It's been quite a while since I last posted anything here. During this time, there has been steady progress on the FM-Towns MESS driver. In other words, there are a few games that are somewhat playable. So here is a quick look at what is working (or close enough to working).

Since MAME's i386 CPU core is somewhat lacking in features, the first two games to run were those that ran in real mode.

After some bugfixes to the i386 core, some more life is shown.

You can also run TownsOS 2.1, and some TownsOS applications.

Still bashing away at the MESS FM Towns driver. I've now added some of the all-important CD audio functionality to the CD-ROM controller. Not an easily task, when no games run, and there is virtually zero documentation on it (that I could find, at least). But, since MS-DOS does now run, there's always a possibility of some small, simple DOS application that can play CD audio tracks. Here's one! :)

So, what I did, was download the exe, and copy it to a normal PC MSDOS disk image via WinImage. Then boot DOS 6.2 in Unz (since MESS only supports the normal, for Japan, 1.2MB 1024 byte sector format currently), and copy the exe to the DOS 6.2 floppy. This boots in MESS, and CDPLAY.EXE can be run there.

If you're having trouble imagining how it sounds from a screenshot, there's footage from an actual FM Towns Marty, running Raiden Trad – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gziChneci4

Been looking back at the Fujitsu FM-Towns driver lately, and been successful to some extent in getting it to do something useful. Now it passes the RAM test successfully, and managed to stop it from returning to an empty code area. Now it fails on checking the CD-ROM drive. Oh, and there's basic video output also now, so you can actually see just what it's testing. Still a very long way to go on this one, but progress is progress.

Been following Kale's progress with the Sharp X1 driver lately, and came across another emulator than runs on the X68000. Not only that, but this emulator was originally released back in 1993(!), and updated early 1994. I guess back then, no one thought to give it a cool name, so they stuck with “X1 Emulator for X68000”. Also, it's written in 68k ASM, so it's much faster than XM7 is. That is, it does run at a sluggish pace on a 10MHz X68000, but it does appear to run most software. Had to test this in MESS also, and it appears to work very well. Disk images do tend to quickly fill up a 40MB SASI harddisk though. :)

And it's still faster than MAME running NAOMI games on today's PCs. ;)

Another change of pace, this time the Amstrad PCW series, systems designed for professional word-processing. Anyway, first job was to replace the boot code on the “ROM” with something that actually worked. Now with the boot code, more or less, being what is expected to be the result of the bootstrap process, it can actually now boot a disk. With a couple of fixes to interrupt handling, it can now do something useful, like boot CP/M.

Or use Logo, which was used back in the day to teach programming skills in primary school. On a C64, at that. This got me digging out my tattered old CPC6128 manual, looking up Logo commands (it's been awhile) since the PCW version seems very similar to the CPC version. Ahhh, the memories.