Fujitsu [1985] FM 77 AV

 

 

The FM 77 AV was an impressive system in 1985. It's a good example of what was developped in Japan and we never heard of in the rest of the world. 

The system has great audio and video features, hence the AV for "Audio and Video". It can display 640 x 200 pixels in two colors, or 320 x 200 in 4096 colors ! There is even a multipage mode where you can define two 460 x 200 screens with 8 colors each, or six 640 x 200 monochrome screens ! 

There are a lot of graphical symbols already stored in memory (each symbol / letter is composed by 8 x 8 pixels) : 69 alphanumeric symbols, 63 kakatana signs, 63 hiragana signs and 62 graphic symbols. Moreover, the system is capable of displaying 3418 chinese and asiatic characters with a 16 x 16 character matrix (text resolution is thus of 40 x 12). 

Last but not least, the FM 77 AV offers superimposition features...
On the sound side, it offers three FM voices and three more PSG voices. Other cool features include infra-red keyboard and built-in real time clock. 

There were two models : the AV-1 which has one 3.5" disk-drive (double density) built-in and the AV-2 which is equiped with two of these drives. 

 

 

 

NAME	FM 77 AV
MANUFACTURER	Fujitsu
TYPE	Home Computer
ORIGIN	Japan
YEAR	1985
BUILT IN LANGUAGE	F-BASIC V3.0
KEYBOARD	Infra red professional keyboard with numeric keypad, 100 keys, JIS standard
CPU	MBL 68B09E x 2
SPEED	2 MHz
RAM	128 kb (up to 192 kb)
VRAM	96 kb
ROM	72 kb (in which 32 kb are used to store the F-BASIC)
TEXT MODES	40 x 20, 40 x 25, 80 x 20, 80 x 25 (8 colors each) Letter matrix : 8 x 8
GRAPHIC MODES	640 x 200 (2 colors), 320 x 200 (4096 colors) Multipaging possibilities
COLORS	4096
SOUND	3 FM channels + 3 PSG channels
SIZE / WEIGHT	Main unit : 363 (W) x 380 (D) x 101.5 (H) mm Keyboard : 410 (W) x 192 (D) x 38 (H) mm
I/O PORTS	RGB analog video output, RGB TTL video output, Parallel/Centronics interface, Tape-recorder interface (1600 baud), two joystick ports, 4 expansion ports
BUILT IN MEDIA	3.5'' disk-drive (DD, 320 kb), one for the AV-1, and two for the AV-2 model.
POWER SUPPLY	PSU built-in
PRICE	FM 77 AV-1 : 128,000 Yen (Japan, 1985) FM 77 AV-2 : 158,000 Yen (Japan, 1985)