Didn't See That Coming! The X68000, Japan's Monster PC, Gets a Mini-Console

[ArugulaZ]

I just learned about this a couple days ago from the YouTube personality MadLittlePixel.

In case you didn't know, the X68000 is a home computer running on the same hardware as Capcom's late 1980s arcade games, with a DOS-like file system. What this means is that the system punches way above the weight class of other 1980s home computers, with numerous arcade perfect conversions and exclusive titles that flaunt the machine's advanced 16-bit muscle. The game Castlevania Chronicles got its start on the X68000, and while it seemed like a bog-standard Castlevania experience on the Playstation in the late 1990s, it was a lot more impressive ten years prior.

This titan of home computers, costing $3000 in 1987 and selling less than 200,000 units, is somehow getting its own mini console, courtesy of Zwiki. They were the guys who made the Astro City cabinet for Sega and the Mini Egret II for Taito. We don't know much about the X68000 Mini yet, but everything I've seen so far, including the mechanical keyboard with interchangeable keys and a trackball/mouse hybrid, leads me to believe that it's going to be expensive. Not as expensive as an actual X68000 computer, because almost nothing is, but I could easily see this shipping for $300 or more.

MLP (the YouTube guy, not the colorful horses) also says there's a mini-console PC in the works, but I'm less interested in that. Might be handy for anyone who doesn't want to use DOSbox, if they can wrangle the rights to the system's best games from Sierra, or Activision, or Microsoft, or whoever the hell owns them now.

 

[Aurelia]

This is really cool! I know very little about the X68000 other than the very impressive arcade ports that it had on the system. If this is affordable, this might legitimately be worth picking up.

I think a PC-98 mini could be really cool too.

 

[madhair60]

Haha. Good timing as I just got into this machine a few days ago.

 

[Peklo]

Akumajō Dracula for the system was always a masterpiece. Igarashi did such unbelievably valuable service in making sure it had an opportunity to reach worldwide audiences, at a time when demand for games of its type was at its lowest point. Underappreciated then and emblematic of all the good he did with the series since.

I do hope the murmurs of a mini 68K materialize into something real, because it's difficult to conceive of the shape it'll take so I'm inherently curious. All of the old Japanese home computer standards are fairly impenetrable to folks observing them from afar and decades removed, and the overall reputation and awareness of the system's library is mostly represented by those then-remarkable arcade ports of high accuracy, and in my mind more significantly to what the market was like at the time, high-resolution pornographic material--whether it was adventure games and visual novels or any other genre mix, smut defined these platforms and what's survived of them since, and that's a difficult thing to build a revival around. There are of course exceptions that would lean into catering to enthusiasts of different (if adjacent) sorts, too--all-timer works like Cho Ren Sha 68K, almost certainly exclusively known and played through its later Windows ports, started here, so here's hoping.

 

[Phantoon]

I'm hopefully that this one will a) be good and b) won't be comically expensive. It certainly has the potential to be amazing.