Great retro Japanese Computer archive

Post by **undamned** » Fri May 09, 2008 10:07 pm

Nice mini reviews for many shmups on PC-88, MSX, X68000, etc.:

http://gyusyabu.ddo.jp/MP3/MP3.html

-ud

nimitz · Post by **nimitz** » Fri May 09, 2008 10:12 pm

wow, awesome!

so much detailed information about hundreds of games.

thanks.

ps: how did you stumble upon this website?

Turrican · Post by **Turrican** » Fri May 09, 2008 10:15 pm

*drools* - this needs to be in the board FAQ!

doctorx0079 · Post by **doctorx0079** » Fri May 09, 2008 10:22 pm

That's pretty awesome. The best part is that he has tons of screenshots of everything. Finally I can see what Silpheed and Hydlide were SUPPOSED to look like before they got mangled into other computers.

EDIT: Not everything has tons of screenshots.

Post by **undamned** » Sat May 10, 2008 1:27 am

nimitz wrote:ps: how did you stumble upon this website?

I was looking at 68000 games on YAJ and c+p'ed a title into Google Image Search and one of the images belonged to that site (I think it was the JP text for "Star Trader," I put in).
-ud

nimitz · Post by **nimitz** » Sat May 10, 2008 1:29 am

I love how they often have the exact DAY of release for games that are 20+ years old.

it290 · Post by **it290** » Sat May 10, 2008 3:06 am

Amazing site! Makes you realize how deprived us Western computer-owners were with our gaming back then (ok, not really, but I sure wouldn't have minded playing some of these games back in the day).

doctorx0079 · Post by **doctorx0079** » Sat May 10, 2008 5:29 am

The PC8801 and the MSX2 must have had the best graphics in the world for a PC. Damn that would have been awesome.

it290 · Post by **it290** » Sat May 10, 2008 5:54 am

Yep, they were amazing for their time. As was the X68000.

The best thing about those old Japanese computers was how awesomely hi-tech they looked. I wish someone would do case designs along the lines of the X68000 Expert or even the FM Towns. Badass.

nimitz · Post by **nimitz** » Sat May 10, 2008 5:58 am

The PC8801 and the MSX2 must have had the best graphics in the world for a PC. Damn that would have been awesome.

That would be the Sharp X68000 in 1987 (year of release). The graphics of that machine were about 5-6 years ahead of anything else on the market.

also I just learned from that site that most X68000 games were sold between 78000 yen and 98000 yen. Thats a lot of money for a floppy disk (that would make at least 100$ to 120$ US in 2008).

it290 · Post by **it290** » Sat May 10, 2008 6:08 am

BTW, the streaming radio is pretty fresh if you guys haven't checked it. Although I still prefers me some Nectarine Demoscene Radio.

Ganelon · Post by **Ganelon** » Sat May 10, 2008 7:54 am

nimitz wrote:wow, awesome!

so much detailed information about hundreds of games.

thanks.

ps: how did you stumble upon this website?

Heh, it's only like the most popular JP game music streaming site.

Necronom · Post by **Necronom** » Sat May 10, 2008 9:20 am

nimitz wrote:
The PC8801 and the MSX2 must have had the best graphics in the world for a PC. Damn that would have been awesome.
That would be the Sharp X68000 in 1987 (year of release). The graphics of that machine were about 5-6 years ahead of anything else on the market.

You mean PC or in general? I must say I find all these jp PCs quite fascinating, especially designwise, but to be honest I have yet to see graphics there that are on the level of the best Amiga stuff (Stardust, the Bitmap Bros games, some of the french adventure stuff like Kult or Captain Blood...). Are there any particular games you base your claim on?

nimitz · Post by **nimitz** » Sat May 10, 2008 4:07 pm

Ganelon wrote:Heh, it's only like the most popular JP game music streaming site.

Then why havn't you told us about it already

. (

)

For Necronom,

Well, it was ahead of ANYTHING on the market designed for personal use (opposed to arcade hardware or supercomputers), the first "thing" to be better than the X68000 was the NeoGeo and this one is in a class by itself, after that I think the snes/SFC was the first gaming system to surpass the X68000.

About the Amiga, I don't want to get into that "Amiga games suck" debate. But lets face it, the best game(s) on the amiga would have been average AT BEST in Japan at that time. Granted it may have had more raw "power" or "potential" but a game system is only as good as its games are good/beautiful (graphically, musically, design wise or any aspect)

Games like Gradius (1987), Sol Feace (1990), Star Trader (1991) and all Games by Konami. They all are very detailed with impressive amount of sprites and very smooth 60fps graphics.

