FM Towns Marty Master Compatibility List

UPDATE:

The DMC88 ODE will be releasing very soon. I plan to use this as my main testing platform. It is an all in one CD and floppy emulator that will have some nice quality of life improvements over current alternatives. I don't have an eta, but it should be very soon™. I will still have a Marty with Dock Brown ODE and HxC FDD emulator as well.

DISCLAIMER

Before committing to purchasing any software that is not marked as Marty compatible on the box, please test it on your console. FM Towns software is very rare and can be very expensive. Everything on this sheet that is marked with color I have personally tested on my version 1 Marty. I use a 2 button Marty controller, 6 button FMT controller, TN-88B mouse, FMT-KB1071 keyboard, burned discs, Doc Brown ODE, DMC88 ODE (Soon™), and an SD HxC FDD emulator. I have made every effort to be accurate, but I am not responsible if something doesn't work on your console.

Spreadsheet

Basic info for this spreadsheet, like titles, publishers, etc came from the lists at Tokugawa Corp, Wikipedia, and Redump. Missing data and all testing info is my own. At the very end of the spreadsheet are links to these lists.

This spreadsheet is color coded.

Green means the software runs on Marty.

Yellow means more testing is needed.

Red means it is not compatible, or needs more testing.

Blue means there are hardware requirements.

Purple means there's an English fan translation available.

No color means it has not been tested yet.

(DB) means it was tested with the Doc Brown ODE.

(DMC) means it was tested with the DMC88 ODE.

Be sure to read all the info about a title. It may be playable, but a bit slow, or require a keyboard or mouse, or any number of other things. Note that you do not need the Marty branded mouse and keyboard. As long as it is compatible with FM Towns, it should work on Marty. If you spring for a keyboard, make sure to get one with a number pad as it is needed for some games.

Fast Mode

A few games have a "fast mode" option that cuts down wait cycles for memory. This option is greyed out on Marty. This is not because you can't use it, which seems to be a prevalent idea, it's because fast mode is baked in Marty by default. Marty runs the same clock speed as the regular FMT models, 16MHz, but uses a slower 386SX CPU. To aid the slower CPU it was decided to enact fast mode by default.

Marty

Fujitsu's FM Towns Marty is a trimmed down consolized version of their FM Towns line of computers. While the Marty was current, games that were compatible with it were marked as such on the game cases. What about all the FM Towns games released before and after the Marty was being sold? That's the point of this massive ongoing project.

Software

There are over 1,000 pieces of software for FM Towns, and many are playable on the Marty even if they don't say it on the box. Sometimes they can be confusing to start up though.

Do you need a boot disk?

Do you need a user disk?

Can you format a disk in game, or does it have to be formatted beforehand?

Can you use the standard controller, or do you need the mouse or keyboard?

Do the input devices conflict with each other?

Does the mouse have to be in the mouse port, or the controller port?

Is the game playable to a person that doesn't know Japanese?

There are a smallish number of floppy disk only games. My floppy testing right now in mainly to see if the software will autoboot. If it does autoboot, then I'll see if it works correctly on Marty. More thorough floppy testing will happen down the line. For more info on loading floppy disk only software, see the downloadable instructions below.

Expansion Cards

Right now the only available expansion card is a ram expansion card that offers an extra 2MB at the expense of speed. The extra ram will not help speed up games, but it will help you boot into a few that require more than the stock 2MB. Look for the blue entries in my list, and read the notes to see if more ram is needed.

There is an SCSI adapter card that may come out at some point. This could potentially allow you to run a BlueSCSI emulator or similar, and could potentially allow games that need to be installed to a hard drive work. There are a lot of ifs to this though.

Closing

Please understand, this is a massive undertaking, and it is very much ongoing. I have tested the more popular games already, but there are still a huge number to get through. I will be updating periodically, but I have no particular time table.