SX-Windows & KO-Windows On Top Of HumanOS OnThe Sharp X68000 (MiSTer)(FPGA)

#X68000 #MiSTer #FPGA

X68000 is a personal computer released in March 1987 by Sharp. It’s also called the X68k. Together with the later released X68030, it is also called known as the X680x0 series.

Together with the NEC PC98 and FM-Towns they played quite a big role in gaming on PCs.

The Sharp machines were only commercially available in Japan, in a way some would argue they are the Japanese answer to the Commodore Amigas of the West which was released two years prior to the Sharp machine.
The X68000 has graphics and sound hardware similar to many of its contemporary high-end arcade machines. Hardware wise the X68k seems to have the upper hand when it comes to arcade-gaming abilities, especially when compared to the A1000/500 Amigas. But this has been a heated debate on the internet for decades. The X68k offers near 100% arcade ports (many arcade games were actually developed on the X68k!) yet the Amiga has a much broader software library and to this day is actively used!

Many Japanese PCs featured a command line interface similar to MS-DOS and or MSX-DOS the NEC and FM-Towns machines did so to as did the X68k. Human OS was it’s MS-DOS counterpart complete with a command line interpreter, batch files, device drivers, TSR apps, shells making the command prompt life a little more user friendly etc. Games often booted directly from 5.25″ disks (often two were needed) much like many of the Amiga games did. Later hard drives were also introduced for the machine, smaller SASI 40Mb drives and later on large SCSI drives were available. Also MO-drives. With those larger storage solutions other types of software became available and much like Windows 3.x and Windows 9x running on top of MS-DOS, the X68k had SO-Windows and KO-Windows running on top of Human-OS making for a more capable machine with a GUI. Contrary to the X68k the Amiga came with Workbench and featured highly advanced multitasking which the X68k machine and it’s two Windows systems didn’t offer.

Here’s a look at me trying to make sense of the two Windows systems on the basic X68000 model (the only model that runs on the MiSTer core).

Enjoy & thanks for watching – LactobacillusPrime

Credits:
Audio used in this video was licensed from Epidemic Sound the track heard is Powerhouse 1984 by Lupus Nocte.

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