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FM Towns

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The FM Towns (commonly spelled FM-Towns, FM TOWNS, or FM-TOWNS) system is a Japanese PC variant, built by Fujitsu from February 1989 to the summer of 1997. It started as a proprietary PC variant intended for multimedia applications and computer games, but later became more compatible with regular PCs. In 1993, the FM Towns Marty was released, a gaming console compatible with the FM Towns games.

The name "FM Towns" is derived from the codename the system was assigned while in development, "Townes"; this was chosen as an homage to Charles Hard Townes, one of the winners of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics, following a custom of Fujitsu at the time to codename PC products after Nobel prize winners. The e in "Townes" was dropped when the system went into production to make it clear that it was to be pronounced "Towns" rather than "Tau-Ness", and the "FM", which stood for "Fujitsu Micro", was added.

Details

Several variants were built; the first system was based on an Intel 80386DX processor running at a clock speed of 16 MHz, with the option of adding an 80387 FPU, featured one or two megabytes of RAM (with a possible maximum of 64 MB), one or two 3.5" floppy disk drives and a single-speed CD-ROM drive. It was delivered with a gamepad, a mouse and a microphone.

The operating system used was Windows3.0/3.1/95 and a graphical OS called Towns OS, based on MS-DOS and the Phar Lap DOS extender (RUN386.EXE). Most games for the system were written in protected mode Assembly and C using the Phar Lap DOS extender. These games usually utilized the Towns OS API (TBIOS) for handling several graphic modes, sprites, sounds, a mouse, gamepads and CD-audio.

A minimal DOS system that allowed the CD-ROM drive to be accessed was contained in a system ROM; this, coupled with Fujitsu's decision to charge only a minimal license fee for the inclusion of a bare-bones Towns OS on game CD-ROMs, allowed game developers to make games bootable directly from CD-ROM without the need for a boot floppy or hard disk.

Various Linux distributions have also been ported to the FM Towns system, including Debian and Gentoo.

Graphics

The FM Towns featured video modes ranging from 320×240 to 640×480, with 16 to 32768 simultaneous colours out of a possible 4096 to 16.7 million (depending on the video mode); most of these video modes had two memory pages, and it allowed the use of up to 1024 sprites of 16×16 pixels each. It also had a built-in font ROM for the display of Kanji characters.

One unique feature of the FM Towns system was the ability to overlay different video modes; for example, the 320×240 video with 32768 colours could be overlaid with a 640×480 mode using 16 colours, which allowed games to combine high-colour graphics with high-resolution Kanji text.

Sound

The FM Towns system was able to play regular audio CDs, and also supported the use of eight PCM voices and six FM channels, thanks to Ricoh RF5C68 and Yamaha YM-2612 chipsets, respectively.

See also

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