
Sharp X68000 - peter_d_sherman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000
======
0xcde4c3db
X68K is super-interesting. It's hard to summarize it without sounding like
you're just making stuff up to troll retrogaming/retrocomputing enthusiasts. I
mean, imagine running into a post like this on Reddit or whatever:

"Did you know that the company behind the Bomberman and Adventure Island
series made an MS-DOS clone, but it was for a 68000-based computer that had
proper arcade-tier graphics and sound hardware in it? Yes, they were working
with NEC at basically the same time on PC Engine and PC-FX, but the computer
was a completely unrelated Sharp design. In addition to having better arcade
ports than any other system at the time, it had a thriving doujin scene. One
of these doujin games was an enhanced clone of Sega's version of Tetris, which
inspired the creation of Tetris: The Grand Master."

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imglorp
Another Japanese 68K machine from the same time: Sony NEWS (network
engineering workstation). This one was System-V like, not DOS-ish.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_NEWS)

For context, this was probably in response to the Sun 3, also 68k. Sun's
foresightful motto was, "the network is the computer," which maybe explained
more of the Sony effort.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-3)

~~~
tyingq
Hmm. Sun had a windowing system called "NeWS".
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS)

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slartibardfast0
Anyone looking to dabble with similar 68k machines might enjoy the MiSTer FPGA
Console, which also re-implements the X68000:

[https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki](https://github.com/MiSTer-
devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki)

[https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/X68000_MiSTer](https://github.com/MiSTer-
devel/X68000_MiSTer)

It pairs a Cyclone V with dual-core ARM, a HDMI scaler and SD-RAM for latency.

It's just an incredible project, in breadth & depth.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
Unfortunately, the MiSTer X68000 core isn't very usable yet. The upstream
project has been updated and the author seems open to the idea of maintaining
a MiSTer port but doesn't have the hardware.

~~~
slartibardfast0
Thanks for the info! I hope that can change very soon.

I got into the MiSTer for the Amiga minimig core, watching the project develop
has been really enlightening, for example, the wildly interesting MSX
completely passed me by as a child in the 1980s.

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baybal2
My parents had a black x68000 of uncertain modification. It was worth a few
yearly incomes in early nineties Russia. It worked till 1996 or 1997, when
hard drive failure put end to it.

A repairman that came to fix it took a look at it, and was like "is it even a
computer?"

From that time, we still had a black NEC Ultralite by 2006. When I returned
back to Russia in 2016, I got to know that parents threw it away. Again, that
was an extremely expensive thing for early nineties.

Father liked to buy toys like that for mom on his business trips to Japan.

~~~
snvzz
>threw away

That hurt to read. They're quite valuable even today.

------
contingencies
It's actually terrible how little content there is on Wikipedia regarding past
hardware. I uploaded images of an 8086, the LCII, IIE, etc. and was gobsmacked
at how bad the existing ones were. Come on people!

~~~
LeoPanthera
This site is so old it's almost a museum piece itself, but it is basically the
Wikipedia of historical computers.

[http://www.old-computers.com/](http://www.old-computers.com/)

------
znpy
Some years ago I looked pretty much everywhere for one of these, but it was
either impossible or not financially viable to get one. I wanted to try and
run NetBSD on it, possibly opening it up as a shell account server.

I was studying computer architecture ad university and the reference processor
was the Motorola 68000. Needless to say, we had to do various kind of
exsercises without having the thing running [1]. The only thing the professors
recommeded was an emulator, Easy68k i think, but it was super uncomfortable to
use and it used to mess up jumps and condition evaluation (even in its own
sample programs).

I ended up verifying the exercises using a Debian/68k virtual machine under
Aranym. Needless to say, it was slow, but at least it was functional.

[1] Personal rant: it's "funny" how professor in the calculus classes in the
first year expect you to "question everything" and not to "assume something is
just true because the professor said so" but then you progress and have real-
world topics and professors just wing it and say "meh, that's the reference
processor for the course and for the exam, you are supposed to run samples in
your mind or on paper, if you want to verify that what I'm saying is true get
some m68k machine and run the code (good luck with that)."

~~~
ci5er
The thing I loved about the 68k was how quick it was to wire wrap (breadboard)
a fairly serviceable terminal sitch, from where one could bootstrap
development of devices and then programs and then more devices. This was all
pre-linux (but post-minix), but if you ignore the head-banging incidents,
pretty straight forward.

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spongeb00b
An interesting machine. Dave Jones of eevblog did a great tear down of one
[https://youtu.be/W40qGkp-mEU](https://youtu.be/W40qGkp-mEU)

~~~
bdowling
His teardowns are hard to watch if you love vintage computers. He often does
destructive things to them and you know they go straight into a landfill after
the video is over.

If you want to see someone who lovingly restores and repairs vintage computers
and actually gets them working again, check out Adrian Black on YouTube.

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needle0
Many people were reminded of this machine when they first revealed the groove-
in-the-middle design of the original PlayStation 4.

------
bane
Anybody interested in this machine, there is a Reddit for it

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sharpx68000](https://www.reddit.com/r/sharpx68000)

There's also typically one to play with at the annual demosplash competition
at CMU.

------
polskibus
Why did Motorola stop working in CPUs?

~~~
nine_k
They spun off the semiconductor business, that became Freescale, then merged
with NXP.

