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. Personal computer and peripherals. ... Fujitsu (富士通) is a Japanese company specializing in semiconductors, computers (supercomputers, personal computers, servers), telecommunications, and services, and is headquartered in Tokyo. ... Look up February in Wiktionary, the free dictionary February is the second month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Summer is a season, defined by convention in meteorology as the whole months of June, July, and August, in the Northern hemisphere, and the whole months of December, January, and February, in the Southern hemisphere. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII in Roman) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Multimedia is the use of several different media (e. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... 1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ... The FM Towns Marty console, which was released by Fujitsu in Japan in 1993. ...

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. Charles Hard Townes (born July 28, 1915) is an American physicist and educator. ... For the Nintendo 64 emulator, see 1964 (Emulator). ... Hannes Alfvén, 1970 winner for work on astrophysical plasmas List of Nobel Prize laureates in Physics from 1901 to the present day. ... Sir Edward Appletons medal Photographs of Nobel Prize Medals. ...

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 6 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. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC, SEHK: 4335), founded in 1968 as Integrated Electronics Corporation, is a U.S.-based multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... An Intel 80386 Microprocessor. ... MegaHertz (MHz) is the name given to one million (106) Hertz, a measure of frequency. ... The Intel 80387 (387) was the math coprocessor for the Intel 80386 series of microprocessors. ... A floating point unit (FPU) is a part of a CPU specially designed to carry out operations on floating point numbers. ... A megabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to approximately one million bytes. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Mid-19th century tool for converting between different standards of the inch An inch is an Imperial and U.S. customary unit of length. ... A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a ring of thin, flexible (i. ... The CD-ROM (an abbreviation for Compact Disc Read-Only Memory (ROM)) is a non-volatile optical data storage medium using the same physical format as audio compact discs, readable by a computer with a CD-ROM drive. ... A game controller is an input device used to control a video game. ... Operating a mechanical 1: Pulling the mouse turns the ball. ... An Oktava condenser 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. An operating system is a special computer program that manages the relationship between application software, the wide variety of hardware that makes up a computer system, and the user of the system. ... 1. ... Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... Phar Lap was the name of a company manufacturing DOS extenders. ... DOS extender is the name invented in the 1980s for a technology to allow programs started from MS-DOS, which ran in Real mode, to actually run in protected mode. ... Protected mode (sometimes abbreviated p-mode and also called Protected Virtual Address Mode in the Intel iAPX 286 Programmers Reference Manual (iAPX 286 is just another name for the Intel 80286) even though a 32-bit virtual address mentioned in the manual was actually a far pointer and true... Assembly language commonly called assembly or asm, is a human-readable notation for the machine language that a specific computer architecture uses. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. ...

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. Read-only memory (ROM) is a class of storage media used in computers and other electronic devices. ...

Various Linux distributions have also been ported to the FM Towns system, including Debian and Gentoo. See Linux kernel for the kernel itself. ... Debian, organized by the Debian Project, is a widely used distribution of free software developed through the collaboration of volunteers from around the world. ... For other uses, see: Gentoo (disambiguation) Gentoo Linux is a Linux distribution. ...

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. Japanese writing Kanji 漢字 Kana 仮名 Hiragana 平仮名 Katakana 片仮名 Uses Furigana 振り仮名 Okurigana 送り仮名 Rōmaji ローマ字 Kanji ( (help· info), literally Han characters), is the Japanese term for Chinese characters (Hanzi), the Chinese logographic writing system that is used, along with Hiragana (平仮名), Katakana (片仮名) and the Roman alphabet, to write modern Japanese. ...

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. The Compact Disc logo was inspired by that of the previous Compact Cassette. ... Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, then quantized to a series of symbols in a digital (usually binary) code. ... Frequency modulation (FM) is a form of modulation which represents information as variations in the instantaneous frequency of a carrier wave. ... The Yamaha Corporation (ヤマハ株式会社; TYO: 7951 ) is a Japanese company with a large number of product areas. ...

External links

• FM Towns entry at Old-Computers.com
• FM Towns photos
• The world of FM Towns
• Unz (うんず) – An FM Towns emulator
• FM Towns/Bochs – An FM Towns emulator based on Bochs