Raiden-ing out onto your feeds: some Japanese PC eye candy. The FM Towns has such an interesting design with its narrow tower and CD drive - reportedly the first computer to come with one as standard.
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More waves of nostalgia for a country I never lived in. Visited in 2019 and with all the malls and bookstores still open, I got this overwhelming nostalgia in Japan as a Gen Xer. It's so damn weird. It's like a Gen X fever dream
Oh, not related to fm towns, more to regular pcs.
i remember when i’ve got my first home tower pc, my mother decided it would be cooler if it will be placed horizontally… And because of this we somehow scratched to hell my first game cd…
True! I’ve got only later edition wii (family edition, if i remember correctly). And it was horizontal by design, which a bit puzzled me, because i’m used to see wii differently 🫠
The Towns has such an amazing look, it’s too bad that the games library doesn’t quite live up to its aesthetics. In that regard, the X68000 is a much more complete machine, IMHO.
the way the disk drive is positioned is such an interesting placement and if this one could build a custom PC tower, it's a design element this one would probably use. Or maybe put a couple drives along the top or side of the tower? either way, it'd have a transparent(lets here it for atomic purple)
They're still reasonably affordable to import over the X68000 for some reason, they usually play game better than it and have a cool remix ost. I think they're neat but they're so close to the Wintel arch, that I've not imported them for that reason. I've debated getting a UX-20 several times though
We do have emulators for them, but it isn't just a DOS PC with custom graphics. Almost every supporting ASIC is custom. That's part of why emulating it is a challenge.
However, you got Tsugaru, MAME, UNZ (most compatible from what I've read), "FM BOCHS", and the XE Muilti System Emulator (Marty).
Well, Towns OS is actually MS-DOS based so technically that is right as well. The machine has a complicated love story with IBM compatibles, as it was MS-DOS and Windows 3.1/95 compatible too. Towns OS (it's primary GUI) is based on MS-DOS, but with the Phar Lap 386 DOS extender (pre-DOS4GW).
There could be a novel written on the architecture of the machine. In fact there probably is. 😅 The gist of it though is, it is PC based, and not PC based at the same time. Hardware wise it's quite different, but software wise, it's not. To an emulator though, that hardware matters more.
That's next level! Even my PCs 10 years later didn't look that sick. The IBM Aptiva Stealth was pretty neat design, but the rest were the bland old vanilla fuglies.
tangentially related, im reminded of the PC-88 model that you could actually put a PC Engine CD ROM^2 drive in the top to use as the cd drive, like this
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Oh, and "Hyperart Thomassons" are EVERYWHERE.
Can't read much Japanese but intensely, deeply, jealous of their bookstores. And the specialty shops. Those don't exist anymore in the US.
Small town shopping streets!
Pushbutton phones in the hotels with oldtimey handsets!
Bookstores!
It's like this mad blend of nostalgia and Alice in wonderland. Japanese malls are like a dream you had about a mall long ago.
Department stores too!
i remember when i’ve got my first home tower pc, my mother decided it would be cooler if it will be placed horizontally… And because of this we somehow scratched to hell my first game cd…
Wii's being laid out horizontally weirds me out a bit. I'm sure it's fine but it's a vertical console in my head and ours has always been.
thats turbo
Love the look of old computers, specially those from Japan.
(also if they're literally dos pcs with bog standard chips for everything but the graphics, why cant we have emulators for them already x_x)
However, you got Tsugaru, MAME, UNZ (most compatible from what I've read), "FM BOCHS", and the XE Muilti System Emulator (Marty).
Someone had said the Fujitsu gui was just gui of MS-DOS but I guess they are wrong so my apologies
i think fm towns ii is sexier though