Retro Tech Nibble: Mystery Japanese PC 

Thanks for watching! Can you help? Did you spot anything in the video you can elaborate on to get this running? Perhaps you've used this machine and can shed some light? I'd love to hear from you! If you enjoy my content and would like to show support for The Cave then here's how you can help: ● Support RMC on Patreon: www.patreon.com/RetroManCave ● Treat me to a Coffee with Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/retromancave ● Leave a tip on Paypal: paypal.me/RetroManCave ● RMC Tool Shop - Find tools seen on the channel for your Cave here: USA Shop | www.amazon.co.uk/shop/retromancave UK Shop | www.amazon.co.uk/shop/retromancave Thank you! Neil - RMC

Ah a Fujitsu FMR70 HL...The 1 in the HL was added because there used to be a HL2/3 too. As far as I remember those could be seen in any normal office in Japan. CPU should be a 08386DX-20MHz with an optional 80287DX coprocessor. Graphics resolution is 1120x750 dots and it should be able to display 16 colors out of 4096 colors. Japanese characters where displayed in 40 characters x 25 lines (24 dots). Also the Japanese characters where all stored on a special ROM (actually all Japanese pc from that era stored the kanji in a special ROM). Main RAM used to be 2-10MB and graphics RAM was 512KB. The FDD drives use 2HD floppy discs. OS on these machines usually was a customized version of MS-DOS made for the Japanese Market but it was also able to run MS-OS/2 or Kanji XENIX. you also could run Windows 3.x on it. Address space as 768KB instead of the normal 640KB on other machines running MS-DOS. Sorry for this messy post but I am just a native Japanese guy who used a FMR80HL2/3 ( same series but used a i486DX2-50Mhz CPU) and I am just going through my memories and translating stuff off from Japanese Wikipedia and other Japanese sites. Hope this helped a bit.

I used to work for Fujitsu (not in hardware department, though). I have contacted my now former colleague still working there. I hope he gets back to me with some inside info. Hopefully he can dig up some technical specs.

Designer: how many floppy drives you want in this new PC? Project manager: Yes

I see that pc has been carefully looked after by the Edward Scissor hands iT department before being shipped over.

The internal speaker is mounted inside of the expansion card holder. You can see it at 8:06.

The I/O card in the end slot is a GPIB/HPIB/IEEE-488 controller. I suspect the card in the 2nd slot is a digital I/O board. Some of these Fujitsu machines were used as controllers for Japanese CNC systems, and I suspect your example might be one of them. Some of the Fujitsu machines had speakers built into the monitors, which might explain the presence of a volume control but no speaker.

I was very surprised when you opened the case and revealed how clean it was the computer inside compared to its exterior (very grimy) appearance.

Pretty drab looking case made far more interesting by those decals. Adds about 10 speed to the machine. :)

Many PSU in the 80s needed a substantial load on +5VDC before they tried to fully power up. Try a large load resistor (5 or 10 W ) across +5 to negative (or use some jumper wires to an old HDD. a floppy won't likely be enough to trigger it.) The 5 volt rail was more common for this as that was the rail monitored for regulating the output. The 12V rail was just "what ever" as long as it was close. You have test points on the board. Trace them back to the connector to figure out some of the pins.

Plenty of switch-mode supplies won't do anything until presented with a load.. Plug it in! Would love to see this all solved and restored - what a cool thing.

Take some photos of the ICs near the crt port, that way ist way easier to identify the port or build an adapter.

It looks much like GP-IB ports (the centronics ones). It was used for connecting test-equipment, printers and diskdrives back in the day. Pioneered by HP as HP-IB

This is Fujitsu FMR - 70, is a product of FMR family. FMR - 70 using similar PC98 high-resolution model (PC-H98) to display the 24 x24 kanji fonts. It uses a special CRT interface. like the Macintosh and PC-H98 display port, the CRT port has some different resolution display mode. If you're interested in the FMR series, you can get your hands on fm-towns, which contains the full function of fmr-30/50.

I would guess that machine was used to control a CNC machine or a factory robot in Japan.

Lovely video... know nothing about this kinda stuff but really enjoyed this

That video connector + Fujitsu rang a bell on me. I remember an old 80's Fujitsu Mini Server with the same video connector (Or very similar). In that case, it connected to a mono CRT. But is possible they kept the same connector for all kind of video systems. It was very common in the era to use propietary connectors that fit all their monitor line.

I'm really surprised you didn't find any specimens for me inside that thing. :-)

The second expansion card looks like a GPIB IEEE-488.

As I watch this it looks a lot like some of the CNC machines we use in our machining department. Love the look into the very proprietary/under utilized hardware. Really look forward to learning more.

Would you say it has many quirks...and features?

