The 'Thing' is a standalone floppy drive emulator for the FM Towns Marty (both 1 and 2 models),a home video game console released in 1993 by Fujitsu, exclusively for the Japanese market.'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 loads disk images (in .HDM and.HFE format) stored on a USB pen drive (2.0 or higher) and it's powered by FlashFloppy firmware (latest stable version onboard at time of shipping).Technically speaking 'The Thing' consists of two boards.
The mainboard which takes places of the original floppy drive :
The DISPLAY/ROTARY board that controls the emulator allowing you to browse and mount disk images store on the USB pen drive :
The two boards interface with each other through a ribbon cable (included in the bundle)
With this setup 'The Thing' can be fully installed internally on Marty 1/2 consoles equipped with DocBrown ODE by Deunan.Consoles with original CD-ROM 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 as well.
***A SINGLE 0.91" OLED DISPLAY WILL BE PROVIDED TO USE WITH IT ON THE INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL DISPLAY/ROTARY BOARD ***
INSTALLATION/OPERATION MANUALS WILL BE SENT VIA E-MAIL AFTER PURCHASE
'The Thing' (FM Towns Marty FDD emulator) final revision testing
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