Sega Arcade Ports on X68000 | Were they Perfect? 

Yup, emulation is about the best thing to happen for older game systems. I've loved it for the convenience factor alone for decades now.

Towns uses intel CPU, but architecture is quite different. Graphics board and i/o are unique. All Towns machines support SCSI HDDs by the way.

Yeah, the Japanese computer gaming scene was pretty interesting in those days. I'll eventually get to some FM Towns and Marty stuff in here.

@@superdeadite Oh I did not know that! Looks like I might be getting some new games 😉 Thank You!

Thanks! I'll definitely cover the Towns / Marty games some day.

It definitely has some ports that are pretty close to perfect. A lot of the Capcom and Konami stuff in particular was really well done. Then again, while it has this reputation for being a machine with nothing but arcade perfect ports, we have stuff like Afterburner, Space Harrier and others that aren't even close and kind of dispel that myth. It was great at 2D, but not so hot at 3D or faux 3D games.

Thanks. There's a lot of good ports for it, primarily of 2D games. The quality of original games varies pretty wildly, though.

You're welcome. I completely agree about the varying quality of original games. Looking at best/top X68K games, "Aquales" and "Akumajō Dracula" seem to be the only original games to make the list. The rest are (admittedly impressive) arcade ports. :D

Yup, they were a dominant force in the arcades for a long time.

Thanks!

Thanks! Yeah, the x68k's library is pretty eclectic as a whole. It's got an eclectic mix of top tier 2D games and... well... not so top tier stuff. Everyone talks about the great games but I almost never see anyone talking about the other stuff. I don't want to do an all negative video on the thing but I'd love to find an interesting way to cover some of that stuff.

Thanks!

Yup. Not so sure the nickname is quite earned. There were more powerful home computers that came out right around the same time, not to mention within just a few years. Not saying it wasn't very powerful or anything, just that people tend to exaggerate.

@@InglebardGaming I don't think there was a more powerful computer out in 87. The only thing close was maybe the Amiga 1000 but that is still far behind. Nothing came close until the early 90s. To be clear it was the custom graphic chips that made it a powerhouse not the CPU

Ah, but there was. The Acorn Archimedes came out in 1987 also. Check out it's ability to polygonal graphics for example, it surpasses any polygonal real time stuff on the X68k. The CPU was technically slower in mhz, (it was 8 mhz) but it was a 32bit RISC CPU from ARM - the precursor to what's in pretty much all smartphones today.

I imagine it would have been pretty similar to the Genesis port. Maybe with just a smidge more color.

@@InglebardGaming right especially considering it was going to be done by the same developer.

@@InglebardGaming but thunder blade was absolutely fantastic compared to the megadrives super thunderblade

It was definitely an interesting platform with plenty of power for its time. Shame about the price, though.

There's a good amount of good original stuff, but man does the quality of the original games vary. Some of my favorites are Akumajo Dracula, Nemesis 90 kai, and the Telenet stuff that later got ported to Genesis/MD and TG16/PCE.

Thanks! Yeah, it was definitely an interesting computer even if most people couldn't get one back during its commercial life time. Unless money was no object or you needed the computer for specific development or productivity purposes, for most people it wouldn't have been worth the cost. As far as the spectrum goes... THE TRUTH HURTS! 🤣🤣🤣

​@@InglebardGaming Ha Ha! You're missing out on the pinnacle of 80's gaming! What other platform offered an arcade perfect sound track to Outrun? Granted it came on the 2nd side of the cassette the game was on but the fact remains! Such rose tinted memories 😅

Lol, yeah, amazingly accurate music on that one!

Yeah, the Neo Geo has a little more horsepower in most ways. Since it was a dedicated single purpose game system/arcade board they were able to do that. I really wish the Neo Geo had taken off more as a home platform, would love to have seen other arcade games ported to it.

Sorta while the console itself was cheaper (650 USD at launch) carts were often 300-400 $ a pop

If Western PC makers had put 2D sprite accelerators on graphics cards we could have had a whole generation of arcade perfect ports of 2D arcade games on PCs from 1993. 486 Pcs would have been enough. Although yes they were also more expensive than the Neo Geo.

@@alexojideagu .. sprites and hardware scrolling and hardware DMA block copy transfers. Well, the Commodore Amiga had all of that, but most of the developers weren't accustomed to using hardware like that and as a result most of the games looked and/or played like trash. It wouldn't have turned out as differently as you expected. Also, it would face the typical hardware adoption issues of the day.

@@glenndoiron9317 Look what the FM towns achieved with just a 386 sx and a small amount of ram. Most people had more powerful Pcs than that in the west by 1994. Although the graphics card development was shifting to 3D by then so it was too late

I definitely wouldn't have minded getting one myself back then!

