There are a few Sharp X68000 emulators to choose from but the best is WinX68kHighSpeed.
WinX68kHighSpeed is a Sharp X68000 emulator for playing X68000 games on your PC.
Download the English Version, the Boot Roms and some games.
http://www.geocities.jp/winx68khighspeed/ - winx68khighspeedv095.zip
See the emulation section for some games to download.
IMPORTANT! To get the emulator working you need a copy of the Sharp X68000 Boot Roms.
Windows 2000 onwards come with the Japanese True Type Font caled MSGothic (msgothic.ttc) already installed so you should have no problems with the emulator, on older systems (Win9x) you may have some issues with the menus but this is out of the scope of this guide.
Winx68kHighSpeed does not have an install script but its not really needed as the program will run from wherever you Extract the files to.
Create a folder called win68khighspeed and unzip the winx68khighspeedv095.zip and win68k_roms.zip files to that directory.
Create a folder called games and unzip the games to that directory.
Here's a look at the folder and files that are set up.
The keyconf.dat and winx68k.ini files are created automatically when the program has been run once.
To play games on Win68kHighSpeed you will need rom images of the original games, see the Download section for all the Gradius related games. All you do is decompress the games to the games directory.
Run the WinX68kHighSpeed_eng.exe file and this screen below will appear.
This message on screen just says you must insert a floppy disk.
This pop up message may appear about clearing SRAM, choose Yes
Click the Option menu and choose Config.
Now you can change the sound quality to higher than the default (which is 22kHz), I use 44kHz for CD quality sound.
The games are easier to play with a JoyStick, the default settings are fine. For some reason the first four buttons do no display correctly but this does not matter.
The Up, Down, Left, Right controls cannot be changed.
Click FDD0 and select the first disk image from your games directory.
This pop up message may appear about clearing SRAM, choose Yes.
Click FDD1 and select the second disk image and the game will load.
Here are some screen shots of other games playing in the emulator.