Hi Everyone, I was looking at the FM Towns line of systems for collecting games, and I was wondering how hard people think it would be to collect for it? Are the games hard to find/expensive? Would I need to worry about read/write media (Floppies) from dieing? Or are they not generally required for CD-ROM titles? For that matter, how are the titles lined up for the system? Mostly RPGs? Or more top heavy on arcade games? Any advice would be appreciated, as I'm kind of a newbie in regards to the FM Towns.
I would advise against, personally. First of all the Marty was exclusive to Japan, so finding games is not easy. Second, many of the games released on the FM Towns computer cannot be used on a Marty. Third, the prices are astronomical! Very few ebay listings to speak of, but all are hundreds of bucks a game. The Marty had a pretty even distribution of games across genres, but they are pretty much all ports and retreads you can easily find on other systems.
I see. Is Marty collecting just as hard (or harder?) than collecting regular FM Towns games you think? I guess outside of real die-hards, there are probably better alternatives to collecting Japanese PC like games.
I disagree. The Marty was my favourite machine to collect for. I ended up with about 80 games for it and yes, some of them can be very expensive (the lucasarts stuff and the shooters) but they are quite often the best versions of the games available. I suppose the fact that I collected Neo Geo homecarts prepared me for the prices though! I was always constantly surprised with some of the games that I found for the machine. I would highly recommend it!
FM Towns as platform was the worst performer of all of the Japanese PCs of the time so the # of copies of each game are relatively low. Every in demand title of the system has gone up on price to several hundreds for each. You are better off buying the arcade boards for them as in many cases they are the same price or cheaper. It does have some of the best versions of some games including Western games like Ultima VI. It's better to buy a FM Towns than a Marty so you can play everything. Many of the non-arcade stuff uses disks for booting and saving. The drives that go bad usually just need the bands replaced.
Did you not have a pretty much amazing FM Towns collection Shou? I was sure I remember reading about it back when I was collecting them?
if you have money collecting towns is easy. Would not start again these days! Around 5 years ago it was much more fun and 1000% cheaper