Nope, not unless someone did an aftermarket or homebrew version. Kind of like the Mandela effect for R-Type on FM Towns / Marty. Everyone thinks it came out, but it didn't. In that case it was because it had been mentioned in EGM.

Yes, definitely on resolution. It's been a while since I did this so I don't remember everything I pointed out or didn't. I can tell you that I always end up cutting stuff to trim down run-time to keep the videos as breezy and engaging as I can, even the long ones. Often there's changes I talk about at first, but then cut for time if I went on too long about them.

@@InglebardGaming 👍🏼

I am Japanese and posted using Google translation. Sorry for the weird parts. The original arcade version is 320 x 224 pixels. I don't think the horizontal resolution is 384 pixels. Also, the fact that the bosses on the first and second stages are different has nothing to do with X68, and there is a difference between the Japanese version and the non-Japanese version. In addition to the bosses, there are many other changes between the non-Japanese version and the Japanese version. Non-Japanese version The number of allies to rescue to open the exit has been reduced to 10. The time remaining until the time bomb explodes (time limit per stage) has become shorter. The bosses on levels 1 and 2 have been swapped. BGM added during name entry. There is a hidden character on the third boss stage. When extending just 100,000 points, the bonus score of 100 points is not added (it is possible to 1up continuously).

Thanks for all the insight, I appreciate it! I'll probably cover Alien Syndrome a little more extensively in the future and do proper research on the x68000 game's video modes to be 100% sure on them. In the future I'll probably do a full game comparison of the x68000 version and the Japanese arcade version. If I do that, I'll have all the facts ready and show the two games in as similar a way as possible.

@@InglebardGaming you're welcome!

Ha, yeah the super WEIRD version of Ys,

Yup, definitely an interesting machine.

Well. You're absolutely right, of course. I'll get a correction card in the video when that comes up and update the description. Sorry about the error, everyone! Appreciate the correction!

They were, but lots of different computer setups were used as arcade devkits. The most common story is Capcom used it as a dev kit - which they did for a while since they based the CPS1 hardware on the X68000.

It would have been nice to see something like that. I mean, the Genesis in a lot of ways is relatively close hardware-wise... it's just too bad Sega had to strip down the original MD/Genesis design from what they'd planned. If it had more colors like originally intended it would have been able to put out stuff really close to a lot of the games on the x68k... just with fewer sprites.

Yeah, I often wondered how a like how there was a standalone console version of the Fujitsu FM-TOWNS home computer called the FM-TOWNS Marty. It was released only in Japan but was the first 32-bit game console, releasing before the Commodore CD32 or Panasonic 3DO.

Yeah, IBM, Intel and the gang just didn't care about media applications of pretty much any type until the mid 90s. Instead of designing efficient chips and systems, they just kept expanding on their existing x86 architecture until they had enough raw speed to do a lot of the calculations they needed directly on the CPU. Then once video cards and sound cards came along, things changed a LOT in the PC gaming scene.

@@InglebardGaming Yes, another thing to make it worse with Western Computer ports is Japanese companies deliberately refused to give out source code and graphic assets to Europeans and Americans. The PC, Amiga and ST versions of SF2 for example are a mess due to no source code or raw graphical assets.

@@InglebardGaming Look how accurate Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 are on PC, an American game, once you have the real source code and Graphical files.

Yup, I covered that stuff in the Sega games on the Amiga video 😁

@@InglebardGaming Cool I will check it out! I notice many of the comments I've made on your videos are already covered or you know anyway lol

Yeah, it was crazy... I guess that's a big part of why it only sold 150k units over its life. And who knows how many of those were to developers.

I am Japanese and posted using Google translation. Sorry for the weird parts. In the 1980s, the retail price of the X68000 in Japan was around 300,000 yen for a CRT set. A game software is also included as an extra. Although it was expensive, an 8-bit PC such as the PC-8801, FM77, and X1Turbo costs 200,000 yen for a CRT set, and a 16-bit PC-9801 costs 300,000 to 400,000 yen, so I feel that the X68 is actually cheaper in terms of functionality and performance. I did. Both FMTOWNS and X68 had a lot of memory, high resolution, multicolor display, FM sound source and PCM sound source, and the monitor set was cheap at 300,000 yen. I couldn't beat the 500,000 yen PC-9801, which had 16 colors, 640KB of memory, and no FM sound source. The obvious reason why we didn't win was because there wasn't enough business software. In Japan at the time, PCs that could not run the word processing software Ichitaro and the spreadsheet software Lotus1-2-3 would never sell in Japan, no matter how cheap and powerful they were.

