KtJ Dragon

Overview

FM TOWNS is a personal computer released by Fujitsu Japan. They are sold only in Japan. The first model was released at Feb. 1989, and the last model was released at Jul., 1997. The computer is a 386-based archtecture, but is INCOMPATIBLE with IBM-PC architecture. They are mainly used in home, and in schools. The specifications --- improved garaphics and sounds, built-in bootable CD-ROM drive, and 386 DOS Extender causes impressive games and creative tools. The specifications are especially suitable for porting AMIGA/PC-VGA games into Japanese. Around 500 thousands sets of the computer were sold in japan.

basic specifications

Historical backgrounds

In 1981, IBM released IBM PC. The computer had widely spread in offices. However, the architecture was not popular in Japanese offices. Japanese language uses Kanji letters, which requires at least 12x12 pixels area for displaying a letter. PC's CGA is too poor to handle Japanese. To handle Japanese language sufficiently, Japanese computer companies were developped other x86-based computers having 640x400 video adapters. NEC's PC-9801 archtecture, which was released at 1982, was the most poplular one. In late 1980's, at least 70% of the 16/32 bit computers are PC-9801 computers. They were spread in home, and a number of games were released for this architecture.

The PC-9801 computers were wide-spread, however, they have poor graphics (640x400 at 16 of 4096 colors) and sounds (4-operator/3 voice monoral FM sounds). Therefore, like as AMIGA in US, a computer having improved graphics and sounds was considered to overcome the PC-9801 in the home-use field. For example, SHARP's X68000 computers, released at Mar., 1987, became popular among people who like action/shooting games.

Fujitsu, which had been released a best-seller 8-bit home computer "FM-7" in early 1980's, was decided to release a new home computer. After FM-7 was overcome by NEC's PC-8801 computer, Fujitsu got a useful experience that the number of usable softawre packages are important to sell computers. Therefore, in order to acquire usable software immediately, the archtecture of the new computer is set to be based on Fujitsu's "FMR50" architecture. The FMR50 architecture, released at 1986, is another x86/DOS-based computer having a constitution similar to NEC's PC-9801. The computers were sold in moderately in Japanese office, especially in Japanese goverment office. There have released hundreds of software packages for FMR, including Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, Multiplan, and dBASE III.

Impressive specifications