The monitor supports horizontal scanning rates of 15, 24, and 31 kHz and functions as a cable-ready television ( NTSC-J standard) with composite video input. The rear has a variety of ports, including stereoscopic output for 3D goggles, FDD and HDD expansion ports, and I/O board expansion slots. The top has a retractable carrying handle only on non-Compact models, a reset button, and a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) button. The front of the computer has a headphone jack, volume control, joystick, keyboard and mouse ports.

The system's keyboard has a mouse port built into either side. The screen would fade to black and sound would fade to silence before the system turned off. This system was also one of the first to feature a software-controlled power switch pressing the switch would signal the system's software to save and shutdown, similar to the ATX design of modern PCs. The X68000 features two soft-eject 5.25-inch floppy drives, or in some of the compact models, two 3.5-inch floppy drives, and a very distinctive case design of two connected towers, divided by a retractable carrying handle. Since the system's release, software such as Human68k, console, SX-Window C compiler suites, and BIOS ROMs have been released as public domain software and are freely available for download. Most games also boot and run from floppy disk some are hard disk installable and others require hard disk installation. These GUI shells can be booted from floppy disk or the system's hard drive. A third GUI called Ko-Window exists with an interface similar to Motif. Other operating systems available include NetBSD for X68030 and OS-9.Įarly models have a GUI called 'VS' or 'Visual Shell' later ones were originally packaged with SX-WINDOW. At least three major versions of the OS were released, with several updates in between. Versions of the OS prior to 2.0 have command line output only for common utilities like 'format' and 'switch', while later versions included forms-based versions of these utilities. An MS-DOS-workalike, Human68k features English-based commands very similar to those in MS-DOS executable files have the extension.

The X68k runs an operating system called Human68k which was developed for Sharp by Hudson Soft.

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