Comment by FMecha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FMecha | Hacker News Reader

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>(btw, the FM Towns, IIR, also had specialized graphics hardware to produce arcade-like graphics with tiles and sprites and so on, making it even more different)

I originally thought might have confused it with the X68K, whose it's closeness to arcade hardware such as Capcom CPS-1 allowed for near (but not fully, contrary to popular belief) perfect ports possible at the time. (Capcom even sold a Genesis/SNES controller converter for X68K for the Street Fighter II ports.) However, the FM Towns does have its own share of arcade ports, mainly involving Sega, Taito and Capcom titles, such as After Burner, Operation Wolf and Super Street Fighter II, respectively.

On FM Towns side, their commercial games list appears to be intermediate between X68K's "arcade at home" experience and PC-98's graphics that prioritize RPGs and visual novels (often smut in nature) due to PC-98's graphics capabilities that benefitted static graphics. (No PC-98 mention/discussion is complete if eroge is not brought up at one point anyway.)

The X68k was an absolutely amazing line of machines. Beautiful industrial design in and out.

The FM Towns relied on Intel CPUs, but the rest of the hardware was designed more or less like any other Japanese system of the era with specialized graphics and sound hardware. I believe it also was capable of booting off of CDs and running the software directly without having to install anything to an internal hard drive.

The specifications of the graphics and sound hardware were bleeding edge for sprite-based hardware of the time and included some really incredible graphics modes that far exceeded normal VGA plus had some really arcade level sprite hardware which the IBM-PC graphics hardware never offered.

The audio hardware was likewise well in excess of contemporary PC soundcards. It also mirrored arcade level hardware in capability.

In some ways, the FM Towns was as much a general purpose Personal Arcade as it was a Computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns

>The FM Towns relied on Intel CPUs, but the rest of the hardware was designed more or less like any other Japanese system of the era with specialized graphics and sound hardware.

This was also true of PC-98, too, to some extent.

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