FM Towns

The system FM Towns (also printed Fm-Towns , FM TOWNS or FM-TOWNS ) is an alternative of PC of origin Japan ease constuite by Fujitsu of February 1989 at the summer 1997. It began as an alternative of PC centered on the Multimédia and the Video game; but later, it became more compatible with the usual PC. In 1993, the FM Towns Marty, a Game console compatible with the plays of FM Towns, was developed.

The name “FM Towns” comes from the code name given to the system during its development, “Townes”; it was selected in homage to Charles Townes, one of gaining Nobel Prize of physique 1964, following the habit of the time adopted by Fujitsu to take the names of nobelized for code name of their products. The letter “E” of “Townes” was removed when the system started production in order not to make error in the pronunciation of the mot. “FM” was added as an acronym of “Fujitsu Micro”.

Details

Several alternatives were created; the first was based on the processor Intel 80386DX functioning with a Fréquence of clock of 16 MHz, with the possibility of adding a coprocessor Intel 80387 FPU, including one or two megabytes of Random access memory (with a maximum of 64 MB), one or two readers of Disquette 3.5 " and a reader CD-ROM at a speed. It was sold with a joystick, a mouse and a microphone.

The Operating system ( OS ) used was Windows 3.0,3.1 and 95, as well as the graphical interface called Towns OS, based on MS-DOS and extension DOS of Phar Lap (RUN386.EXE). The majority of the plays developed for the system were written in the modes protected Assembleur and C using extension DOS from Phar Lap. These plays used Towns OS AP (TBIOS) in order to emulate certain graphic modes, sprites, sounds, the mouse, the controllers of play and CD audio.

A minimal system DOS which gave access the reader of CD-ROM was contained in a system ROMANIAN; that, coupled with the decision of Fujitsu to deal with minimum of expenses of license in order to include bare-bones Towns OS on the CD-ROMs of plays, thus allowing the developers to create plays bootables directly starting from the CD-ROM and without passing by a diskette boot or the hard drive.

Various versions Linux were also related to the system FM Towns, like Debian and Gentoo.

Graphics

FM Towns included graphic modes going from 320*240 with 640*480 Pixel S, and from 16 to 32768 simultaneous colors within a pallet going from 4096 to 16,7 million (according to the graphic mode); the majority of these graphic modes had two pages of memory, and that allowed the maximum use of 1024 sprites of 16*16 pixels each one. They also contained in their read-only memory the possibility of posting the characters Kanji.

Its

The sytème FM Towns was able to make function the audio CDs, and supported also the use of 8 votes PCM and 6 channels FM grace, respectively, with RF5C68 of Ricoh and YM-2612 of Yamaha.

See too

References

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