So I picked up a bunch of FM Towns games, and the first one I wanted to try was Queen of Duellist Gaiden + Gaiden Alpha. I popped the CD and system disk in my Marty and... nothing. The disk spun for a little bit, then it checked the FDD and then just stopped. So I tried it again; same thing. Next I tried it on my FM Towns II system with the exact same results. So I booted into the Towns OS and took a look at the CD. It didn't show any data being on the disk. So I put it into my iMac... and the mac came up with data files and music files. So I tried cleaning the disk and trying it in the FM Desktop and the Marty, and still no dice. Any clues? Also had a problem with Rance. Put FD into the Tower with no results and the Marty with no results. It just sits there.
Fixed! Sort of... OK, so let me answer my own question. I took out the Towns tower FDDs, changed the jumpers, and resat them so that the 1 was now in the 0 position and vice versa. There must be a problem with the old 0 drive because now it works fine... still won't work in the Marty, though... interesting. But then the case doesn't have the Marty designation on it, either. Interesting thing about the game... default settings are on HARD with the CG mode turned off. That's strange.
A number of games won't work on the Marty for a number of reasons, although if you are going to run hentai games then get a NEC PC-9821 as they are cheap, the games are exactly the same and are also cheaper...
Well, I don't just play hentai games. I wondered about Queen of Duellist because it was a fighter and I remember seeing screen of it in Japanese magazines back in the day. Same thing goes for Rance. I actually love the Towns version of Puyo Puyo, and I play a lot of shooters. Plus I just love the Town hardware. Such a sexy beast! Rance still doesn't work, though... One thing I've noticed about the Marty is that on many games it runs the text at a much faster speed than the Towns computers do. And while I appreciate the Marty's ease of use, those games look so much better on a monitor than they do on a TV.
I can confirm the QOD games (alfa+lite, alfa, original) all work on the marty & require the use of the floppy boot disc.
Hummmm.... wonder why mine isn't working. Disk's fine... drive's fine... maybe I should clean the floppy drive. Any clue why Rance wouldn't work? Dow often do those old floppies go bad?
Old floppy discs do go bad, if they are stored badly then heat, humidity, cold, dampness, etc can ruin them. However with a lot of google searching you can find images of the disc and using a mode 3 drive (basically any USB drive) you can make a new image of the boot disc, generally games that come on floppy and CD are not copy protected.
So the problem with Rance wasn't a bad floppy. It doesn't work in the Marty at all because it needs to 2 floppy drives to run. You have to have the A Disk in drive 0 and the B Disk in drive 1, or it just sits there. Even during the game, it's constantly reading from both drives. Problem solved.
