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A package arrived from Japan last week. Inside: games, a mouse, some old magazines, and a good excuse to talk about one of the most interesting home computers that most of the world never heard of.
The parcel came courtesy of JPFans (sponsor), a platform that lets you buy directly from Japanese marketplaces like Mercari, which generally don’t ship outside Japan, or make it complicated enough that most people give up. I’ll come back to how it works. First, the box.
The X68000Z, briefly
Before getting into what I bought, some context on what it’s all for. The X68000Z Mini is Zuiki’s 2023 reimagining of the Sharp X68000, a home computer that launched in Japan in 1987 and never officially left the country. It was expensive, powerful for its time, and built around a premise that almost no other platform could match: near-perfect arcade ports. Street Fighter II, Final Fight, Gradius, the X68000 versions were as close to the arcade original as you could get at home, because the hardware was designed with exactly that in mind.
I picked up the Mini while travelling in Japan, since it wasn’t sold overseas at the time. The basic version comes with the computer itself and a joystick. There are more elaborate bundles: a keyboard replica, a monitor replica that puts a modern LCD inside a CRT-style shell, but I went minimal and gentle to my luggage. And then used JPFans to fill in the gaps.
I’ll dedicate a full video to the Mini and the original X68000 separately, so this isn’t the place to go deep on the hardware. What I want to show here is what the game library looks like when you can actually access it.
What was in the box
The packaging from JPFans is genuinely careful. Everything arrived individually wrapped, and for older items especially, that matters.
Fatal Fury Trilogy was the first thing I pulled out. Three games: Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2, and Fatal Fury Special, in a single collection. The packaging Zuiki uses for these games is something I keep noticing: the outer case contains a smaller case shaped like a 5.25-inch floppy disk, which in turn holds the SD card. It’s a bit of a matryoshka, but it works, and it says something about who these products are made for. These aren’t budget releases. Someone thought about this.
Akumajo Dracula and Quarth come as a Deluxe Pack, a Zuiki reissue licensed from Konami Digital Entertainment. Two very different games sharing one case. Akumajo Dracula is the X68000 version of Castlevania, originally released in 1993. Quarth is a 1989 Konami arcade puzzle shooter: blocks fall from above, you fire pieces upward to form rectangles and clear them. Simple concept, surprisingly hard to put down. An unusual pairing, but the pack is well put together.
The FZ Senki Axis / Granada Pack covers both major titles from Wolf Team, known for cinematic intros and complex multilayer scrolling, solid 16-bit action that doesn’t get enough attention outside Japan. Wolf Team later became Tri-Ace, which puts them in an interesting historical line.
Then the X68000Z Game Collection Vol.1, which is the most straightforward purchase: Zuiki’s official compilation, a curated entry point into the library.
The mouse
I ordered the X68000Z mouse replica through JPFans alongside everything else. It’s a replica of the original 1987 model, and the thing I find most interesting about it is the trackball mode. You pop off a cover on the top and the optical sensor works as a trackball instead of a standard mouse. The original had a mechanical ball; this one uses optical tracking in both modes. It wasn’t a gimmick in 1987, a good portion of the X68000 library was designed with this kind of input in mind. The replica keeps the feature, which I appreciate more than I expected.
The Oh!X, magazine
Five issues of Oh!X, the Sharp home computer magazine published by SoftBank from 1982 to 1995. It started as Oh!MZ and switched to Oh!X in 1987 when its focus narrowed entirely to the X68000 ecosystem. Issues 1, 2, 8, and 10 from 1992, and issue 5 from 1993, right at the peak of the machine’s relevance.
I collect these kinds of magazines because they work as time capsules. The advertisements alone tell you a lot: what hardware variations existed, what software was available, what the community cared about. Oh!X went further than most, programming tutorials, hardware modification guides, game source code listings, developer interviews. It was written for people who used the machine seriously.
One of the 1992 issues covers the X68000 XV, the 32-bit compact model, and seeing how Zuiki’s Mini fits into that hardware lineage is part of what makes collecting these useful for context.
How JPFans works
Mercari Japan and similar platforms are enormous. The selection of X68000 software that circulates there is something you simply can’t find in Europe, and when you do find it, the prices reflect the import premium. JPFans removes the barrier.
The process: you search their platform (Japanese search terms return better results than English, a quick translation lookup is worth it), find what you want, add it to your cart. JPFans purchases the items on your behalf, receives them at their warehouse in Japan, photographs everything for a quality check, which matters a lot when you’re buying vintage items sight unseen, and ships it all together as one parcel. The handling fee is 300 yen per item, roughly £1.50 at current rates. Lower than most comparable services.
One thing worth mentioning openly: customs. JPFans can’t do anything about it, and depending on where you are in Europe the situation varies. In the UK I rarely have issues. Italy tends to be stricter. The practical advice is to be sensible about order size, both to keep shipping weight manageable and to limit your exposure to customs charges. Even accounting for duties, Japanese market prices on this kind of material are typically lower than what you’d pay in Europe, if you can find it at all.
If you sign up through the link below, you get eight coupons worth $86 in total.
👉 https://jpfans.com/register/?ref=800265122 [Affiliate link]
Castlevania on the X68000
The Akumajo Dracula Deluxe Pack deserves a bit more attention, so here it is. The original X68000 Castlevania came out in 1993. It was a remake of the 1986 NES game, but the hardware gap between the two platforms meant Konami could rebuild it almost entirely. Around half the levels were altered or entirely new compared to the NES version. The sub-weapons were expanded. The controls were tighter. The FM audio, processed through the Yamaha sound chip built into the X68000, is one of the most frequently cited reasons people still talk about this version.
It was a Japanese exclusive. Konami eventually ported it to PlayStation in 2001 as Castlevania Chronicles, and for that release they brought in Ayami Kojima to redesign Simon Belmont, giving him the long pink hair and red leather armour that looks almost nothing like the original pixel art. The PlayStation version kept the classic mode as an option, so the contrast is right there.
The Zuiki reissue from 2024 adds save states, which I used more than I’d like to admit. The game is hard in the way most Castlevania games are hard, not arbitrary, but unforgiving. If you want to make it harder, enter NOMIS at the name screen (Simon backwards) and you’ll start with one bar of health. I don’t recommend it.
One last detail: the candles. Breaking every candle in each stage is basically required if you want to keep your health and sub-weapons topped up, and there’s an actual canonical reason for it. In the Castlevania lore, the candles are human souls captured by Dracula and Death. Destroying them frees the souls, who drop hearts and weapons as thanks before moving on. It’s bleak, but it adds something to the repetitive act of whipping everything in sight.
Final thoughts
The X68000Z Mini is clearly made by people who care about the original machine. The emulation quality, the attention to the hardware details, the packaging decisions Zuiki has made for the game releases, none of this feels like a cash-in on nostalgia. It feels like a genuine attempt to make an obscure platform accessible.
If you’re curious about the machine itself, a follow-up video is coming that goes into the original X68000 and the build I’ve been putting together around it. Subscribe if you don’t want to miss it.
And if you want to start building your own X68000Z library, JPFans is where I’d start looking.
Watch the full video on the RetroAffaire YouTube channel.
Stay curious. Stay nostalgic.
Because retro never dies, it just respawns.
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