@@yoshitaka7642 Thanks you for the insight and history. Very interesting!

Yeah, for the most part 2D stuff was done very well with just a few exceptions. What's a little thought provoking, regarding the Genesis / MD, if Sega had managed to meet their original design spec if would have had more color than it ended up with and also hardware sprite scaling and rotation. If that had happened, it would have had a big advantage with super scaler ports - even though performance surely wouldn't have matched the multi-CPU arcade games. What could have been!

Any SNK ports?

@jbmaru yes there has been several SNK ports but I did not play them and did not compare to the NeoGeo. I imagine the NG must be better.

Actually, the Atari ST wasn't the original version and the X68k port is unrelated to the Atari ST port. It originally came out for the HP-UX and I have never seen that version. It was then ported to the Atari ST, DOS, Mac and Windows 3.x. The X68k version doesn't look like any of those, they're all much simpler.

Broke even... eh, that might even be a tad generous. To be fair most are pretty OK, there's just a select few that stand out as being excellent and close to to the originals. The Capcom games fared a lot better for a few reasons 1) they were made by Capcom 2) they were developed for CPS1 mostly which is almost the same and 3) some of them were originally developed on the X68000 to begin with! I'll probably do a video looking at those in the not too distant future! And maybe a few other companies' games, too!

Thanks, glad you liked it! I tried to stress the points of what they cost and availability and sales, because all of that does add context that's often not included when people just refer to X68K as the "god machine" and silly stuff like that. It was powerful, it had some near perfect ports of fairly powerful 2D arcade games, no argument there. But it wasn't really built as a general consumer device and it's important to make that clear.

This video looked at Sega games on the platform only.

Yup definitely super pricey. Sorry for the late reply! I wouldn't have minded having one when it was new, but I could never have afforded it back then!

Errors? No. Like I said at the start it wasn't a comprehensive history on the system. Regarding music sounding different, I can clarify and tell you I was specifically talking about the FM instruments, which could have been identical between systems using the same FM chip. The only time I brought up effects at all was Space Harrier because they cut out. Which, you know, is because they do. The whole point of the video was to show how well these ports compared to the arcade games, especially from visual and audio standpoints. Not mentioning analog controls in After Burner II doesn't negate the fact that it's kind of a mediocre port. Not covering the monitor / graphic modes in games like Fantasy Zone that I already complimented by calling a near perfect port with extras hardly seems relevant in this context. Why would I bring up 3D glasses in this video? Again, this was a video with a single, scope-limited purpose. To show the few Sega games that made it to the system compared to the original arcade versions.

​@@InglebardGaming If you are not interested in the history of the machine than it's price is also irrelevant. Afterburner arcade and X68000 generate music by mixing FM (YM2151) and PCM channels together. If you were to disable the SegaPCM chip on Afterburner arcade, you would be missing half the music. I could write a giant wall of text here about every single game and why side by side comparison videos are not a very accurate assessment of port quality. For example: FM Towns Afterburner looks a lot nicer than the X68000 port, but it controls and plays like garbage. However, I will stop here. What I will say is that the main appeal of the X68000 in the year 2022 is the extras. SuperHangon's MT32 MIDI support alone makes it my favorite way to play the game.

I agree that extras and the MT32 music are appealing today since they differentiate the games from the originals, but that's still outside the point of this video, that would be a whole separate topic to cover and it's worth looking at. The price is still completely relevant to discuss here, though. It's what the computer cost and from a game perspective its competition was still that was less than 10% of that cost. The x68k cost as much as some complete cabinets featured in this video, and that's part of assessing how the ports were. So to close out here, I appreciate your perspective on the computer itself. Some of this stuff I will go into in the future, especially the MT32 side of things. For this video, it had a limited purpose and I kept everything in that scope and removed a few things ahead of time in editing that I was going to say because they were a little outside of that purpose. I'll definitely do more on the x68000 some other niche/region exclusive computers in the future.

Japanese price of all consoles was very similar to USA price (not sure re W. Europe & other regions). Plus X68000 only sold ~150k units/Japan, so clearly price was issue. I find it hard to be very impressed by system that essentially cost same as average arcade machine, nothing clever about it. Might as well use super gun & arcade PCBs.

@@ShallRemainUnknown When X68000 launched an IBM PC with a 4.7mhz 8088 and 16kb of RAM, 4 color graphics and PC speaker audio was 1,565USD. Comparing PC/workstation prices to game consoles makes no sense. Japan's economy was booming at the time, people had the money. X68000 was a financial success. What do current day high-end PC gamers spend to upgrade their GPU every year? Lol.

