There were a lot of Japanese only computers that existed back then (MSX, PC-88, etc;). Sharp took the high road and released a computer that was just one level blow a super computer. They knew theyd have a few buyers, but they werent going for the mass market. There were no Japanese companies that dared leave Japan with their computers. Jack Tramiel kept Japanese computer/console companies out of North America and Europe by making a decent product with low profit margins and making all the hardware in his own company. Tramiel had a few of his ventures get killed off by Japanese companies over the years and considered them his biggest competition and was always trying to be ready to take them on if they entered the computer business here. Most Japanese electronics companies didnt have the distribution networks outside of Japan (Sega, Konami, Capcom, Nintendo and Namco were here, but they didnt make computers and were small companies at the time), and they sure couldnt start out on their own. Right when Jack Tramiel quit Commodore, it wasnt much longer after that that the NES and Master System were released. Even with Jack Tramiel running Atari, the ST was still somewhat affordable, and even then, the Commodore 64 was so cheap that enough people were just buying it. The Commodore Amiga still had relatively good graphics, and the X68000 would have been competing with it and Sharp probably knew that even with a faster and better computer, there wasnt much room to work with on profit margins. Not only that, Japanese software companies had very little money to hire for translating their software to English and American Companies werent going to make software for a high end Japanese computer. If the X68000 was more mainstream, maybe American software companies would actually made software for the system. American companies would rather make software for a system that has a few million users over (what would likely be) maybe 100,000 users.
