Multimedia player is PC-video game hybrid

Fujitsu, the world’s second largest computer manufacturer, recently began shipping a multimedia player into the Japanese market that some believe could end up competing head-to-head with 3DO if it ever is sold in the U.S.

The FM Towns Marty, an $850 CD-ROM-based multimedia player that plugs into a television set, is targeted toward the home consumer market in Japan as a personal computer-game machine hybrid. Though under the hood it is an Intel 386SX computer with 2 MB of RAM and a built-in CD-ROM drive, the device looks more like an oversized answering machine with a remote control than a computer.

SNEAKING PEEKS STATESIDE, BUT NO PLANS FOR U.S. YET

The Marty initially will be sold only in Japan. To date, the device does not support MS-DOS or Windows, but Fujitsu representatives say that decision is based more on the fact that consumers in Japan don’t look for DOS or Windows compatibility. There is no technical reason why the Marty couldn’t support both platforms if demand existed.

That demand isn’t likely to materialize in the near future, according to Fujitsu representatives, since there are as yet no plans to release the Marty in the U.S. But Fujitsu has been sneaking the Marty around to trade shows in the U.S. for a few months and although the company will absolutely not speculate on its future plans to make the Marty available stateside, it’s clear it does not intend to repeat its past mistakes in addressing the U.S. market.

According to Tom Randolph, president of the FM Towns Support Center in San Francisco, the company is testing market interest in the U.S. and working on a strategy to build a distribution channel for its consumer devices in the States. “Multimedia is a long road,” says Randolph, “and we [at Fujitsu] tend to like to make our mistakes in our domestic market.”

A sleek look in ‘89. Fujitsu’s multimedia strategy began with the original FM Towns personal computer that was launched in 1989 to great fanfare. Despite its sleek look and built-in CD-ROM drive, the machine was a bomb in the U.S. because it was not DOS- or Windows-compatible and few U.S. developers would write software for it.

It was not Fujitsu’s first expensive U.S. mistake. In the mid-1980s, as the PC-clone phenomenon was catching on, Fujitsu and other early PC vendors missed the wave by launching its computers with an incompatible version of MS-DOS.

Even in Japan the Towns machines (supposedly named after a famous scientist) have achieved only modest success after a slow start. PCs are still mainly confined to offices, and a machine with a CD-ROM drive built in was even more of an enigma to the Japanese business market.

NEW CHIPSET DOES HIGH-RESOLUTION ON A TV SCREEN

While the new Marty itself may not make it into the U.S. anytime soon, Fujitsu is considering licensing — to third-party manufacturers both in Japan and abroad — the most compelling component inside the Marty: its chip technology for displaying high-resolution images.

Using what Fujitsu claims is the world’s first “full-digital one-chip video converter,” which is based

on the company’s proprietary Line Interpolation Scanning Technology (LIST), the Marty can display a resolution of 640 by 480 — the same high-quality resolution displayed on computer devices — on a television set. The images in most of the titles we saw during a demonstration of the Marty were exceptional.

STILL RISKY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

The release of the Marty is a risky move for Fujitsu even now. With consumer audio and video equipment in a prolonged slump in Japan, the company is daring to make a play for a slice of the Japanese home consumer market — traditionally the hallowed ground of Nintendo, Sega and, more recently, Philips CD-I game machines.

To do so, the company is promising to deliver more than 400 education and entertainment titles and applications for the Marty by year’s end (there are 250 existing FM Towns titles that will play on the new consumer device), including titles from U.S. companies such as Brøderbund Software and Maxis Software. In addition, Marty can play audio CDs, CD+G (music with graphics) and CD dictionaries.

Despite the risk, Fujitsu representatives say they expect the company to sell more than 250,000 Marty devices in the first year. Fujitsu will sell Marty through “department stores and supermarkets,” according to Akira Kuwahara, Fujitsu’s general manager for personal systems, as well as into its established PC channel: electronics and computer shops in Japan. The company’s PC distribution channel includes 3,000 outlets in Japan that distribute FM Towns systems and its peripherals.

Janice Maloney