FM TOWNS miscellanies and other stories

[Skykid]

FM TOWNS MISCELLANIES




Just wanted a little TOWNS discussion in a dedicated thread, since I got some experiences and questions for ya'll.

Got a Marty, it's pretty cool, got a few games going.

TATSUJIN OH



Tatsujin Oh is a beautiful game, but not a perfect port. Anyone who says they prefer the Towns version to the PCB is on some kind of crack, like Radirgyman who once professed "Played my Tatsujin-oh today and its amazingly great! I also own the pcb but prefer the fm towns version."

I agree with the amazingly great part, indeed it is - but how on earth one can say they prefer the Towns ver to the PCB has got some explaining to do (or is just jiving cos they don't actually own the PCB.)

I don't own the PCB, so I can't side by side compare, but the Tatsujin Oh port cropping is such a damn shame! Everything else is fine, even the missing layer of parallax (which is sort of inexcusable, but also doesn't matter much) but when the play area is missing such a wide band from the top of the screen, you're getting sniped like a mofo. It ain't a game that requires lessened visibilty whatsoever. Also, the Towns port struggles with audio balancing - the sound effects really drown out the amazing soundtrack. You can barely hear parts of it unless you stop firing (at which point you'll likely die.)

Still, you can get used to this. Apart from these issues, it's still a great port and a great game.


Muscle Bomber



Better than the SFC version, although between round loading sucks ass Neo CD style. But where's the crowd animation? Totally static image? Even the SFC had some animation going on. Weird.


Splatterhouse



Easily the best port there is. Doesn't warrant its dumbfuck price tag, but still the best. But following on from this:


Question time:

Can someone explain the Towns' games screen settings? I don't understand all the Hi-Res, Lo-Reso, Lo-Reso Wide (or whatever) and where they're meant to be used. In many cases uses the Marty on my CRT, the images are very small compared to the actual screen size. If I change the screen settings they usually go off-centre and cut off, or have a visible wobble that hurts the eyes. One thing I noticed is the actual screen layout can suffer for this. For instance, stage 1 boss on Splatterhouse, in the 'Cade version it's full screen, but in the Towns you have to walk right a bit to trigger it and the whole boss is never on-screen at any one point. Is that really pixel perfect portage?

[hermit crab]

Gonna guess the wobble is in hi-res and wide modes and a result of the image being interlaced. For Amigas there are products called "flicker fixers", maybe there's something like that for the FM Towns too?

[Skykid]

Well, for example, the screen appears completely square and not true 4:3. In Splatterhouse on the bosses it's obvious that part of the screen isn't visible when it should be. for instance on stg2 boss, you can scroll the room about, whereas in the arcade it's static because you can see the whole thing (more panoramic.)

That doesn't strike me as arcade perfect...

[BIL]

If I'm not mistaken, VING handled both Splatterhouse and Tatsujin Oh as well as Hishouzame on FMT, and in all three cases they kind of just cropped the screen and left it at that. A God Damn Shame in the latter two as there's constantly a big chunk of active playfield you can't see.

They fared much better on the Saturn with Rayforce, which has a genuine 3:4 TATE mode, but still has god-awful formatting in yoko.

[hermit crab]

Display resolutions: 256x256, 320x240, 352x232, 360x240, 640x400, 640x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1120x750
From http://www.giantbomb.com/fm-towns/3045-108/

But yep some of those are square not 4:3. You'll notice they are 256x256 and 1024x1024. (Powers of two). The benefit of these resolutions it makes certain types of speed optimization possible. Very useful for cpu intensive games etc. So there was a reason for these screen modes.

[Skykid]

I sorta thought the odd resolution settings had something to do with being played on a pc monitor, as these games also run on the Towns PC.

But not true 4:3 and cropped can't rightly be called arcade perfect, which is only really cited in Splatterhouse's case. I can't see how that was overlooked in all that reliable internet information.

Also, the reason I cited Radirgyman's post is because I saw it many months ago and thought it was interesting that he favoured Tastujin Oh over his alleged PCB. I was looking forward to finding out too, but alas, unless something has eluded me completely here (do tell) I have absolutely no idea what if anything could make the port in any way superior to the original.

That's not to say it's a bad port, it's pretty superb - but cropped aspect ratios and play field is no substitute for real tate or at least a Slap Fight MD workaround.

[BIL]

Same Same Same MD and SFMD had the right idea (luckily one shared by most of the other vertical Toaplan ports on that system). The visible limit of the playfield is also its actual limit. Although this does fundamentally change the way the games play (one on hand, you have less enemies onscreen simultaneously - on the other, you can't kill them from as far away), it's far preferable to simply having a section of the field invisible.

[Ed Oscuro]

But yep some of those are square not 4:3.

No such thing. The monitor isn't square and unless I'm very mistaken it doesn't display any modes with black borders. Rather what you want to say is that the pixels aren't displayed as square. In fact, if the pattern of pixels is even on both sides ("square") then the individual pixels will have to be 4:3!

The original arcade games quite usually have non-square pixels as well and that's no problem.

I have a Towns II (HR model) that looks just like the one in the OP, except in ghetto condition, which I've made somewhat worse now when disassembling the machine - somehow the plastic covers over the floppy drives will break right off when you slide out the block component holding the floppy, unless there is some special motion that I didn't discover. It also has a very ugly main PCB with tons of small components and little integration - I think they're building a lot of logic with 7400 series chips and the like, which might've made sense in the 68000 era but doesn't make sense in the 286 and up. The system is full of traps for the unwary.

