
The system has two joystick ports, both 9-pin male and supporting Atari standard joysticks. Many add-on cards were released for the system, including networking (Neptune-X), SCSI, memory upgrades, CPU enhancements (JUPITER-X 68040/060 accelerator), and MIDI I/O boards.
#Sharp x68000 bios download software
Floppy disks came in a couple of different formats, none of which are natively readable on other platforms, though software exists that can read and write these disks on a DOS or Windows 98 PC. Per the hardware's capability, formatted SASI drives can be 10, 20 or 30 megabytes in size and can be logically partitoned as well.
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It was an excellent monitor for playing JAMMA compatible arcade boards due to its analog RGB input and standard-resolution refresh timing.Įarly machines uses the rare Shugart Associates System Interface (SASI) as their hard disk interface later versions adopted the industry-standard "small computer system interface" (SCSI). The monitor supports 15/24 and 31 kHz with up to 65,535 colors and functions as a cable-ready television ( NTSC-J standard) with composite video input. The rear has a plethora of ports, including stereoscopic output, FDD and HDD expansion ports, and I/O board expansion slots. The top has a retractable carrying handle (only on non-Compact models), a reset button, and a Non-Maskable Interrupt (NMI) button.
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The front of the computer has a headphone jack, volume control, joystick, keyboard and mouse ports. The system's keyboard, although rather poorly designed overall, has a mouse port built into either side. The screen would fade to black and sound would fade to silence before the system turned off. This system was also one of the first to feature a software-controlled power switch pressing the switch would signal the system's software to save and shutdown, similar to the ATX design of modern PC's. The X68000 features two soft-eject 5.25" floppy drives, or in some of the compact models, two 3.5" floppy drives, and a very distinct case design of two connected towers, divided by a retractable carrying handle. Since the system's release, Human68k, console, and SX-Window C compiler suites and BIOS ROMs have been released as public domain and are freely available for download. Most games also booted and ran from floppy disk some were hard disk installable and others require hard disk installation. These GUI shells could be booted from floppy disk or the system's hard drive. A third GUI called Ko-Windows existed its interface is similar to Motif. Other operating systems available include NetBSD for X68030 and OS-9.Įarly models had a GUI called "VS"(Visual Shell) later ones were packaged with SX-WINDOW. At least three major versions of the OS were released, with several updates in between. Pre-2.0 versions of the OS had command line output only for common utilities like 'format' and 'switch' while later versions included forms-based versions of these utilities, greatly improving their usability.
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The X68k ran an operating system developed for Sharp by Hudson Soft, called Human68k, which features commands very similar to those in MS-DOS (typed in English). RAM in these systems is expandable to 12 MB though most games and applications didn't require more than two. The first model was released in 1987, with a 10 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, 1 MB of RAM and no hard drive the last model was released in 1993 with a 25 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU, 4 MB of RAM and optional 80 MB SCSI hard drive. The Sharp X68000, often referred to as the "X68k", is a home computer released only in Japan by the Sharp Corporation.