Turrican · Post by **Turrican** » Sat May 10, 2008 4:53 pm

the best game(s) don't rely on raw power... Lemmings began its life on the amiga because it was a fertile ground, and was soon ported everywhere.

I think that's missing the point - the pseudo-arcade offer of the Amiga is rarely comparable to the original Japanese which were source of inspiration, this is true. Of course, Konami doing an Akumajo Dracula on X68k themselves is obviously better than Konami licensing the brand to Novotrade so that they could rape it.
The point however, is this: the amiga was widespread and became a cultural phenomenon, and you could have played a respectable pseudo-arcade like Apidya, AND Frontier, AND Lemmings, AND LeChuck's Revenge, AND Cannon Fodder and so many others...

X68k: besides its specs it had the advantage of being coded most of the times from the original developers. That's the advantage. But, the selection is fairly limited. You have your share of ports, some JRPG and some Hentai. In the end the key successes were all born on the Famicom and the MSX. X68k goes through history as a reflection of those.

I'll be the first to say that yeah, the real gameplay glory in the west resides in Commodore 64, and that unfortunately the amiga began a trend that made many games worse. Still, the Amiga kept a fair share of creativity for its life cycle. And at least aurally, it's the pinnacle of western game music composition, see Leipzig concerts and stuff.

Does the X68k boost a similar success, or is it just remembered as a very powerful platform which could replicate arcades pixel perfect? A glory that surely is the antithesis of what makes a system significant: the adventure-oriented mood of the NES took a nothing like Bionic Commando and turned it into Bionic Commando.

Amiga is the Megadrive/Snes, X68k is the NEO-GEO. Amiga is DS, X68k is PSP. Some rare jewel is on it, and most hardcore players will love it for the specs (just like they prefer sony's handheld to DS), but eventually it's all ports and remakes.

End of the rant

Edit: to explain my point better, look at this:

http://www.uvlist.net/platforms/detail/1-Amiga

Most popular games:

Turrican 2: The Final Fight
Beyond Dark Castle
Moonstone - A Hard Day's Knight
Sensible World of Soccer '96
Cover Girls Strip Poker
Eye of the Beholder
Space Hulk
Cannon Fodder
Civilization
A Rockstar ate my Hamster

http://www.uvlist.net/platforms/detail/26-X68000

Most popular games:

Lemmings
Akumajo Dracula
Ajax
Viper-V6
Dragon Knight II
Street Fighter II - Champion Edition
Dragon Knight
Dōkyūsei
177
Sangokushi

See? The Amiga created some of its glory (Sensible Soccer, Moonstone)... The X68k has great conversions.

it290 · Post by **it290** » Sat May 10, 2008 5:05 pm

I do think the European coders in particular ended up getting more out of the hardware. People are still releasing C64 (and to a lesser extent, Amiga ECS) demos that do some crazy stuff. Games like Stardust, Lionheart, Ruff 'n' Tumble and so forth really push the hardware and are more impressive technically than the majority of x68k stuff.

On the x68k side, the gameplay tended to me much more polished (as Turrican hinted at), but again, what was done with the hardware was fairly standard. Take Dracula x68k for example; the game is rock-solid, but the graphics are really nothing that couldn't have been done on the SNES (or an AGA Amiga for that matter). True, those systems came out much later, but again, games like those I mentioned above look even better with weaker video hardware.

Also, the western systems did tend to sound better, at least the C64, Amiga, and ST: the C64 is still unrivaled and to my ears MODs and even Amiga/ST chiptunes sound miles better than most of the stuff that in Japan was only accomplished with expensive MIDI modules.

Necronom · Post by **Necronom** » Sat May 10, 2008 8:11 pm

nimitz wrote:
Ganelon wrote:Heh, it's only like the most popular JP game music streaming site.
Than why havn't you told us about it already . ( )

For Necronom,

Well, it was ahead of ANYTHING on the market designed for personal use (opposed to arcade hardware or supercomputers), the first "thing" to be better than the X68000 was the NeoGeo and this one is in a class by itself, after that I think the snes/SFC was the first gaming system to surpass the X68000.

About the Amiga, I don't want to get into that "Amiga games suck" debate. But lets face it, the best game(s) on the amiga would have been average AT BEST in Japan at that time. Granted it may have had more raw "power" or "potential" but a game system is only as good as its games are good/beautiful (graphically, musically, design wise or any aspect)

Games like Gradius (1987), Sol Feace (1990), Star Trader (1991) and all Games by Konami. They all are very detailed with impressive amount of sprites and very smooth 60fps graphics.

