[HN Gopher] Tsugaru OS - A New Free FM-Towns OS
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Tsugaru OS - A New Free FM-Towns OS
Author : bane
Score : 107 points
Date : 2024-11-16 02:14 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| monkpit wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns
|
| I'd never heard of this. Neat!
| esafak wrote:
| It was the hottest thing you could have as a gamer at the time,
| since they were so rare. I never saw one, even for sale. That
| and the Neo Geo. There was a lot more diversity in computing
| hardware then.
| gramie wrote:
| When I was living in Japan in the '90s, the FM-Towns was very
| heavily promoted. I considered buying one, but by the time I
| was ready to upgrade, there were better alternatives.
| LukeShu wrote:
| For those missing context: "Towns OS" was an operating system
| made by Fujitsu in 1989 (with the last release in 1995) for their
| "FM Towns" line of PCs. This is a Free clone of Towns OS, so that
| one can run Towns OS applications without infringing on Fujitsu's
| copyright, akin to ReactOS or DOSBox.
| bane wrote:
| right, this appears to be basically what FreeDOS is to MS-DOS,
| but the Town OS for the FM-Towns.
|
| The FM-Towns was an x86 Japanese PC with some really
| interesting alternative take on how x86 PCs could be.
|
| I watched this be introduced live at Demosplash happening this
| weekend at CMU.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > with some really interesting alternative take on how x86
| PCs could be
|
| care to elaborate?
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| Here's some information on it.
| https://gekk.info/articles/towns-tour.html
|
| EDIT: Here are some of the highlights:
|
| * Towns OS had a custom GUI that was fairly advanced for
| the time.
|
| * Towns OS included multimedia support.
|
| * Towns OS had an API that provided advanced sound and
| graphics capabilities.
|
| * Towns OS included support for overlaying videos in
| different modes, which boosted gaming and multimedia
| support.
|
| * The FM Towns computers came standard with a mouse and
| gamepad in an era when PCs typically didn't have these
| things.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Sounds like an Amiga with x86 hardware.
| bane wrote:
| It's better to think of the FM-Towns as a kind of general
| purpose arcade machine pressed into service as a Personal
| Computer. It _just_ so happens that the CPU selected was
| x86 instead of something else (like a 68k or an SH-2 or ARM
| or something), so you _could_ technically port IBM-PC
| compatible software to the system but with some additional
| caveats. As the x86 line of CPUs progressed, newer version
| of the FM-Towns came out to keep up (from the 386sx to the
| Pentium!), but somewhat like the Amiga in the West, the
| core specialized hardware more or less stayed the same.
|
| 1. The systems all came standard with a CD-ROM and expected
| to boot from this. They had no hard-drives. Writeable media
| was floppy disks.
|
| 2. Each CD-ROM had a copy of _an_ entire OS on it. The
| relationship we think of today, where the OS is
| "installed" on the computer didn't exist with the FM-Towns.
| This meant that software might ship with an MS-DOS variant,
| a Windows 3.1 variant, or Fujitsu's own OS, whatever was
| necessary to run the software you were looking to use.
| There were ways to boot to the OS, and load things from CD-
| ROM, but this wasn't the primary way to boot the system for
| many users.
|
| 3. Memory map, peripherals, etc. were all different than an
| IBM-PC compatible. The BIOS was also unique to the system.
| This was because the graphics, sound, and other hardware
| was entirely different than IBM-PCs. Again, the system
| design was a ground up design where the CPU just so
| happened to be x86, there was no intention of being an IBM-
| PC compatible system in the design. This meant that IBM-PC
| compatible software had to be modified to support these
| differences.
|
| 4. They have an entirely custom video/audio subsystem
| that's entirely different from anything seen in the West on
| normal IBM-PCs. Lots of sprite-based support, smooth
| scrolling, the ability to run and overlay multiple
| resolution graphics with different priority levels (e.g. a
| high-res text mode could be place on top of a lower-res
| graphics mode). Keep in mind this was in 1988/89, when most
| home PCs were maybe EGA with some VGA, and very few even
| had accelerated mouse pointers in Windows.
|
| * Audio was also completely different than anything on
| Western x86 systems of the time and would have blown away
| nearly anything on the Western markets for years. You had
| redbook audio, multiple PCM voices (better than an Amiga),
| digital real-time effects like echoes and filters, and
| multiple FM channels. Again, in 1988/89. IIR the audio
| hardware shared components used in actual high-end arcade
| games from that time.
|
| As a result ports of high-end Japanese arcade games were
| pretty flawless, and there were some interesting ports from
| the West like a completely unique FM-Towns version of Lucas
| Arts' Loom that's far superior to pretty much every other
| port.
| macintux wrote:
| Thank you, the headline was utterly baffling, and the README
| doesn't provide that context.
| bsimpson wrote:
| So this is to an old Fujitsu system what Haiku is to BeOS?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Pretty much so.
| Leynos wrote:
| Not entirely related, but here is someone's exploration of the
| TOWNSOS's graphical shell.
|
| https://gekk.info/articles/towns-tour.html
|
| This article at Computing History also gives some context:
|
| https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/60616/FM-Towns-2DF/
|
| It seems that developers had a choice of either licensing the
| TOWNSOS to include on their bootable CDs or requiring that users
| boot from a floppy (presumably included with the machine).
|
| This GitHub repo is for use in the latter context with modern
| freeware games whose developers wish to avoid a dependency on
| copyright Fujitsu code.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I _love_ how intuitive, obvious, and above all charming that
| looks.
| nopelynopington wrote:
| There was also a console, the FM towns Marty
| slartibardfast0 wrote:
| this is really interesting.
|
| FM-Towns was an always 32-bit approach, really really early and
| features a port of Strike Commander (1993) that is pretty great.
|
| does anyone have any manuals from the Phar Lap Run/386 dos
| extender from back in the day? sadly not preserved online as far
| as i have found.
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(page generated 2024-11-16 23:01 UTC)