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For those missing context: "Towns OS" was an operating system made by Fujitsu in 1989 (with the last release in 1995) for their "FM Towns" line of PCs. This is a Free clone of Towns OS, so that one can run Towns OS applications without infringing on Fujitsu's copyright, akin to ReactOS or DOSBox.

6 days agoby LukeShu

https://gekk.info/articles/towns-tour.html

This article at Computing History also gives some context:

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/60616/FM-Towns-2DF/

It seems that developers had a choice of either licensing the TOWNSOS to include on their bootable CDs or requiring that users boot from a floppy (presumably included with the machine).

This GitHub repo is for use in the latter context with modern freeware games whose developers wish to avoid a dependency on copyright Fujitsu code.

6 days agoby Leynos

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns

I’d never heard of this. Neat!

6 days agoby monkpit

So this is to an old Fujitsu system what Haiku is to BeOS?

6 days agoby bsimpson

Will we see a return of the High C compiler extensions? https://duriansoftware.com/joe/the-lost-language-extensions-...

5 days agoby mwkaufma

There was also a console, the FM towns Marty

6 days agoby nopelynopington

this is really interesting.

FM-Towns was an always 32-bit approach, really really early and features a port of Strike Commander (1993) that is pretty great.

does anyone have any manuals from the Phar Lap Run/386 dos extender from back in the day? sadly not preserved online as far as i have found.

6 days agoby slartibardfast0