was in the prototype versions of the original game. I'm not sure how this person managed to do this though. You can download and check them out for yourself here. If you don't feel like listening with a player, I recorded the credits BGM to give you an idea of how accurate it sounds. Someone made another version of Sonic 1's music that uses a sampled version of the original Megadrive's snare, but the music itself doesn't sound as accurate. That version is somewhere in the complete MDX pack. Anyone know how one would go about creating MDX music?
IDK how to make MDX files but I can tell you the X68000 base configuration has a YM2151 — the original OPM sound chip whose OPM channels VOPM emulates — and a MSM6258V single-channel ADPCM chip (one of several single-channel audio chips by OKI that were used in quite a few arcade boards, but I don't think Sega ever did) — so if you were to fake it with some music editor like FL, all you need is 8 channels of VOPM and one raw audio channel with samples. There are a bunch of add-on sound modules, but I don't know much about them...