I was asking because it seemed you were talking about being ahead in the graphics department and not gameplay, aesthetics or the amount of detailed pixelart. Considering equally "detailed and smooth" titles like R-Type (1989), Turrican 2 (1991) or Lionheart (1993) the superiority you're talking about seems more like a very subjective assumption than a fact. Especially until the mid 90s.
Bringing in the Neo Geo for a comparison is problematic - not only was it no computer, considering the price it wasn't even a mainstream product.
I guess these jp PCs were also a lot more expensive than Amigas...

nimitz · Post by **nimitz** » Sat May 10, 2008 11:34 pm

doctorx0079 wrote:The PC8801 and the MSX2 must have had the best graphics in the world for a PC. Damn that would have been awesome.

The discussion originated from this post. So by saying that the Amiga or western computer's games were of lower quality overall was a bit of a mistake. Because:

nimitz wrote:I don't want to get into that "Amiga games suck" debate.

The main poit of the argument was that the X68K was "5 years ahead" of the competition, I was referring mostly to the graphics or the processing power for a personal system used for playing games. The competition of a Japanese only system is obviously the japanese market wich was in my opinion ahead of anything made in the west for almost 10 years (1985-1995). We can debate all day about how great the Amiga games were but it doesn't change the "power" of the X68k

To give an idea:

Sharp X68000(1987): 10 mhz motorola 68000 cpu, 1mb ram

Amiga 600 (1992) 5 years later: 7 mhz motorola 68000 cpu, 1mb ram

To put this very simply. Look at Gradius for the X68000 released in 1987. And try to find a version of a similar game that looks better than that 1987 port. maybe Parodius Da! on the snes?

Bringing in the Neo Geo for a comparison is problematic - not only was it no computer, considering the price it wasn't even a mainstream product.
I guess these jp PCs were also a lot more expensive than Amigas...

The point was that the X68k was ahead of its time. price is not relevant. Was the neogeo a "mainstream product"? Hard to say for sure.

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Sat May 10, 2008 11:39 pm

The price of various X68000 systems at launch is known - not sure but I think it's $2-5K per model. Not cheap, but not terrible considering their capabilities at the time.

Of course, it would've been nice if they had launched with a 386 (yes, the 386 was out the year before the X68000), but the CPU choices allowed pretty much straight ports of arcade games which a 386 would've prevented.

Turrican · Post by **Turrican** » Sat May 10, 2008 11:43 pm

Price is always relevant in these matters... I'm sure they had more powerful computers at NASA in 1987.

For the price X68k, I think the comparison would be better with the top of the amiga range, A4000.

Anyway, a 3mhz difference is hardly something that defines a 5 years gap. Snes ran at half the speed of MD, so it's a problem of architecture and what it's designed for.

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Sat May 10, 2008 11:53 pm

Turrican wrote:Price is always relevant in these matters... I'm sure they had more powerful computers at NASA in 1987.

Quite right; if I assume a X68000 was ~$2K new, it could've been nearly (or more than; I don't know pricing) double that with a brand-new 386.

Just for fun, I looked up the rated megaflops performance of various systems HERE:

386/387 386BSD UNIX 0.1 80386/80387 40 0.6598
[...]
Sharp X68000 XVI Human68k V2.03 68000/68881 16 0.1127

Of course, the 40 MHz 386 came much later (quite a ramp up in speed on that chip!)

Optimization counts:

Clone 386 Win95/DOS 386 fp opt AM80386DX 40 1.2908
[...]
Clone 386 Win95/DOS No opt AM80386DX 40 0.8353

nimitz · Post by **nimitz** » Sun May 11, 2008 12:54 am

unfortunatly the 80386 was not really a "gaming system".

i.e. MS-Dos games in 1990...

the "good" ms-dos games started coming in 1992 or so with games like Dune or Wolfenstein 3d or X-com in 1993.

Anyway, a 3mhz difference is hardly something that defines a 5 years gap. Snes ran at half the speed of MD, so it's a problem of architecture and what it's designed for.

well the X6800 was at 25mhz in 1993. And most importantly the Amiga games were designed for the A500 A600 not the top of the line A4000.

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Sun May 11, 2008 2:03 am

nimitz wrote:unfortunatly the 80386 was not really a "gaming system".

There's the first generation of FM Towns hardware (home PCs, Marty, and Car Marty to name a few)...and in any case, it's just a general purpose processor. Code makes the system.

320x240 · Post by **320x240** » Sun May 11, 2008 6:55 am

The X68000 had the benefit of being developed in a culture with a rich tradition in visual media as well as a thriving arcade scene and this is what gives it's games that overall professional quality. At least that's how it looks to me.

