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Let's talk about 16-bit computers. Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIgs, Sharp X68000, 68k Macs etc.
I'll start with the question: would Sharp X68000 be marketable in the West? I have a feeling that it was unlikely. It debuted in 1987 at the equivalent of $2500 which was 3.5 times the Amiga 500 price and even 1.6 times the Amiga 2000 price - the most expensive Amiga model. X68000 target consumer was Otaku - a nerd with a lot of disposable income. X68000 had powerful sprite hardware which allowed perfect arcade game ports but not much else. In US and Europe nobody would buy a $2500 machine just to play games. And speaking of video production applications, Amiga was still a cheaper choice, even the most expensive model. For music production people used even cheaper Atari STs. One cool quirk about X68000 is its 31khz 1024x1024 monitor. That one would be perfect for business applications and in theory X68000 could compete with $5000 Macintosh II if it had the business software, but Mac already had a more powerful 68020 cpu and a hard disc in stock. So to market X68000 as a business machine you would have to invest into business soft and include a hard disc which would drive the end price closer to Mac II but your machine would still be less powerful for business use while also having useless videogame specific hardware.
>hear this is an all time classic, decide to try it out >game starts with unskippable cutscene >first combat arena is literally just mashing square against 50 copy-pasted generic goons >next is a mini-boss hydra that has one attack and the strategy is.... drumroll please... just hold L1 to block his one attack. You literally just hack away with square, hold L1, repeat 20x over because the boss has way too much fucking HP Should I just drop this shit? This seems so amateurish
Internet archive has a rom I would like to play (Sonic Spinball (U) [f1]), but it appears to just have the .bin but not a .cue file, just a bunch of image files that show screenshots. There is a torrent file, but I'm assuming downloading that will just give me the same files described above.
Am I right in thinking that without the .cue file I cannot proceed with this source?
Anyone feel like 2004 would be a better cutoff than 2007? 2004 was like the last hurrah of the 5th/Early 6th Gen soul. 2005-2007 saw the 360 released, "mature games for mature gamers", bloom, Halo 3/Gears/COD4/WOW, HD, etc. which arguably moved away from retro.
