I’d been watching with mild annoyance as this guy dropped his price 100 yen per day for a couple of months to keep his items at the top of the search list in Mercari (or whatever reason he had). It was kind of annoying because the machine itself is pretty banged up, and with a starting price of 20000 yen, it seemed like it would take forever to finally sell so I wouldn’t have to look at the listing anymore.
Then a couple of days ago, when it hit around 15000 yen, he started dropping it by 500 yen per day. Cool! It’ll be sold soon, I thought.
And today it sold! To me. I wasn’t planning on buying it, but I felt compelled to look a little more closely today. I noticed that it was fully-populated with RAM and despite being a first-gen Towns, it has a 486 CPU. I sent him an offer of 11000 and he accepted. Not a super bargain, I suppose, but finding RAM that is ready to go with an FM Towns has been pretty elusive, and I haven’t even been able to find much in terms of 1 or 2MB sticks that I could get converted to work with Towns, so I thought perhaps this could be my opportunity. I didn’t know the size of the RAM sticks, but even if they were all 1MB, that would still be 2.5x more than my current 2MB. It arrived today.
A little scuffed, but not nearly as bad as I’d imagined based on the images from the Mercari listing.
The mystery RAM was three SIMMs totaling 5MB, so when I put it into my main Towns system, I came to the grand sum of 7MB, 3.5x more than my original configuration. Despite the non-matched pairs (there is 2MB on-board RAM, and slot 0 is 1MB, slot 1 and 2 have 2MB each), everything worked nicely together.
At first I thought the extra memory was making it boot faster from the hard drive, but that’s either not true or only maybe one or two seconds of improvement.
But there are definitely some benefits. The most obvious is that I can now do things that I wasn’t able to do before.
Starting with the OS, using 2.1 L51, I was unable to use quite a few applications that were built into the OS with my default 2MB. Most noteworthy, I can now use the Paint/Lite and text editor applications (no, I wasn’t able to launch the text editor with 2MB!). A handful of other applications that I couldn’t open before now open correctly, too, but fail along the way because I either lack equipment (telopper) or need some other media (Oasys). But anyway, whereas 2.1 definitely seemed beyond my system’s abilities before, now it seems comfortable.
And the biggest win, I can now play a couple of games that I couldn’t before: Super Street Fighter II and SimCity 2000. But just because you *can* do something doesn’t mean you *should*. SSF2 works pretty well, despite using only my 386. SC2K, on the other hand, is sooo laggy, and in addition to that, it throws up video glitches frequently (but the glitches are always the same) and I would venture to say the music isn’t playing correctly, although I don’t know for sure what it’s *supposed* to sound like. But I could play it enough to make a small beginning of a city.
There are also a couple more subtle wins that I noticed. The game that I play most, Amaranth 3, doesn’t seem to care, but King’s Quest V uses the extra memory to save more screen data. While the stock 2MB can only store about 4 or 5 screens of data before it has to go back to loading from CD, with 7MB I could walk freely through the whole initial area (about 12 screens) without accessing the CD, and potentially more.
And my Towns OS experience has become much more multi-taking (at least it feels that way, in the way Windows 3.1 also felt multi-tasking). I can load several applications at the same time and slip in and out between the apps and the OS, whereas with 2MB it would close down the launcher interface to start the selected app and when I closed that app it would restart the launcher.