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The FM Towns; the OTHER God Tier Japanese Gaming PC NOT named the Sharp X68000

VGEsoterica

Member
Don't get me wrong...the Sharp X68000 is a legit amazing piece of hardware that I absolutely love and enjoy...but damn does it take all the air out of the room when it comes to retro Japanese gaming PCs...leaving nothing left for the FM Towns and FM Towns Marty.

Which is wild because the Towns has some legit amazing games on it and impressive hardware to boot. A near perfect arcade port of Splatterhouse, tons of Sega ports (Turbo OutRun, After Burner 1,2 and 3, etc) Pu Li Ru La...the list goes on and on...but for some reason it never gets the love it deserves which just kinda bums me out!

Is the Towns for everyone? absolutely not. Not cheap, you def need an optical disc emulator to enjoy it to the best of its abilities...and the floppy drives are basically bubble level fragile...but even with all that...Towns deserves more love. Luckily it's getting a core on MiSTer FPGA hopefully in 2023...which should bring a lot more curious people to the Marty Party (sorry couldn't help myself hahaha)

Curious if ANYONE on Gaf has a Towns? I know I can't be the only one. Nice thing is it emulates well...so you can enjoy it today. Like the exclusive port of Truxton II / Tatsujin Oh...legit amazing...only on Towns

 

manzo

Member
FM towns was the place for porn games, just right after PC98. It’s actually hard to find anything else for it these days though.

Also the Marty 2 was actually useful, the first Marty was quite stripped down compared to the real FM Towns tower system. I saw one Marty 1 in a hard-off in 2005 for 500 yen, wasn’t even worth that then.
 
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SlimeGooGoo

Party Gooper
FM towns was the place for porn games, just right after PC98
GIF by moodman
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
i knew about the FM towns but never really bothered looking up the library for it... that being said, japan really loved their powerful 16 bit PCs back in the day
 

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
Jeez, copies of Splatterhouse are $800+ on eBay. I wonder if it was cheaper 10 years ago or if prices for the FM Towns were always this high. Street Fighter II looked great. It looks a lot more crisp. What modern version of SFII looked better? Anniversary or SFIIX?
 
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