Road Blaster; Thunder Storm (found Windows/Sharp X68030 ports of arcade games; 2009)

This article has been tagged as Needing work due to its lack of content and clarity.

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Cover art of the Windows/Sharp X68030 port of Road Blaster.

Status: Partially Found

Overview of the Source Game

Road Blaster and Thunder Storm(Known as Cobra Command in the west) are both Data East Laserdisc based Arcade games from the mid-1980s that have seen numerous ports to many consoles over the years. The rights to these games were sold in Febuary 2004 with the liquidation of Data East due to its bankruptcy to the Japanese developer and publisher G-Mode Corp., which specializes in mobile game development. since their aquisition of these games there are two known ports; a 2011 port by Revolutionary Concepts to IOS and a limited release to the sharp X68030/68060 MSX PC and Windows Only released in japan. This rare port is the primary focus of this page.

History and Technical Info

(The following information is from the Road Blaster Page, but holds true for both Ports) The sharp X68030 and windows port was coded by Taiyo Seisakusho Inc. and distributed by Jitensyasougyou Inc. The minimum specs for windows are windows 2000 or newer, a pentium 3, directX 9, and 1.5 GB worth of free space on a hdd, as well as a DVD rom drive to install the game from. The minimum specs for the Sharp X68000 are either an 030 or 060 revision PC, Human68k Vers. 3.02 OS, Internal ram of 8mb, and 150MB or more free on the hdd. It uses the same DVD as the PC port as the install medium, making it the only Sharp X68000 software to be distributed on DVD-rom. It is not Emulator compatible. The source of the video used for the port is the rare VHD Version, pulled from a disk with only a couple of previous plays. It seems the X68000 port was a passion project by a talented Developer only listed in these pages as EXCEED, and the windows port is just an upscaled x68000 port version. it was sold through the online store of Jitensyasougyou and some online retailers before Road Blaster was pulled from sale after October 2012, with the store page edited to reflect the end of its availability. Cobra Command was pulled in December 2012

Discovery of Playable Demo

Located in the archived store pages are download links to playable demo versions of the windows ports, and the links to download from are still up being hosted, even though they're inaccessable. you can get Road Blaster and get Cobra Command . Both of these are strangely listed as trial versions, and updaters for the full versions if you own a physical copy, which means it might be possible to manipulate the exe to unlock the full game. As for the sharp X68000 versions, there appears to be no digital versions available or roms available at this time, but there might possibly still be copies existing in people's Sharp X68000 software collections.

Gallery

Screenshot from the Windows Port of Road Blaster

Screenshot of the Windows port of Thunder Storm