Ignorant? No that would be pretending that all computers cost what Macs and IBMs did back then. The Amiga 1000 released in 1985 for $1300 and the 500 released in 1987 for $700. The Atari ST released in 1985 at $999 for the color model and in 1987 was going for about $500. The Acorn Archimedes launched in 1987 with the low end model at £800. Let's not pretend like every computer back then was $3,000 or $6,000 and start name calling when there were lots of successful home computers in that era that cost WAY less than the numbers you're citing. Apple in particular has been notorious for charging exorbitant amounts of money for basically every electronic device they've ever made considering the hardware inside them. The IBM AT, which you cite as releasing "a little bit earlier" came out much earlier, in 1984. And it was insanely overpriced, like most IBM computers. The Amiga 1000 that came out the following year trounced it in most ways despite selling for less than half the cost. And what about the 8-bit computers of the day? The number one selling computer model of all time is the Commodore64. How much did that cost? $600 when it debuted in 1982. By the time the IBM AT came out in 1984 the C64 was going for about $250, sometimes less. Go look at the ads from back then. And for games in 1984 and a few years beyond the c64 was vastly superior. It may be tempting to view the world from an IBM or Apple lens if that's all you know, but until the mid 90s there were loads of different models from many different companies and anyone that fails to look at the actual market back then... well that would be ignorant.

@@InglebardGaming The X68000 was not a low end 8 bit computer. It was a high end computer with features not seen in these computers and with more RAM and exclusive to Japan which had higher prices anyway.. The C64 was $599 in 1982. My point wasn't that it was cheap, but that it wasn't out of line with mainstream computers of the time. I did not cherry pick those 2 computers. They were extremely popular and mainstream models. The first 386 PCs from around the same time were priced similarly, though higher spec as far as the CPU goes. Most PC OEMs were offering similarly priced computers. These high prices of PCs stuck around until around the early mid 90s. There were cheaper options, especially as time went on and (technically) trailing edge computers could be had. But if you wanted to be at the cutting edge of desktop computer technology, 5 grand was not uncommon. I don't think the Atari ST and Amiga compare well with this machine and were largely competing on price, especially the ST. Both were created to be low cost computers. If you believe this was the X68000's primary competition, then 3k would be very high. But I don't see these machines being competitors. The Amiga and ST were abysmal failures in Japan. The 8 bit computers were a different market and there is no reason to compare them. Asides from games, there isn't a lot you can do with them (other than the Apple II). Most could only do text in 40 columns at most (the CPC, I think had an 80 column mode). 64k is just nowhere near enough RAM for most productivity applications. They had low end CPUs from the 70s. The 68k was a very powerful chip for its time, especially on a price to performance basis. You can argue that being a new player without an existing software library should have put downward pressure on the price. I wouldn't quibble with that. But your particular attention to the price as if were an outrageous and unheard of high price is simply wrong. I started working in IT in the mid 90s. I'm familiar with the industry. I do apologize for coming off so rude. I thought you made a very big deal about the price and seemed very ignorant of the price of PCs of the time. Go peruse archive for computer magazines from 1987. Take a look at the reviews and prices of typical desktop PCs of the era. Another thing you might want to keep in mind is the state of money in Japan in the late 80s. Everything was more expensive in Japan and they were having a huge bubble, especially in real estate. Real estate bubbles raise the price of most things because all businesses have real estate and finance costs around it.

The primary thing you missed in this video and rude comment was context. This video was made to provide context to those discovering the machine that didn't know about it in the 80s and 90s and see some 'arcade perfect' ports and don't udnerstand why it didn't sell better and wasn't more popular. One of the main reasons is it cost almost as much as a small car back then and if you think price wasn't a facor in its 150k total sales over roughly ten years, I don't know what to tell you. Also, you can't wave off the C64. Its 64k of RAM in 1982 was unheard of in a machine of its price. It's sprite capabilites were advanced for home computers of the time and its sound was unparalleled. Despite all that, it was far cheaper than IBM PCs or Apple IIs of the same era, and outperformed them in most games for MANY years despite selling for under $200 for most of those years. It's relevant to bring into a discussion about the price people paid for computers to play games on. You could have spent thousands on an IBM at the same time, it was what they cost. Similarly, it's not fair to discount the Amiga or even the Atari ST. The Amiga sold up to 7 million units and had a life beyond games with various productivity apps and carved itself a decent sized niche in video production in the late 80s with the video toaster. And why was that? A number of TV studios were replaced equipment that cost several times as much with Amigas and video toasters. Again, not everyone was buying super expensive Apples and IBMs, especially in the early 80s to the mid 90s. IBM and Apple were great at selling to industry and education, which is a big reason why their computers were so expensive back then.

