For those missing context: "Towns OS" was an operating system made by Fujitsu in 1989 (with the last release in 1995) for their "FM Towns" line of PCs. This is a Free clone of Towns OS, so that one can run Towns OS applications without infringing on Fujitsu's copyright, akin to ReactOS or DOSBox.
Not entirely related, but here is someone's exploration of the TOWNSOS's graphical shell.<p><a href="https://gekk.info/articles/towns-tour.html" rel="nofollow">https://gekk.info/articles/towns-tour.html</a><p>This article at Computing History also gives some context:<p><a href="https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/60616/FM-Towns-2DF/" rel="nofollow">https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/60616/FM-Towns-2DF/</a><p>It seems that developers had a choice of either licensing the TOWNSOS to include on their bootable CDs or requiring that users boot from a floppy (presumably included with the machine).<p>This GitHub repo is for use in the latter context with modern freeware games whose developers wish to avoid a dependency on copyright Fujitsu code.
<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns</a><p>I’d never heard of this. Neat!
Will we see a return of the High C compiler extensions? <a href="https://duriansoftware.com/joe/the-lost-language-extensions-of-metaware's-high-c-compiler" rel="nofollow">https://duriansoftware.com/joe/the-lost-language-extensions-...</a>
this is really interesting.<p>FM-Towns was an always 32-bit approach, really really early and features a port of Strike Commander (1993) that is pretty great.<p>does anyone have any manuals from the Phar Lap Run/386 dos extender from back in the day? sadly not preserved online as far as i have found.