Sharp X68000 (opens in new tab)

These are great machines and as an Atari ST user in the old days I was very intrigued by them. So some time ago I went out of my way to buy and import one from Japan at some expense. They're really nifty, and really quite far ahead of the Amiga and ST in terms of capabilities.

Great industrial design, too. The original black model has a wonderful case.

I had some idea I'd try to port EmuTOS to it, which wouldn't be super hard, but I never got around to it.

(But now it sits in my basement unused. So if there's anybody in southern Ontario who wants it, and will do something with it, let me know. I would just like to get back what I paid I guess. Trying to pair back the hobbies)

I wonder if they would work with a PiStorm, or other accellerators of working in similar ways. Meaning not some hard to get 68040/60, but some modern not even that big ARM, some minimal glue logic via CPLD and some additional RAM on a small board, which plugs into to the original socket instead. Running Musahi or EMU68k and some firmware for the CPLD/FPGA.

Seems to work very well for Amigas, AtariSTs, and 68k-Macintoshes. Equivalent to some 100s of MHz for applications, games & demos not so much.

The most interesting part to me is that with 2 MB of RAM and a 68030, it’s essentially a late-1990s/early-2000s Palm device in desktop form.

One of the most aesthetically pleasing music players was for X68000: https://github.com/gaolay/MMDSP