FM Towns
The FM Towns is a series of 32-bit personal computers manufactured and sold by Fujitsu in Japan. The line was first sold on 1989-02-28 and eventually discontinued in 1997. Fujitsu built the system to be backward compatible with their previous Fujitsu FM R standard. The computer line was technologically advanced for 1989 being built around the fairly new Intel 80386, a powerful custom GPU, a built-in CD-ROM (the first computer model to do so), and a built-in audio chip. It originally shipped with the custom Towns OS (based on MS-DOS), but, it also supported Windows 3 and eventually Windows 95.
The custom video card had a high resolution mode of 720×512 with 16 colors from a color space of 4,096 down to a low resolution of 320×200 with 32,768 from a color space of 16,777,216. The built-in Ricoh RF5c68 audio chip allowed for 8 PCM voices and 6 FM synthesis channels and could play CD audio. Both were very impressive for the time.
The FM Towns competed with the NEC PC-9800 and the Sharp X68000 computers. However, despite the computer being a powerhouse, it was unsuccessful at displacing the market dominated by NEC and only sold around 500,000 units in its lifetime. The hardware served as the base of the FM Towns Marty, a poorly-received video game console.
Contents
Personal
I think I first learned about the FM Towns series from an Ultima web site which showcased the Ultima Trilogy remastered for the platform. After that, I started looking up more about the system and was very surprised to see the impressive graphics and sound from a platform released at the end of the 1980s.
I've never owned an FM Towns computer or even used one in real life, though I've played a little with it using an emulator.
Games
- See all FM Towns Games.
Media
Logo.
Links
