FMV-Towns Master discs

[watto]

I have the good fortune(?) of an FMV-Towns appearing at my desk.  Unfortunately, it's missing some bits, I think I can figure out most (I found a pinout for the audio out port if anyone is looking) but annoyingly someone pulled the HDD out so kind of limited with software.

As far as I know there were a couple Master CDs, one with Windows 95, one with Towns OS.  I think I may have found somewhere that has the Towns OS ISO at least but no luck with the Windows 95.

Can I substitute a Japanese Win95 OSR2 or is there some other stuff needed apart from VTOWNS to get the system working?

I guess if I figure it out myself I will update here.

[mattsoft]

I have the good fortune(?) of an FMV-Towns appearing at my desk.  Unfortunately, it's missing some bits, I think I can figure out most (I found a pinout for the audio out port if anyone is looking) but annoyingly someone pulled the HDD out so kind of limited with software.

As far as I know there were a couple Master CDs, one with Windows 95, one with Towns OS.  I think I may have found somewhere that has the Towns OS ISO at least but no luck with the Windows 95.

Can I substitute a Japanese Win95 OSR2 or is there some other stuff needed apart from VTOWNS to get the system working?

I guess if I figure it out myself I will update here.

Search archive.org for "Neo Kobe" and your prayers will be answered.

[watto]

Thank you for the response.  I've seen that collection, but figured that version of 95 is especially for Towns mode?  The driver disk maybe useful in any case.  I'll do some experimenting and update when I get around to it.

[mattsoft]

Thank you for the response.  I've seen that collection, but figured that version of 95 is especially for Towns mode?  The driver disk maybe useful in any case.  I'll do some experimenting and update when I get around to it.

Oh yeah sorry, I don't know what an FMVTOWNS is. But the copy of Win95 from archive.org works great on my 2F.

[watto]

FMV Towns is a split mode PC/AT (meaning normal Windows PC) with the FM Towns chips on a PCI board.  There's a little bit of magic to connect the two together from the PC side, but worst case scenario you can use the little switch on the front to run it in Towns mode and it'll boot off CD, etc.

In theory you can get the best of both worlds, a Windows PC that's a decent mid-late 90s spec for running that era of games, and an FM Towns that has the advantage of being supported with more standard parts, eg. an AT style PSU, IDE HDD and CD-ROM (apparently slightly custom though), 15 pin PC gamepads, etc.

I know for example that the Windows 95 install for it came with a driver to support looking at the Towns partition from Windows.  There's a program called VTOWNS that lets you launch into Towns mode straight from Windows that is readily available, but I'm not sure if some other stuff is required to make it work.  The advantage of VTOWNS as far as I can tell is you can improve compatibility with things like RAM, replace the CD-ROM drive, etc.

The PCI board doesn't work with normal PCs, although it seems like there are a couple other motherboards that do work with it, but requires some extra wiring.  Also it uses SMD caps, which will scare off some people.

I also have a normal white Towns II with a CD-ROM on its last legs, so would be nice to get the FMV-Towns up and fully working.

[watto]

Managed to grab one from someone on the Facebook group.

I replaced the Japanese power supply with an ATX psu combined with an AT adapter cable.  The motherboards on these are standard AT with a weird standby connector, but will work OK with just the normal two AT connectors.  If you do this you'll need to use the switch on your ATX supply as the front button will no longer power on/off the computer.  It seems like I can probably re-use the front power switch with the ATX power on (I've just shorted it to ground for now) but will sort that out later.
 
For setup from the AT side the most important part there is the FMDISK.EXE that you use from the AT side to set up an FM TOWNS partition.  When setting up a blank system like me, it's important to note that FMDISK.EXE (at least the version I had) doesn't seem to handle large disks well, so maybe set up a smaller Windows partition first, then set up the FM TOWNS partition.  You can safely add an extended partition for Windows after the FM TOWNS one.

Next step was stubbornly installing an English version of Windows 95 instead of Japanese.  Main problem here at least for me is my FMV-Towns came with the FMV-183 LAN card, which doesn't appear to have drivers in English Win95 but does in Japanese Win95 (sort-of).

Most needed stuff can be extracted from the Japanese Win95 CAB files (NETFJVI.INF and f3ab18xi.sys as referenced within it), although it's probably easier to just install Japanese Win 95 anyway.  Also noteworthy is I had to install it as an FMV-181/182 and manually set IRQ 10, Address 0x300.  There are allegedly 183 compatible drivers for PNP mode, but I couldn't get them to work.  The 182 is basically a 183 without PNP support, so no issues.  You can also hard disable PNP mode with the Fujitsu update for the card for Win 2000, but it seemed to make no difference for me.  There's also a program called FJN0ISET which apparently can be used to change the IRQ and port, but no luck finding it anywhere.

Win95 up and going, I grabbed a copy of vtowns.com and confirmed that all worked OK.  The MasterCD I got wasn't bootable, so I booted off a TownsOS CD, switched to command mode, swapped to MasterCD, and ran DO.BAT.  After going through the steps, 3 partitions were set up in the Towns partition, and TownsOS was installed.

Everything almost fully working now, two issues still

1. My Sound Blaster AWE64 seems to be dodgy and some bits work intermittently.  I've got an AWE32 on the way which is the exact model meant for this machine, so hopefully that will help.
2. I made an adapter for the 15-pin controller ports on the front, but my FM Towns pads don't register up or down using it.  All the other buttons work fine.

The PCI Towns board still needs to be pulled and recapped, so it may be related to the pad issue.