This one is about computers. As much as console gaming forms the crux of what I discuss here at NRWG, it is occasionally my duty to draw attention to that parallel road, that meandering yet meaningful story of mankind’s attempt to entertain itself with computers before they were all plugged into phone lines. (Hell, many of them were before it was even a thing.)

So you remember back in the 80s when you thought your MS-DOS shit or your Amstrad CPC was cool? Do you remember the days before Japan started dropping unfathomable machines on the West one after another? Back before the Internet forcibly occluded every dark corner of electronics culture in stark detail, there was a time when Japan kept the best shit for themselves. And I can’t blame them when I look at some of it. We wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it. Like apes confronted by Arthur C Clarke’s monolith, we would have felt so many emotions that we were reduced to hooting until dusk at the x68000.

My favorite touch is the little pole accessory for the mouse cord. That is very Japanese to me. I don’t even know why.

Sharp released the first model in 1987, naming the machine after its 10MHz CPU. It boasted one whole megabyte of ram, which today is about enough juggling space for one small photograph. ( I realize RAM and disk space are two different things, I’m trying to be illustrative here.) Despite IBM-style PCs in the West having moved on to the concept of built-in hard drives, the x68000 had no such bulk; it had its own OS that bore astounding similarity to MS-DOS but pulled all extra data from floppy.

We’re not here to get soggy over this thing’s data capabilities. When it comes to graphics and sound, the only things the Western world has that came close were the Amiga and the Atari ST… and neither could hold a shaky, barely-lit candle to this heartbreaker. During a time when a lot of people were gradually making the stroll from boxy candy-colored shit to VGA graphics, the standard color palette on the Sharp x68000 was 65,535 colors in a maximum resolution of 1,024×1,024. By comparison, VGA’s 1987 vintage can output 256 colors at a resolution of 320×200. Better get your bifocals out. Needless to say, this graphical depth demanded audio of comparable richness.

I mean, think about it – this machine hit its peak in the early 90s. This shit was like staring God in the face. Except maybe not as awkward.

Regular readers (if I have any; I certainly hope so, or I’m still in that coma and this isn’t even happening) are already aware of my desire to basically fucking marry the Yamaha YM2612 – the exquisite little weaponized synth chip that makes all our favorite Genesis soundtracks go boom-boom. The Sharp x68000 uses a slightly more grown-up, sophisticated cousin of the YM2612. The YM2151 boasts eight channels to the 2612’s six, and to put it in plain terms, the end result sounds far “cleaner” and also offers more potential detail. In other words, the music output on even the off-the-shelf model is delicious. I am terrible for saying this, but aside from the minimal loss of “ass-end” I seem to hear on x68000 soundtracks, I may actually like this chip better. Two key examples of its power to deliver are the x68000 retooling of Akumajō Dracula and the port of Thunder Force II. It even makes River City Ransom sound gnarlier!

Japan’s decision to only market this marvel domestically kept the x68000 a near-secret in the 80s and 90s, but the sheer volume and variety of titles released for it makes the secret all the more unbelievable. You would think more buzz would have been generated – even now, in 2017, when everyone has seen everything and it’s been made into twelve shitty memes, I look at the screenshots and the videos with a certain awe. I humbly present some highlights of what I have found in my plodding research.

Akumajō Dracula

Konami, 1993

It’s a remake of the original, but it’s arcade-quality. (in fact, the x68000 was the test system for the Capcom CPS system for many years.) I digress – the difficulty level is increased just enough to re-engage, the music is remarkable, and I especially love that Stage Clear theme. “Epic” applies here.

Dead of the Brain

FairyTale, 1992

1) this owns 2) ew though

It’s all in Japanese, but I get the general idea. It seems to be a really cool spin on Re-Animator by way of Return of the Living Dead… definitely inspired by both. The music’s not as mind-blowing here, but the graphics are really turned-out. It’s hard to do effective horror stuff in a game medium, especially the earlier you go in the timeline, but Dead of the Brain really impresses me by melding cartoony with frightening.

Dracula Hakushaku

FairyTale, 1992

I’m sorry, these just fascinate me. I’m noticing a dual theme with these graphical-text adventures: prominent tits and horrible things happening or being found.Still, really detailed illustration, great color choice to make for a dark theme.

A Preponderance of NSFW shit

Big Surprise, 1987-1993

It looks almost like cross-stitch. It is an open and kitchen-ready mockery of itself.

Just in case you wanted to jack off to this, well hey, at least it’s better than the same image would be rendered on a VGA machine. Don’t think too hard about what you’re doing, bucko. I guess people made do back then. Some of it’s awfully MSPaint, though.

Heart of Saphilamun

Annandule Project, 1991

I found very little background info on this one, in either language. It was apparently a hit, but in a flash-in-the-pan sort of way. Something about the screenshots and video intro I’ve found really unsettles me. Maybe it’s the brief, silent sequence depicting a nude woman literally fucking falling apart against a black background. Maybe it’s the horrifying winged snake thing. Maybe it’s the fact that I even asked on forums and couldn’t get a synopsis… it’s apparently loosely based on Lovecraft. I’ll buy that.

