A few weeks ago I linked to a story by Misty De Meo, in which they explored what happened to the various eccentric Japanese PC platforms. One of the platforms mentioned was FM Towns, made by Fujitsu, which came with its own graphical operating system from the era of Windows 3.x. I had never heard of this one before, but it looks incredibly interesting, with some unique UI ideas I’d love to explore, if only I could read Japanese. Since learning Japanese is a serious life-long commitment, I can safely say that’s not going to happen.
It seems I’m not the only one interested in FM Towns, as a new project called Free Towns OS (or Tsugaru OS in Japanese) aims to provide an open source replacement for the Free Towns operating system.
The goal of this project is to write a copyright-free FM Towns OS to run free games and the re-released games, or why not a brand-new game for FM Towns. without concerns of violating copyrights of the files included in the original Towns OS.
Let’s see how far we can go! But, so far so good. Now Tsugaru OS is capable of running the three probably the most popular free games, Panic Ball 2, VSGP, and Sky Duel. All playable without single file from the original Towns OS.
↫ Free Towns OS GitHub page
That’s a pretty good milestone already. The project aims to eventually also be able to run on real hardware instead of just emulators, but further than that, it’s difficult for me to extract more information from the descriptions since not every paragraph has been translated to English just yet. Finding English information on FM Towns OS in general is hard, so I’m also not entirely sure just how much the project has already been able to recreate. I definitely hope this effort attracts more interest, hopefully also from outside of Japan so we can get a translated version people outside of Japan can use.
Learning to speak japanese is one thing, but learning to be proficient in all four writing systems is VERY hard and usually a native can see in seconds when something is written by a foreigner.
Japan uses hiragana, katakana and kanji as well as latin letters, and often combine them in sentences when they are better suited to do so. Very hard to get right.
Good, I have a head start then, I already know Latin! 😀
“we can get a translated version people outside of Japan can use” – yes, but Google translate does a very good job of translating Japanese.
Google has an even harder time if you like regular japanese mix and match the four writing systems to be able to shorten word length. It is almost impossible for google translate to get correctly.
Yet another OS I didn’t know existed. Just how many OSes existed for the desktop during the “desktop OS wars” of the mid-80s to the mid-90s?
Off the top of my head:
Amiga
Macintosh
Windows
OS/2
GEM
GEOS
BeOS
NextStep
RISC OS
MSX
Towns OS
Various UNIX GUIs: IRIX, CDE, …
Am I missing anything?
I guess if we’re going into the 90s, then KDE, Gnome as well as potentially the original “netbook” OSes Windows CE and EPOC could be counted.
Amiga, Macintosh, and MSX are computer platforms; they could run a variety of operating systems. AmigaOS, MacOS and MSX-DOS were the most common for them I believe.