The X68000 is a fourth-generation home computer developed and manufactured by Sharp Corporation, first released only in Japan on March 28, 1987.Featuring an operating system written by Hudson Soft called Human68k and bundled with a conversion of Konami's 1987 arcade game Gradius as the pack-in game at launch, the X68000 was very similar to arcade system boards of the time in terms of hardware and served as the development machine for Capcom's CP System.[3] Many add-ons were released including networking, SCSI, memory upgrades, CPU enhancements and MIDI I/O boards, among others that increased the performance of the system.Games were also distributed through the Takeru software vending machines, which allowed users to write commercial titles or dōjin soft on blank 5.25" floppy disks.[6] Originally released at JP¥369,000, later models were sold for considerably lower prices.