Look familiar?

[Harrison]

Anyone else here see a passing resemblance between the system shown in this image below and something Amiga related?

[Submeg]

Whoa creepy, what is that?

[Yanni Oblivion]

If it were a darker shade of grey,and the control pad had a few extra buttons then...... :S

[Stephen Coates]

What is it?

Looks like a CD32.

[Harrison]

It's called the FM-Marty, the console version of the Japanese home gaming system the FM-Towns. This was released long before the CD32 was even announced and it's specifications were far in advance of anything available at the time. It was the first ever CD based home gaming system on the market featuring a 32bit 16MHz 386 CPU.

So sadly, in reality the CD32 was far from being the first 32bit CD based home console, whatever Commodore tried to make us believe.

[Submeg]

Wow, thats quite impressive. Of course, had to be in Japan

[AlexJ]

Didn't Commodore later clarify that by "The world's first 32-bit CD-based console" they meant the first 32-bit CD-based console that was available throughout the world, as opposed to the first one in any part of the world.

[Demon Cleaner]

I wanted to d/l the FM-Towns set at Pleasuredome, but I guess all the games are in japanese.

[J T]

I've heard the names FM-towns and Marty before but never knew what it was and could never really care enough to find out.

But both it and the CD32 are ugly, ugly, ugly

[Harrison]

I wanted to d/l the FM-Towns set at Pleasuredome, but I guess all the games are in japanese.

No, they are not all in Japanese, especially as a lot of the games are versions of classic PC titles and remain in English. For some reason the Japanese love to play games in English (which is great for us). Many FM-Towns games are the best versions of famous titles, such as Adventures like Loom, Maniac Mansion, indiana jones etc, and the FM-Towns versions tend to be far superior releases over any other version with full speech and 256 colour graphics. Just look at the SCUMM full set as it supports all of the great FM-Towns versions of many of the adventures.

It is definitely worth getting the FM-Towns set.