Neil, you do such a great job on these videos. The production quality keeps getting more impressive and you are a real gentleman. Great work!

Judging by the fact that the power switch was connected to the motherboard it must be a soft-start PSU. The main power connector uses 4 wire colors and there are 4 voltage test points on the board: +5V, +12V, -12V and ground. It's likely that they used the standard color scheme, so red will be +5V, orange +12V, blue -12V and black for ground, this should be easy to verify by buzzing out the test points and power connector pins. That leaves the smaller PSU connector for the soft-start signal. So the PSU could very well be perfectly ok, and even if it's not, it can be easily replaced as there are no special voltages or signals present.

I'm guessing this was used in some sort of industrial control. Running some sort of machinery.

Those American style electrical sockets describe my face, when you turned the computer around and there were all the clipped wires.

Oo, an FMR-70HL1 model 40, I think you're going to need to read Japanese to grok this. Given the boards in it, that was probably used in a factory where all you really need is a 80386dx-16 I think the manuals for this would set you back around 5000 yen *IF* you can find them. (I might be able to find one in Akiba.) Monitor connector = non-standard VGA: www.mls-net.co.jp/shouhin/famrcab.htm Yes, some places are still using this gear but the monitors are long gone. hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA018718/towns/connect/pinasgn.htm#FMR_RGB There might also be something here: classicpc.org/jp/category/item/itemgenre/fmtowns/

Those expansion slots are reminiscent of early 68k Mac's NuBus slots. Not sure if they use the same interface. The one expansion card and the port marked "Printer" look like HP-IB/GP-IB ports. A very advanced parallel interface that works similar to SCSI. The 3.5" Floppy looks like it plugs into the SCSI bus as well.

It's probably the brain of a killer robot, ripped from it's head by Godzilla.

It's possible that there's a fuse in the PSU that's blown, or that it will simply refuse to work without a sufficiently large load being present. In any case, the fact that it's not supplying power AT ALL on any of the rails seems to suggest it's a preventative shutdown measure.

The POST BIOS is the 32K AM27C256 EPROM in the corner with a sticker on top (SY19 94002B). Virtually all BIOS's of this era where written and customized by US software companies such as Phoenix, Quadtel and AMI. They're not interchangeable so someone wrote assembler code specific to this motherboard. Don't remove the sticker.

Last time I saw snipped connectors like that was then my wife's office was burgled and all of the "boxes" were taken, but the mice, keyboards and screens were left, all with neatly snipped connectors. The first thing I thought when I saw the rear of your computer was that it might have been stolen ... but of course your explanation also makes sense...

I used to sell Fujitsu computers but this one was long before my time (selling). They always reminded me of Elonex Computers, very heavy, very well made using good components. Sorry RMC, my knowledge of this model would be only what I (we) can learn from Google. Best of luck my friend.

You need a trip to electric Town in akihabara, there'll be a bunch of spares available. All for a round trip price of far more than the pc is worth.

It's general layout is reminiscent of an IBM PS/2 50/50Z.

Well this is glorious! I do hope you can get it working!

Are you going to revisit this one at all Neil? Possibly if not resurrecting the machine we could at least see if the HDD contains anything interesting...

they use to have UK one in a black case in i can remember working on one that I was given by a friend of the family that use to work for Fujitsu in the UK when they had new pc put in at there work. I can remember them slot and think I could not pc a sound card ects in it.

Why can't people just respect old technology these pieces of equipment are testaments to what computers really are and should be today...... I just don't understand

power testing: can't you use a multimeter to test the continuity between the test-points and the power-sockets? that should at least allow you to determine what pins require how much.

Is a industrial Pc those cards are control board's for producing line robots (I seen a similar one controlling sodering robots in a car factory producing car bodies ) The program was on the 2 top floppy not stored in hdd one of the back conector is for calibration The conectors inside are same as i seen in rig servers no were to conect a home use graphics card (in the hdd they have their on program Linux based I'm afraid I can never be converted for home use but is a awesome pice of technology and I wish to have one on my colection )

No speaker, the sound probably goes through the video port to what is likely a special CRT with speakers in it. PSU looks like it has a fairly standard AT connection, just combined into one connector for convenience, I'd guess. Also 4:55 that's not a centronix port, that looks more like the IEEE bus you see on old HP desktop machines of the 70s.

It's been over 2 years, is there ever gonna be an update to this PC?

Being it came out of Japan, that thing -like fax machines still are- was probably in use into the early 2000s.

I'll ask an engineer who spent 85 to 2001 with Fujitsu. I hate you for bringing this up for me to ask him because the engineer in question is my dad and he is starting down Alzheimer disease.

With some of those older machines, they needed a load on the PSU for them to fire up. Maybe you can load some of the rails with a big resistor or something (not the mobo!)

