What is the "Falcom Early Collection For X68000" that will finally be released?

Photo: Impress Watch

March Usagi no Mori's game sales division "BEEP" will release the new software "Falcom Early Collection For X68000" for X68000 on February 26, 2022. This work contains three masterpiece titles of Nihon Falcom, "Dragon Slayer", "Temple of the Sun", and "Romancia", in the personal workstation X68000 series released by Sharp in March 1987. It is possible to play. In addition, the porting source of these three will be the title of the same name of the PC-8801 series or PC-8801mkII SR series compatible version. [See another image about this article] "Dragon Slayer," "Temple of the Sun," and "Romancia" are the titles "Ys" and "Ys" and "Romancia" that were included in "Ys I & II ~ Lost ancient kingdom ~" released last year. It will be a work that was released about a year to a few years before "Ys II". Therefore, there may be surprisingly many people who do not know it. Since it's a big deal, here I will explain the personal computer situation when "Dragon Slayer", "Temple of the Sun", and "Romancia" were released, as well as the background of the times when those three works were released. ■ Around 1985, when game makers used to divide their games on personal computers Before introducing the games, let's take a look at the historical background at the time when the original games were released. The oldest title in the "Falcom Early Collection For X68000" (hereafter "Arikore") is "Dragon Slayer" released in 1984. Speaking of the personal computer situation in 1984, it was an era when many domestic manufacturers released their own personal computers and developed a group of people. In 1983, the previous year, NEC released the latest model of the PC-8801 series, the PC-8801mkII, including a model with two built-in floppy disk drives. In 1984, Sharp and Fujitsu released the X1 Turbo (Sharp) and FM-77 (Fujitsu), which can contain up to two floppy disk drives, respectively. As for other manufacturers, not only did Sony introduce hardware such as SMC-777C and Hitachi introduced MB-S1, but also new MSX computers conforming to the MSX standard were sent to the market from various manufacturers such as Casio, Matsushita, and Mitsubishi. It was. In such an era, the CPU speed is 4MHz (MHz is about 1/1000 of the unit Ghz of modern CPU), and the built-in memory is mainly 64Kbytes. The screen resolution was 640 x 200 or 640 x 400 dots, and the market price was that the number of colors that could be output was 8 or 16. Especially with regard to memory, its capacity is only 1/10000 compared to the current personal computer with 64 gigabytes. The capacity of floppy disks was generally about 320 Kbytes at this time. Compared to SSD with 320GB capacity for the sake of clarity, this is also as small as 1/100000. That was a personal computer around 1985. As for the sound, it is easy to play the recorded music on the current PC, but the PC at that time was not so expressive, so even if it could be put out, most of the 8 octave triple chords. NEC's PC-8801mkII had a buzzer (BEEP) sound, so it couldn't play BGM like other companies' PCs. However, the following year, the PC-8801mkIISR released by NEC in 1985 has faster screen drawing than the previous PC-88 series, and by installing hardware called FM sound source, the expressive power in the music direction is also at once. It became rich. Since then, with the advent of killer software, the number of software houses that release software with the PC-8801mkIISR as the main target will increase. In 1984, when "Dragon Slayer" was born, and in 1986, when "Temple of the Sun" and "Romancia" were born, such personal computers were booming in the domestic market.

GAME Watch, Otonashi