Retro SFF: The X68000 Z Mini Arrives
In 1987 Sharp released one of the best home computers to never make it beyond the shores of Japan; the X68000. The initial models were powered by a Motorola 10MHz 68000 processor and had 1MB of RAM. Later models included the far more powerful 25MHz Motorola 68030, up to 12MB of RAM, and an 80MB SCSI HD. All of the X68000 models were equipped with powerful hardware based 2D graphics processors that supported scrolling, multiple bitmap layers, tiled backgrounds, sprites, and parallax. The system had a very large for the time 1MB of VRAM that allowed it to have up …