This is one of the business desktop PCs called Fujitsu FMR70HL, an older Fujitsu proprietary standard about 35 years ago. Japanese 富士通(Fujitsu) Machine spec CPU: i386-20 (probably Intel 80386?) RAM: 2MB HDD: 100MB 3.5 "FDD

I agree with lots of the comments that this was used a controller machine but if that's the case, it must have been away from the work itself. Metal CNC'ing, wood lathes, even water jet (although I think this too old to be a waterjet controller) all create a lot of dust & debris. The inside of the machine was far to clean for that. Odd in fact to see such a clean machine on the inside but so dirty on the outside. Maybe that was from the scrapping procedure, rather then its working life. Last point, its good to see so many *very* clever folks in the comments. I thought I was a bit geeky but it would seem I'm just in good company !

Lived in Japan for 7 years 87 to 94 and worked on these for a while as I'm a programmer. Quirky PCs even in Japan when every manufacture had their own variants of x86. It was hell for developing as you had to recompile and target different hardware depending on the client. Fijitsu. NEC, Panasonic etc. DOS/V then Windows finally meant things became standardized in the end.

Fantastic. I love seeing these old computers that we didn't have over here, its fun.

museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/personal/0023.html This was the first 32-bit personal computer in the FM R Series of business PCs from Fujitsu. It was announced in September 1987 and had the following features: It achieved high-performance by using a 32-bit 80386 CPU (16MHz 0wait). Processing speed was twice that of the FM R-60 Processing speed was up to 4 to 6 times faster when equipped with the 80387 arithmetic co-processor (optional) Graphic processing was speeded up by using dual memory for graphic VRAM (512 kilobyte). The machine was equipped standard with a high-capacity 2 megabyte memory (expandable up to a maximum of 10 megabytes). It was equipped with a built-in high-speed high-capacity 40 megabyte hard disk (average access time 40ms). A full range of application software (for CAD, AI and engineering computation) built to exploit the higher machine speed. In addition to MS-DOS, the machine supported Japanese language MS OS/2 (a 32-bit OS).

It's a IBM 5100. Useful for hacking SERN.

Interesting video, looks like you have your work cut out with this one, thing is though, let's say you get it working and even get it to show something on a screen, chances are that it's all going to be in Japanese. Still i guess it would still be of some interest...

We used a lot of that exact computer in japan early 90's commissioning a new power plant. Horrible machine, worse keyboards. Took two floppy drives just to fully boot them. Cables to printer and plotter as big as a big guys thumb.

So the Graphics Card was Cirrus Logic CL-GD. Not much more info about this PC: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=328

Great job! Would like to see it working! I can tell it has a massive amount of removable storage with THREE, count them, THREE internal floppy drives supporting rotating disk media! :) My current PC has zero floppy drives so nowhere near as usable in this department.

Love seeing the Japanese hardware. If you need translation support, let me know! Will look for specs.

Looks like a lot of fancy mystery silicon on that motherboard, I'd guess it's custom display hardware designed for touch screen POS terminals. Probably running some flavour of x86 Unix.

Howdy It seems to me I remember working on HP workstations that had a similar set of connectors, back in the 80's. You might look there.

This may or may not be relevant but iirc the Jamma arcade machines use a 28 pin connector for CRT. It looks nothing like the one you have, maybe it's an evolution of it? Possibly could be using the same pinout?

I work in manufacturing power/grid protection devices and we have a lot of 96 pin connections for expansion boards on our industrial line of controllers.

I would suspect the video port to include the speaker line where they would be integral to the monitor face?

Interesting. The main system bus has some breakouts to familiar connectors have straight-through wiring to the DIN connector. On the drive breakout board @10:04 , it looks like the upper bays are standard 34 pin 5.25" FDD edge connectors. The lower bays have the resistor arrays that are terminating the SCSI bus, so internal termination on that HDD will be disabled. Both FDD and SCSI look to be straight-through wired to the DIN. The rear panel also shows you have an RS-232 port and a Centronix port on the bus. So your system bus is just a collection of other buses. On the mainboard you'll have multiple SCSI host-bus adaptors (probably surrounded by those blue terminating resistors arrays or wired to driver ICs sitting with term resistors).

Where's part 2? This showed up on my feed. Now, i'm disappointed.

Between the GPIB port and all the SATA connections, it almost certainly ran some kind of industrial automation in a past life. CNC machining, production line test and measurement... anything is possible, really. The Texnai card is really interesting... seems that Texnai has been a serious player in high-end computer graphics and imaging technology since the late 1970s. Here's a link to a translated version of the company overview from their website: translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.texnai.co.jp%2F I couldn't find anything about this "FR50/60" though.

found this website that explains exactly what you have: www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=328

yahoo.aleado.com/lot?auctionID=v628954521 Found a power supply for a similar FMR-70HX3

Restoring this Japanese PC will be a beautiful challenge! Good luck...