@@InglebardGaming I disagree that cost was the main reason. The PC juggernaut left a trail of dead computer standards and computer companies in its enormous wake. Almost every computer company that existed in the 80s is gone or entirely out of the computer market. Almost every competing system/os is gone. What MS couldn't take out, Apple and Linux did. Cost is not irrelevant. Lisa fell right on her face and was superior to the Macintosh in every way. But it was also more than 3 times the price of the X68000. But 3k was well in the mainstream as far as price goes. Yes, lots of computers back then were near the price of a small economy car and certainly an "in OK shape" used car. 1987 is 5 years after 1982. 64k was near useless in 1987. Outside of the 8-bit computers, which are technically limited to 64k without bankswitching, there were no computers available for purchase with 64k in 1987. I am not arguing the 8 bits were terrible games machines. What I said was they weren't useful for productivity. Even something as simple as writing a fiction book (in plain text) would take on average 5 diskettes worth 8 bit disk storage. The word processor can hold at a maximum around 20 pages at a time. Plus, you have to look at it in the non standard 40 column mode or have windowing where you can scroll left and right to see what it will look like as an 80 column document. Very small and simple spreadsheets are feasible, but they aren't as useful. Spreadsheets really become useful when they are large and a change in one cell can change hundreds of other cells. The Apple II got around a lot of these limitations by having internal expansion slots. The C64's REU is external and cumbersome, took up additional desk space, could come loose etc. 80 column Apple II cards were both produced and supported by major software houses. You could even put a co-processor in it or upgrade the processor altogether. Maybe you could do some homework if you're a kid in school, but that is about it. This is not speculation. We know how these 8 bit computers were used. They were primarily used as game machines. I'm pretty sure the x68000 became a game machine. Its gaming capabilities were not accident, but it was not designed or sold to primarily be a great games machine. 3k is WAY too much money to be a games machine. The ST is a pretty weak machine. While the Amiga was a more powerful machine than the ST, it was also loaded with flaws. The toaster wasn't released until 1990 and was pretty expensive and required a pretty expensive Amiga. And while it was a pretty powerful set up for the day at that price and did see at least some corporate use (I worked for a company that made films to be shown to kids and some of the effects were done on Amiga. They still had the Amigas when I worked there in 96, but they were no longer being used), it was a lot of money for that trick for the average home user. A 2000hd with a few meg of RAM, the toaster board and a genlock (I think it requires an external genlock) would easily hit 4 Grand. 4 grand is great against the broadcast machines back then which cost 10s of thousands of Dollars, not so much in the home. After you've titled a few of your VHS taped birthday parties, its not especially useful. Bottom line, the Toaster/Amiga combo was a highly specialized product. You are just not aware of how much decent computers cost back then. Again, I invite you to peruse the archive website collection of computer magazines from back in the day. PCs aimed at the corporate market were a lot of money. They were also built extremely well and included good keyboards. If you don't work in the industry, there is a lot you are missing because it is irrelevant to you. Things like supporting the machines with new exact replacement parts for 5-10 years was a requirement. The last thing any IT manager wants is 500 PCs all with random off the shelf parts. This greatly drives up cost of the machines. In 2001 I was able to get brand new IBM PS/2 model 70 parts. The Model 70 was 12 years old at the time. But that is one of the reasons they are expensive.

I've been in the IT industry in one way or another for decades also. I professionally teach it now. I know what computers cost in the 80s because I lived through them. $3,000 wasn't "mainstream" in the mid to late 80s for computers that consumers bought for themselves to use in their homes and was definitely not a "mainstream" price for a gaming computer. Sure, there were computers that cost that much, but even in the fairly affluent NY burbs I'm from, almost no one had IBMs or compatibles until the early 90s because the price put them out of reach for most people. You can say that's anecdotal and sure, it is, but any decent article on computing history will tell you that IBMs early computers like the XT and AT were not aimed at consumers and that their first real targeted consumer computer was the PCjr, which was a miserable failure. Also of note, the PCjr sold for $669 to $1,269 in 1984 when it launched. If IBM and their high priced business computers were so mainstream, why did their market share shrink from roughly 80% in 1982 to roughly 20% in 1992? Things started heating up for their platform when the market was flooded with clones from competitors selling similar hardware at much lower prices and Windows started getting pushed hard. Wintel dominance started right in the mid 90s. But please, continue being smug and telling me I don't know about the things I lived through.

Different generation!

@@InglebardGaming i was about to say......