The Sharp X68000 (1987) was an expensive Japanese computer with hardware close to an arcade machine. It received the best home versions of many arcade games of the time, often made by Capcom and Konami themselves.
We have about 280 Sharp X68000 games on My Abandonware. They are floppy images, from a few hundred KB to a few MB.
X68000 emulators
XM6 Pro-68k is the friendliest on Windows, and the easiest to follow in English. px68k runs everywhere through RetroArch. All of them need two ROM files from the machine.
- XM6 Pro-68k (Windows): a version of XM6 worked on for English-speaking players, with menus you can read and good MIDI support. Recommended.
- px68k: a light emulator, best known as a RetroArch core, which runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and small machines. It has no MIDI music.
- MPX68K (Mac): a Mac version, native on Apple Silicon.
- XM6 TypeG (Windows): the most accurate of the family, with Japanese menus. Try it when a game misbehaves elsewhere.
The ROM files
Every X68000 emulator needs two files from the real machine: iplrom.dat, the startup program, and cgrom.dat, which holds the Japanese characters. Without them, nothing starts.
They are copyrighted, so no emulator includes them: see our page about BIOS files. Each emulator has its own place for them. In RetroArch, px68k wants them in a keropi folder inside the system folder; XM6 Pro-68k takes them next to its program.
Running a game
Unzip the game, put the first floppy image in drive 0, and reset the machine. The X68000 starts from the floppy, as the real one did.
Our games come as floppy images: .dim, .xdf, .d88 or .hdm. Open the file in the drive 0 of the emulator, then reset. A game on several disks fills drive 0 and drive 1: put the first two in, and change them when the game asks.
Some games must be installed on a hard disk before they run. An emulator can make an empty hard disk image (.hdf), which you format from Human68k, the system of the machine, then run the game's installer. This takes a working Human68k floppy, so it is the long way round: try the floppies first.
MIDI music
Many X68000 games played their music on an external MIDI machine, a Roland MT-32 or SC-55. Without it, you hear the internal sound chip, which is good, but not what the authors wrote.
XM6 Pro-68k can send the music to a real MIDI machine, or to a software one like Munt, which imitates the MT-32. px68k has no MIDI at all. If a game sounds thin against videos you have seen, MIDI is usually the reason.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. X68000 emulation is documented mostly in Japanese, but a few English sites cover it well.
The Emulation General Wiki compares the emulators and lists the ROM files. NFG Games holds English notes about the machine, its disks and its hard disk setup.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.