All of this has enraptured me with this mysterious device. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing this glimpse into the grey shadows with me; I live for this kind of shit, and it’s part of why I love to write these articles. I get to pluck artifacts from the dusty ground of the wasteland, wipe them off, and decide they need talking about. Cheers.

See you in July, stay retro!

To look back wistfully for the hundredth or so time, I’ve written a lot of articles for NRW about a lot of classic games. All these games, with very few exceptions, were ones that originated in the arcade or for one console and were subsequently ported to other systems. The clear intent of this is to maximize the number of potential consumers, since very few households back then were multi-system owners, and there were a crowd of different machines being used to play video games at home across the Western world and beyond. I tend to mention these ports in brief near the end of my articles; one name you may see often, but may not be closely familiar with (depending on your location and age), is the Spectrum.

In the very late 1970s and the early 1980s, Britain was beginning to embrace computers the same way the US was. There was the same acknowledgment of how useful thinking machines could be, and the two nations also shared an optimistic sense of futurism. This futurism was the lifeblood of Sinclair Research in Cambridge, UK. The early 80s were a time of uncertainty and even of some conflict in the United Kingdom, but just like in America, they were also a time of looking forward. Sinclair was a firm focused on looking forward, with ideas from computers to futuristic transportation making up their offering to the modern world.

The Sinclair C5. Envisioned as a revolution in personal transport, it met with marginal initial success before… well to keep a long story short, it didn’t revolutionize shit. It looks cool as hell, though.

The Spectrum was not the only home computer available in England during the 1980s, nor was it the first Sinclair had released. Its predecessor, the ZX80, had broken barriers upon its 1980 release as the first personal computer available for under US $200. The Commodore product line was available in the UK as well, and in 1981 Acorn partnered with the BBC to release the BBC Micro. The Micro’s intent was not only to make home computers the norm, but to make programming more approachable to those interested in learning. Other than the C64, however, one important flaw remained: You couldn’t play many GAMES on these devices! Well at least not any good ones.

Before proceeding, I would like to state that none of the text beyond this paragraph is meant to malign the Sinclair ZX Spectrum as an overall computing machine, nor diminish its well deserved place in computing/gaming history.

But I have got to be frank… thank the Machine Gods we’ve come a long way since then.

Black with a bold rainbow down one corner. compact, grey TI-83 style buttons. SIX WHOLE COLORS IN ITS PALETTE!

The ZX Spectrum could read and write data using either of the commonly accepted ways: via tape cassettes (slower, cheaper) or a 3 inch floppy (faster, more costly). With a Zilog z80 CPU forming the core of its nerve system, the machine kept up with most of its sister computers of the time (and in fact that same CPU was used in many gaming consoles throughout the 80s, namely the ColecoVision and the predecessors to the Master System). Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, the system was improved and redesigned, both by Sinclair and by their newly acquired company Amstrad. As time went on, the peripherals improved, with later versions even featuring built-in tape and floppy drives. As far as usability and utility, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a wonder.

Graphically and sound-wise, however, the Spectrum was ass. It was pure ass.

Blend, dither and disappear: the overall effect could vary from confusing to depressing.

Let’s start with the graphics. I won’t be that hard on them; I understand that nothing was out-of-this-world graphically in the early 80s, although the C64 was all right and arcade games were on their way. With the Spectrum, you don’t really have much of a spectrum at all. Unless you count black and white, and dimmed tones of the colors, you have exactly six colors. They are bright colors, and if certain ones dominate the screen, you will want your cool 80s shades because your cone and rod receptors will be screaming. This is compounded by the fact that sprites often assume the background’s colors while moving through it; this can add a visual challenge to games that may not need it as both you and other sprites seem to shift into chameleon mode. The Amstrad CPC, a popular later version of the Spectrum, improved on this whole situation somewhat, as shown below.

So… the CPC could almost run the version of MSPaint that came with Windows 3.1!

Now, let’s get to sound. Again, before I get going, I know… it was 1982. But this is the department they seemed to drag the most ass on, for the longest time, with the least real improvement. Below I provide an example; turn your speakers down or anyone you live with might think some kind of nuclear alarm is going off. This is how the Ninja Turtles sound on the Sinclair Spectrum…

Sometimes I share what I find in my travels, and I sent this video to synth-head and gamer Brendon Hicks. Direct quote from Brendon on TMNT’s sound for the Spectrum version:

“It sounds like someone tongue-punching an asshole.”

And he’s not wrong. Here’s another challenge… see if you can handle the whole “theme song” for the Spectrum adaptation of the Stallone hit Cobra:

If you’re a kid who used the family Spectrum to play games, how long do you think you’d have before a parent or other family member came barreling toward you demanding that you turn that shit off? Better get out your stopwatch timer.

All of this said, there’s still a huge community of retro-gamers who love the Spectrum family of computers and still even develop indie software for it. To those of you out there doing that: I do not understand at all, but you are doing something you love, and I can’t speak ill of that.

This examination is done. The patient has a strange set of symptoms, but they seem to be harmless. I don’t think this case is terminal or contagious. You’re free to leave quarantine, Mr. Spectrum.

OW! SHIELDS UP!

😉