The Amiga on the other hand existed in a sort of cultural vacuum and had to slowly build up it's own identity. I believe this is why it's following is so strong even now. For games this meant that most, even the better ones, had a 'nice but not quite professional' aura about them. To tell the truth, I always thought that games on the Amiga had a kind of 'inbred' quality to them, as if the designers never looked beyond their own backyard.

(And let's face it, except for the French, the Spanish and the Italians, no one in Europe can actually design anything...)

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Sun May 11, 2008 7:10 am

320x240 wrote:(And let's face it, except for the French, the Spanish and the Italians, no one in Europe can actually design anything...)

*shoots 320 with a CZ-75*

320x240 wrote:The Amiga on the other hand existed in a sort of cultural vacuum and had to slowly build up it's own identity. I believe this is why it's following is so strong even now. For games this meant that most, even the better ones, had a 'nice but not quite professional' aura about them. To tell the truth, I always thought that games on the Amiga had a kind of 'inbred' quality to them, as if the designers never looked beyond their own backyard.

Lol, reverse ethnocentrism. Most Japanese games scream "sheltered anime cliche," and "visual novels" are mainly B-Roll stuff that were too crippled to crawl onto the small screen.

There's lots of good games on the Amiga, and at least a few good ports of great Japanese arcade games that never made it to the X68000 (doujin or otherwise, I imagine).

Both systems blow for not having arcade Contra ports, though. >)

Udderdude · Post by **Udderdude** » Sun May 11, 2008 7:14 am

320x240 wrote:To tell the truth, I always thought that games on the Amiga had a kind of 'inbred' quality to them, as if the designers never looked beyond their own backyard.

Heh, this is probabally the most insightful comment I've ever seen on Amiga games, and especially Euroshmups :/

Ed Oscuro · Post by **Ed Oscuro** » Sun May 11, 2008 7:15 am

So explain to me again how X68000 games aren't "inbred?" Most of them are straight arcade ports (or play like doujin versions of the same), for chrissakes!

ED-057 · Post by **ED-057** » Sun May 11, 2008 7:15 am

It seems like there was more competition based on features in the Japanese consumer-oriented PC market back in the day. Here in the US you basically had your expensive business-oriented PCs (which mostly sucked for games at that point) and Atari and Commodore, who were waging a price war (one of the reasons given for MSX not coming to US market). Atari and Commodore were comparatively small companies and their development and manufacturing capabilities lagged behind some of the other players. While their 8-bit and 16-bit machines were impressive when they first came out, the designs were not updated much. In the mid '80s MSX2 computers were being made with much of their logic condensed into a single 100-pin surface-mount chip. Amigas had huge boards full of off-the-shelf chips into the '90s.

I would agree that the X68k was way ahead when it came out. On the PC side it had a sharp 31KHz color monitor, 512x512 with 64K colors or 768x512 with 16 colors, before SVGA or even plain VGA was out. On the games side it had 128 sprites and multiple background layers well before the SNES or NeoGeo.

Vs. the Amiga it also had 1.2MB floppies and is actually more than 50% faster (since the Amiga is a single bus system with reduced memory bandwidth to the CPU). The xvi is probably as fast as an unexpanded A1200. You could compare it with the A3000 instead (which cost a similar $4000 or so) but the only real advantage there is the faster CPU (since X68030 wasn't out yet I don't think) and more RAM, while the video still doesn't measure up.

As for 386 vs. 68K... the 68020 was also available at the time but apparently the cost for a 32-bit board was thought to be too high. A 386SX wouldn't be that much faster than a 68000 without suitably fast RAM or an external cache. Plus, if you were designing a computer almost from scratch at that time why would you use the goofy x86 architecture when there is the perfectly good 680x0 alternative? Or the NEC V60? The 386 was used in the FM Towns and some arcade machines though.

Sound is somewhat a matter of taste. I for one would take a YM2203 over a SID any day (I'm a big FM fan)

In short, the X68k pwned. It would be even cooler if it had as good an OS as the Amiga though.

BIL · Post by **BIL** » Sun May 11, 2008 9:07 am

I love this shot of Image Fight's ending. (not inlined in case anyone doesn't want it spoiled)

http://img106.imageshack.us/img106/2550/ima1jva2.gif

It's the shooting in a single picture.

SamIAm · Post by **SamIAm** » Sun May 11, 2008 9:24 am

Regardless of relative technical performance and market conditions, the X68K looks like it would have been supremely badass to own back in the day. Can you imagine being the lucky Japanese kid who convinced his parents to buy him one, and thereafter had an arcade in his room?