Caius Arcade's The Thing Breathes New Life Into Fujitsu's FM Towns Marty Games Console Family

Caius Arcade Repairs & Engineering has released an add-on board for the vintage FM Towns Marty games console, designed to replace a failing floppy drive with a USB port ready to be loaded with software.

Released in 1993 as part of the fifth console generation, the FM Towns Marty took the core of Fujitsu's earlier FM Towns home computer system and turned it into a game-centric machine with integrated CD-ROM alongside a more traditional 3.5" floppy drive. While short-lived — it would be replaced by the lower-cost FM Towns Marty 2 in 1994 before being discontinued altogether in 1995 with just 45,000 sold — the console's fanbase is still coming up with new accessories, including The Thing.

"'The Thing' is a standalone floppy drive emulator for the FM Towns Marty (both 1 and 2 models)," its creator explains. "The emulator replaces the original floppy drive which is well known to be prone to failure and not easily serviceable. 'The Thing' is totally solderless, meaning the installation is very easy."

The emulator itself is split across two boards: The main board, oversized for its components in order to fit snugly where the floppy drive would have originally been housed, handles the actual emulation and provides a USB port for external storage; a secondary board provides a small OLED display and a rotary encoder for browsing a list of disk images to be loaded.

"'The Thing' can be fully installed internally on Marty 1/2 consoles equipped with [a] DocBrown ODE [Optical Drive Emulator] by Deunan," Caius Arcade explains. "Consoles with original CD drive can benefit of 'The Thing' too but the DISPLAY/ROTARY board will be installed externally, a board with different layout will be provided for this purpose."

More details on the board are available on Caius Arcade's Tindie store, where it's up for sale at $109.99 regardless of whether you need the internal or external display variant.