X68000 Development Books:floppy images uploaded

[costa]

Hi everyone.
I have a handful of books about X68000, and some is of general interest as they are about development and, more specifically, game development!
Many of you probably know some of them. I don´t know if the source code from the floppies are available elsewhere, so I have created images of the original disks and uploaded to ftp.nfggames.com/Uploads.

The books and the corresponding disks images that I have uploaded are:

* X68K Programming Series:
  - develop1.xdf
  - develop2.xdf

* X68K Game Programming by GCC
  - gccgame1.xdf
  - gccgame2.xdf

* X68000 (japanese title, could not translate but I think it means "Game Programming")
  - gameprg1.xdf
  - gameprg2.xdf

Since the books are all in japanese, they would no be of immediate help for the majority of us, therefore I consider that the source codes in the floppies will be much more useful in short term.
Thinking long term, it would be very nice to have the books scanned to pdf and/or text for later translation.
However, I lack the time for that, they are massive, and I don't have a proper scanner at this time, and dismembering the books is out of question!

I hope the floppy images are useful for some, and help those ones that want to start playing with graphics, sound, game development to learn a bit using these resources.

I have also attached the covers of the books in this message.

Side note: man, it is a shame these computers were never released outside Japan, otherwise we would have these books translated already!!!! Life sucks!

[H68k]

The X68000 wasn't as popular as other Japanese computers for a number of reasons.

Sharp originally designed the X68k to do a number of things, primely as a Multimedia machine that could things such as: Graphics, Music, Programing as well as games etc and aimed it more at a creative and "professional" audience than home users or public Joe. That "Personal Workstation" moniker is not quite 100% marketing BS after all.

And just like with Mr Job's NeXT Cubes and NeXT workstations, It also had a degree of 'exclusivity'. You couldn't just walk into any Japanesae high street computer store and buy one like with a PC98 or later FM TOWNS models, You had to order them from Sharps own stores or via mail order. then wait.. and wait. And wait some more... due to them being manufactured in limited quantitys at a time.

Sharp where not just banging them out like NEC was with PC98 models. (though you could say the Compact models came around to address this) It also didn't get as much marketing as other Japanese computers did.


As the Japanese are also a very homogeneous, foreigner phobic society (afraid of foreigners coming in and messing with things etc) the chances of it being released in other markets would be very slim indeed.