FM Towns

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Fujitsu Microelectronics "Towns" are the personal computer series which were produced in Japan, it was the second popular brand there after the NEC PC-98 series in their time. They are known as the first computers being able to boot directly from the CD-ROM drive, also for their multimedia capabilities and for the graphical BIOS interface. However they are not IBM-compatible PCs.

They use a firmware that is completely different from a Standard PC BIOS, so a new HAL has to be created. Also, instead of the MBR scheme, they use IPL (Initial Program Loader) scheme for booting.[1][2]

Status

ReactOS is not ported to FM Towns series yet.

Last models in the series (FM Towns II HB and HC, also SK53 and SL53) use Pentium compatible CPUs and up to 136 MB RAM so they could run ReactOS once it's ported.

It's confirmed FM-Towns II HC can be upgraded with AMD K6-2 processor running at 400 MHz.[3]

Hardware

According to different sources, FM Towns has more similarities with IBM PC platform than the NEC PC-98 hardware-wise.

They are usually equipped with a standard 8042 PS/2 keyboard and MSX/FM-Towns joystick as a mouse, but with a proprietary video controller (screen resolution up to 720x512 pixels with 15-bit high-color depth, including hardware sprite renderer).

For the storage, mainly SCSI hard disks are used, along with proprietary Matsushita/Panasonic CD-ROM drives.

Floppy disk controller is MB8877A which supports only Fujitsu FMR formatted 1.23 MB floppy disks.[2]

Emulation

  • MAME is able to run TownsOS[4] and Windows 95 (Japanese version for FM Towns),[5] but does not emulate Pentium-based models yet.
  • UNZ[6] - not investigated yet whether it can emulate Pentium.
  • Tsugaru[7] - emulates only FM Towns II MX[8] model for now (non-Pentium).

See Also

References

  1. ↑ FM TOWNS Rescue Boot Loader Project (* Except models UX, UG and Marty) - YSFLIGHT.COM
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 The Answer To 0x49: Fujitsu FMR | OS/2 Museum
  3. ↑ World's fastest FM-Towns by sampson - Twitter (archived)
  4. ↑ Driver:FMTowns - Installing TownsOS - MAMEDEV Wiki
  5. ↑ MESS: FM-Towns II HR [fmtownshr] - Windows 95 - Imgur
  6. ↑ FM TOWNS / MARTY Emulator UNZ
  7. ↑ FM Towns Emulator "Tsugaru" Project - YSFLIGHT.COM
  8. ↑ captainys/TOWNSEMU: FM Towns Emulator "Tsugaru" - GitHub
ReactOS ports‎
In active development Intel IA-32 (x86) | AMD64 (x64)
In slow development ARM64 (aarch64) | ARM32 (armv7) | NEC PC-98 (x86) | OG Xbox (x86) | Apple TV (1st generation) (x86)
Unmaintained OLPC (x86)
Missing ports that Windows has Intel IA-64 (Itanium) | IBM PS/2 MCA (x86) | SGI 320/540 (x86) | DEC Alpha (axp) | MIPS | PowerPC (ppc)
Ideas for new ports FM Towns (x86) | PlayStation 4 (x64) | Intel SFI (x86/x64)
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