In recent months, we’ve talked twice about FM Towns, Fujitsu’s PC platform aimed solely at the Japanese market. It was almost entirely only available in Japanese, so it’s difficult to explore for those of us who don’t speak Japanese. There’s an effort underway to recreate it as open source, which will most likely take a while, but in the meantime, a part of the FM TOWNS Technical Databook, written by Noriaki Chiba, has been translated from Japanese into English by Joe Groff.
From the book’s preface:
That is why the author wrote this book, to serve as an essential manual for enthusiasts, systems developers, and software developers. Typical computer manuals do not adequately cover technical specifications, so users tend to have a hard time understanding the hardware. We have an opportunity to thoroughly break through this barrier, and with this new hardware architecture being a milestone in the FM series, it feels like the perfect time to try. Hardware manuals up to this point have typically only explained the consequences of the hardware design without explaining its fundamentals. By contrast, this book describes the hardware design of the TOWNS from its foundations. Since even expert systems developers can feel like amateurs when working with devices outside of their repertoire, this book focuses on explaining those foundations. This is especially necessary for the FM TOWNS, since it features so many new devices, including a 80386 CPU and a CD-ROM drive.
↫ Noriaki Chiba [translated by Joe Groff]
This handbook goes into great detail about the inner workings of the hardware, and chapter II, which hasn’t been translated yet, also dives deep into the BIOS of the hardware, from its first revisions to all the additional features added on top as time progressed. This book, as well as its translation, will be invaluable to people trying to use Towns OS today, to developers working on emulators for the platform, and anyone who fits somewhere in between.
It seems this translation was done entirely in Groff’s free time as a side project, which is commendable. We’re looking at about 65000 words in the target language, of a highly technical nature, all translated for free because someone decided it was worth it. Sending this over to a translation agency would most likely cost well over €10000. Of course, that would include additional editing and proofreading by parties other than the initial translator(s), but that’s definitely not needed for a passion project like this.
Excellent, valuable work.