The Car Marty is a nice little system, though it suffers from not having the same exact range of options. Also probably a bit for the unwary as leaking caps can reportedly be devastating.

[hermit crab]

Well he's using a PC monitor, obviously it doesn't realize to stretch the image to have wide pixels.

[Ed Oscuro]

Even my LCD monitor stretches images just fine. In fact, this is a problem if your monitor (like most made nowadays) is widescreen format and that doesn't match the aspect ratio of the image you're feeding it, but it would also be an issue if your monitor had a "dumb" 1:1 pixel mapping mode which did not take into account the aspect ratio of the original image. CRT PC monitors usually have a facility for "square pixel" resolutions but they also implement a huge range of resolutions which have pixels with other aspect ratios.

[Skykid]

Wait chaps, I'm using a Bang & Olufson MX4000 CRT, not a PC monitor - the image is centered with huge fucking black nothing on either side of a picture that is most certainly not 4:3. The TV doesn't auto-stretch to fit no matter which mode I try on the options screen.

[Ed Oscuro]

That's interesting. How is it connected?

[SuperDeadite]

Splatterhouse has to scroll for boss scenes, because it's a port. It does not run at the same resolution as the arcade original did. In fact everything in that port has been downscaled a bit, sprites are smaller then the PCB for sure.

There are some good games on Towns, but in general, the system is highly overrated. I still people writing about the "perfect Afterburner port", too bad they never mention it runs at about 20fps, and has no analog support.... I'd rather play the X68K version which has worse graphics, but runs at 60fps with proper analog controls too.

I have 3 Towns units, and a good stack of games. But if you are buying it for arcade ports, you're going to be disappointed for the most part. What was amazing in 1989 isn't so impressive anymore.

Rayxanber is amazing imo, and a true exclusive, get it!

As for video modes:
Low-Reso = 15khz 240p
High-Reso = 31khz 480p
Video = 15khz 480i

But on a Marty, everything is displayed in 480i.
Also on newer Towns machines, the 15khz output was removed, and these systems will auto-upscale any low-res content to 31khz. Hence the settings won't do anything. But if you install a Towns Video card, you can then have the proper low-res support added back in.

The really old Towns actually used med-reso (24khz) for the BIOS screen, but newer machines just use 31khz for everything really.

[GaijinPunch]

Rayxanber is amazing imo, and a true exclusive, get it!

Fucking pricey,too, no?

But on a Marty, everything is displayed in 480i.

Yeah... no RGB on this machine is a real downer. So much blood and love put in it... only to have it look like shit.

Also on newer Towns machines, the 15khz output was removed, and these systems will auto-upscale any low-res content to 31khz. Hence the settings won't do anything. But if you install a Towns Video card, you can then have the proper low-res support added back in.

Don't most of the games force 480i though? :-/

[SuperDeadite]

Oops, I forgot the "Wide" settings.

"Wide" is basically fake wide-screen. Since all monitors back then were 4:3, the idea is that you manually lower the horizontal screen size on the monitor.

The X68000 did this a lot, games like Cotton, SuperSFII, and many others don't look right unless you manually force the monitor into psudo-wide screen by manual adjustment.

This actually became an auto feature on Japanese TV sets over time. My old 20'' Panasonic TV can go into "forced wide mode" with a push of a button. And my 4:3 Sony HD-CRT will do this whenever I pump in the X360 in 720p mode.

[Ed Oscuro]

Any thoughts on SkyKid's mysterious square reso, chaps?

(I wonder if it has anything to do with the system being NTSC and the B&O MX4000 being PAL.)

It is interesting to hear about the "fake widescreen" (Darius on these machines...that'd be interesting), but it's right to say that there was never any facility or intention that games would have a square viewable area, right? (The exception being ports of vert games with a graphical pillarbox baked in, and games with have a square viewing area with, again, GUI elements off to the side - but I don't think any did this; Last Survivor's viewable area is 4:3 and the actual playfield is vertical).

[SuperDeadite]

Rayxanber is amazing imo, and a true exclusive, get it!

Fucking pricey,too, no?

But on a Marty, everything is displayed in 480i.

Yeah... no RGB on this machine is a real downer. So much blood and love put in it... only to have it look like shit.

Also on newer Towns machines, the 15khz output was removed, and these systems will auto-upscale any low-res content to 31khz. Hence the settings won't do anything. But if you install a Towns Video card, you can then have the proper low-res support added back in.

Don't most of the games force 480i though? :-/

No, it's 480p for sure. When I run games on my Fresh in Video (480i) mode, they flick like shit. But with the video card removed, the low-reso games don't flick at all, they just have a big black border around them, it's not true upscaling, just a big black border to run 240p content on a 480p screen. The video cards are really cheap on Yahoo, and remove this issue though thankfully

[Skykid]

That's interesting. How is it connected?

S-Video. I don't think it's an NTSC prob, the TV is true 60hz afaik.

[Ed Oscuro]

More complications, fewer answers..! (Well, maybe not, but this is getting more complicated than I thought it was.)

[gbaplayer]

i need a japanese FM Towns PC to play my RPG collection. can anybody help me out?

[Skykid]

i need a japanese FM Towns PC to play my RPG collection. can anybody help me out?

Boy you got a real hard on for those silly hentai games. Admittedly they'll be superior in every way to something like Katawa Shoujo, but if you're desperate open a WTB thread.

I'm still trying to figure out why my Marty aspect ratio is square!

[gbaplayer]

thread is already a few weeks (or months?) old...have to search it and bump it up.
my collection is not only h-rpgs. there is also vain dream 1 and 2, dragon half, bible master 1 and 2, kigen.