Friday 28 May 2021

'The Thing' - a FM Towns Marty FDD emulator

Some years I made some work on the Fujitsu FM Towns Marty, a home video game console released in 1993 by Fujitsu, exclusively for the Japanese market.Specifically I found the way to use a FDD emulator (HxC or Gotek) with this console, you can read my past article here :

Using the HxC Floppy Emulator with a Fujitsu FM Towns Marty

At same time I also designed a simple adapter to connect an HxC floppy emulator (or a real 3-MODE floppy drive) to the FM Towns Marty :

The adapter was really popular among enthusiasts (to the point that someone cloned it...) but it was not an immediate all-in-one solution.So, recently, I decided to design my own FDD emulator for the Marty console.I called it 'The Thing':


The emulator is based on the Gotek design and powered by the excellent FlashFloppy firmware so fully customizable and configurable (the settings can be specified in a configuration file called placed in the root folder or the USB drive).

Testing of the first prototype was successful, the emulator properly loads and format disk images :



Stay tuned for further update.

5 comments:

  1. This is awesome! I'm very interested in this project. How far out are from taking orders for a finished design?
    Thanks!

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    1. I'm going thru a little redesign, after this I will be ready to take orders for small batches.

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  2. what a good news, congratulation ! I would like to be inthe first batch if possible. Se you @nfg forum maybe :)

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    1. As said, I did a new design of the mainboard and display board.I will be ready for a first batch in some weeks.I will post uddate here.Thanks for the interest.

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