Sharp X68000

[Tempest]

Is it worth tracking down a Sharp X68000? I've always been fascinated by this computer, but I'm afraid that the language barrier will be too much to overcome. I know most (if not all) of the RPGs are in Japanese, but what about the rest of the games? What about the actual OS? Is it English friendly?

X68000's seem to be hard to come by for some reason. There are hundreds of MSX's to be had, but few X68000's.

Tempest

[zektor]

I played quite a few games through an emulator awhile back, and I would love to grab one of these. As far as I recall, many of the games I tried were English friendly. It has a nice version of Fantasy Zone too If you end up tracking one down, I would love to hear a review from you!

[blue lander]

The X68000 is super English friendly. You don't really need to worry about the OS unless you're changing system settings. You just pop the game in, turn the computer on, and it boots up (some games require you to click on an icon, but that's it). I've got about 20 action/arcade games for the thing, and none of them have language issues.

Just make sure you buy a unit with at least 2 megabytes of RAM. You can find the original gray model 68000 for cheaper than the black ones, but they're very difficult to upgrade to 2 megs, so keep that in mind if you buy one. Also make sure you get a multisync monitor that can sync between 15khz and 31khz. Shipping is pretty damn expensive for the computer itself, so if you already have a multisync monitor it'd be cheaper to build an adapter rather than shipping a monitor.