FM Towns

The FM Towns is a Japanese personal computer that Fujitsu built from 1989 to 1997. It began as a proprietary PC variant aimed at multimedia applications and games, with a standard CD-ROM drive, custom graphics hardware able to show up to 1,024 sprites, and a sound design that played Red Book audio CDs alongside eight PCM voices and six FM channels. The first models used an Intel 80386DX processor. The machine booted its graphical Towns OS, based on MS-DOS and the Phar Lap DOS extender, straight from CD, and could also run Windows. Its Fujitsu name combines Fujitsu Micro with Towns, taken from the development code name Townes after the Nobel laureate Charles Townes. In 1993 Fujitsu released the FM Towns Marty, a game console compatible with FM Towns games. Over time the line gained a DOS/V compatibility mode and Fujitsu moved its focus to IBM PC compatibles.