This Old Mac Episode 8
Hello people, welcome to the continuing saga of my foray into the world of Macintosh stuff. Well I must admit for main time recently I have been working with this i7 Hackintosh. The Mac Pro I admit I have not really used much as I currently don't have any projects regarding it.
So lately I have been playing with emulation. I have been working with two emulators in particular.
Both emulators have been primarily Japanese machines. The first one I have been looking at is OpenMSX. Obviously the MSX was designed between a conglomerate of companies including Panasonic, JVC, Sony, Hitachi and many more to try and create a central standard of home computers.
All had similar components and Basic provided by Microsoft. However for all the had a standardised base. It never really caught on. The concept of a universal base was a good idea but sadly it just didn't gain traction.
The main idea they did try and develop each standard moved a bit further. There was MSX, MSX 2, MSX 2+ and finally MSX Turbo R. So they really did try and get the machine over.
Anyway enough history and onto the emulator. OpenMSX can emulate all the above standards, the idea was each update was backwards compatible. OpenMSX allows you to set which machine you want to emulate. Obviously you need the system roms but they are widely available.
OpenMSX does come with a bios in the form of CBIOS which is a freeware bios replacement which means you can get most games and apps running. However I have been using the Goldstar A1GT bios which is a MSX Turbo R machine so I have the maximum compatibility.
Now MSX had various add-ons such as additional drives and sound chips. OpenMSX can have these added by selecting extensions providing you have the rom. So the amount of options is pretty high including hard drives and more.
I admit MSX games are not reasonably good but I had an issue when I tried Boulder Dash on the A1GT so I used the CBIOS MSX 1 bios and all was fine. One thing I will say is Boulder Dash on the MSX seems to run slightly faster than every other version I have played but it is possible to play if a bit twitchy.
OpenMSX is very comprehensive for its coverage but can be a bit awkward to get setup. If you have never used an MSX emulator it can be not straightforward to get working. The CBIOS is default so games can be played but if you want a different machine. In emulator it's easy to select but if you don't have it set up can be a bit of a headache to set up.
However once setup OpenMSX is a more than capable emulator.
The second emulator I have been using is XM6 Pro 68K which is an emulator of the Sharp X68000.
The Sharp X68000 was only released in Japan. The initial machine was released in 1987 which had a 10Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU. It went through a many iterations and the final machine was in 1993 which had a 25 MHz Motorola 68030, with 4MB or RAM and an 80 GB SCSI hard drive.
The Sharp X68000 while popular in Japan never got out its home territory. Many games were written for the Sharp X68000 series and most are obviously in Japanese but certain games were in English.
Being a Japanese machine a lot of the games were Manga inspired with scantily clad young girls everywhere. However the Sharp X68000 had some very good arcade conversions. I wish I knew how to read Japanese so I could appreciate the games more as many are visual novel style so they have a lot of text.
However I spent a lot of time playing the excellent Akumajou Dracula aka Castlevania. The game is amazing and seems to be Rondo of Blood. The comparison to the PC Engine version is obvious and it has multiple paths just like the PC Engine has but it does have differences.
Now I have discussed the machine and the games. I now have to admit the XM6 Pro 68K emulator is a Windows version. I did try to run native Mac versions of Sharp X68000 emulators but I had issues.
The first emulator was called XM6i which I could get to open but i could not get it to play any games. The entire menu system was in Japanese so I had no idea what I had to do to get it started. So I couldn't use it.
I then tried to run RetroArch, which is a multi machine emulation system where you have to install various emulation cores.One of the cores is PX6a which apparently runs Sharp X68000 games. However every time I tried to run the machine regardless of the game I chose, it would just crash out.
So I had to try a different method. I had to run XM6 using CrossOver from Codeweavers. Crossover is a version of Wine for the Mac and the Codeweavers do contribute tot he actual Wine project as well as CrossOver.
Initially I could get the emulator running which it does by creating a Windows instance in a container they call a bottle but could not figure once the bottle was created how to run it again.
After a few attempts I discovered you could get a shortcut to the program in the bottle by running the emulator and there is an option to create a launcher for program ran.
So now I have XM6 Pro 68K running with with an icon on my dock. The Sharp X68000 is a very interesting machine but sadly due to not many of the games having translations many of them I can't get to appreciate.
Well I think that's enough for this episode so until next time... Take care.
