FM Towns

~ the obituary ~

Fujitsu had lost the previous round. The FM-7 had been overtaken by NEC's PC-8801, and the lesson the company took from it was that software sales drive hardware sales, so the next machine would be built on an architecture that already had software. That was the FM R, a 1987 x86 and DOS platform sold into Japanese offices and government departments with hundreds of packages available for it. The FM Towns was announced on 28 february 1989 as the multimedia version of that lineage, and it arrived carrying something no other computer on sale anywhere had: a CD-ROM drive fitted as standard.

The first models ran an Intel 80386DX at 16 MHz with one or two megabytes of memory, and the single-speed CD-ROM drive sat next to a floppy drive in the same case. In the box with the machine were a gamepad and a microphone, in 1989, which is a bill of materials from about fifteen years into the future. Graphics came off a custom Fujitsu chip that could put 32,768 colors on screen and drive up to 1024 sprites, and it could overlay one video mode on top of another so that a game could hold high-color artwork behind high-resolution kanji text.

It never broke out of its niche. NEC's PC-9801 had at one point seventy percent of the Japanese 16 and 32-bit market and was not going to be dislodged by a better graphics chip, and the FM Towns spent eight years as the machine Japanese developers liked and Japanese buyers mostly did not purchase. Around 500,000 were sold. Fujitsu eventually bolted a DOS/V compatibility switch onto it, which removed most of the reason to own one, and in the summer of 1997 stopped making FM Towns hardware entirely so it could sell IBM PC clones under the FMV name like everybody else in the country.

The CD-ROM is where this grave connects to anything I remember. In Turkey the CD-ROM did not arrive as a computer, it arrived as a kit. You bought a box with a drive in it and a controller card, and then you opened the case and mounted the drive in a bay. After that came a line in config.sys for the driver and a line in autoexec.bat for MSCDEX, so that DOS would agree the disc existed at all. Getting either of them wrong meant a machine that booted to a prompt with no D drive and no explanation. The FM Towns had deleted every step of that in 1989 by putting the driver in ROM and letting the disc boot the operating system directly. Fujitsu solved a problem eight years before the rest of us stopped having it, in a machine almost nobody outside Japan could buy.

~ the case file ~

~ what booting from a disc actually took ~

The FM Towns has a hidden C drive in ROM holding a minimal MS-DOS with the CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX already in it. On power-up that runs first and then hands control to the boot loader it finds on the disc. The graphical Towns OS comes off the disc after that, built on MS-DOS underneath with a Phar Lap DOS extender so software could run in protected mode and see real memory.

That ordering matters more than it sounds. The Amiga CDTV booted a GUI from an internal CD drive in 1991, which is the same year a CD-bootable System 7 landed for the Macintosh, and the PC world did not standardize bootable CDs at all until the El Torito specification in 1994. Fujitsu was doing it in 1989. Then it did the second smart thing and charged game publishers almost nothing to put a stripped Towns OS on their own discs, so a game could boot the machine by itself with no floppy and no hard disk anywhere in the process.

~ the console version ~

On 20 february 1993 Fujitsu shipped the FM Towns Marty at 98,000 yen, which was the computer with the keyboard removed and a case that would sit under a television. It ran existing FM Towns software off the same discs and is generally counted as the first 32-bit home console, arriving well before the Saturn or the PlayStation. It was also priced like a computer, because it was one, and it was discontinued in 1995.

There is a pattern here that the Japanese hardware industry ran repeatedly in that decade. A platform that cannot win as a computer gets its keyboard removed and is offered to a different buyer at the same cost of goods, and the different buyer does the arithmetic and buys the cheaper thing. Sharp put a games console inside a computer and Fujitsu took the computer out from under one. Both lost to boxes that had been designed as consoles from the first schematic.

~ the long tail ~

The software is what people chase now. Because the FM Towns had a CD drive and a good sound path when almost nothing else did, western games ported to it in the early nineties often arrived with full CD audio and voice work years before the same titles got that treatment anywhere else, and those versions are the reason emulator authors bothered. Debian and Gentoo were both ported to the hardware at various points, which is the kind of thing that happens to an orphaned architecture with a devoted enough following.

Fujitsu is still one of the larger laptop manufacturers on earth and has no reason to mention any of this. The machine that carried its most original engineering is now a small community of collectors in Japan and a directory of disc images everywhere else.

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