Those slots look a lot like Macintosh Nubus slots but are probably something completely different electrically maybe just ISA with an odd connector.

Definitely a stock code trading machine in the early days. My dad used one of this back then.

Awesome video. Nice to see something different. The machine looks very well made, but could have been built much simpler. As for the speed of the machine, about 7 MIPS, this would have made it similar in speed to a 68030 of about 32 MHz.

Trying to provide some info and hoping it may be relevant: Back in the early days of IBM PC and it's compatibles, I remember there was a japanese "PC-Standard" called NEC PC-98, relating to the companies' PC-9800 series of computers. These machines used a lot of the same components as IBM PCs and compatibles did, but they never were fully compatible. There were, however, expansion cards being sold for both the IBM PC/compatibles AND the NEC PC-98 series, for example the Roland LAPC-I (IBM compatible) and LAPC-N (NEC PC-98 compatible) cards, which is why I remember this "odd" NEC PC-98 standard at all, as I have never been in Japan. While the system in this video is clearly not a NEC model, I thought maybe there are "NEC PC-98 compatibles" the same way there are "IBM PC compatibles", so I looked at this article ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_series ). It mentions Fujitsu several times, and regarding to the i386 CPU in this Fujitsu system and comparing that to the article, maybe this is a DOS/V PC as mentioned in the section "Price war with DOS/V PCs". DOS/V was a DOS optimized for the japanese market, supporting their double-byte character set. More on that here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS/V According to the DOS/V article, Fujitsu sold about 200,000 DOS/V units in 1994, the FMV series. Maybe your machine is related to those. I hope you can pull at least something of interest from this comment, may be it helps on further investigation.

Didn't they use that same expansion/backplane port for NuBus? I doubt that you could plug in a NuBus card and have it work though.

I am also wondering if this is something that came from manufacturing. The grime on the outside and inside look like something that could have been pulled from machinery. The way it was yanked out suggests that the guy was on the clock and did this to expedite replacing that machinery with new updates. I have seen CNC machines thst came from GM with nothing more than a 386 computer mounted inside the large cabinetry, and the coolant from that process ocassionaly leaking in. Of course its not supposed to but accidents happen. This most likely was working if pulled from that application as they were updating their machinery.

Put a load on the power supply. Many SMPS's won't output on the supply rails unless presented with a load. The power supply may also have a crowbar circuit that will prevent the mother board from receiving over-voltage.

The industrial looking connectors look like NUBUS connectors. And they did make sound cards to fit that port. Video cards too.

The PSU may need a load to start... even the old Cheap PSU of my Amiga 2000 would not run if not connected to the board.

It's an unidentified SCP. Keeps exterior dirty and interior clean. Someone or something sawed off the cables because any attachments become dangerous lifeforms ( i.e. mouse and keyboard ). After Dr.***** plugged in a keyboard, it quickly grew razor sharp teeth, approximately 5 inches thicker at its base ( presumably for a stomach), lunged and ate both of Dr. ******'s arms up to his elbows. It is theorized SCP 079 came into contact with SCP- ???? during the 80s while it's user was computing synthetic lifeforms. It's origins remain uncertain however as SCP- 079 refuses to talk about SCP-????.

Source Japan!? Power supply might be set for 100 vAC. Parts of Japan use 100 vac and other regions are at 120 vac. Use caution when powering up, see if there is any data on the power supply.

The PSU might need some volts on the "Power good" line before you'll get output. I seem to remember that was a thing with some power supplies.

Looking forward to the next episode!

I've found CRT cables that are close to that for the FMTowns types of PC but they are D-Sub15 but have the same type of connector with the large metal pieces either side (example of it is the FM-77AV) just need to see if there are any 28pin versions.

Wonder why they have that many floppy drives on it. The number of floppy drive might indicate the machine had some distinct purpose.

TEXNAI do images and print products and they do have a partnership with Fuji xerox I'm guessing it's a printer processor for laser printers it was common in japan

It looks like the 3.5" floppy uses scsi

This is a good mystery. The general build quality reminds me almost of minicomputers, but the i386 chip belies that, especially in 1991, which is well into the 486 era. (Although, if this model came out in 1988, that would explain that. And it's specialized enough to have a three-year product lifespan, I guess.) Or perhaps raw CPU power wasn't the main selling point. My instincts suggest this may have been a special-purpose system mostly sold to some very specific market. The ultimate customer probably never interacted with the operating system at all, nor with any common well-known software either: it was probably dedicated to running some specific line-of-business software in the "let us know you're interested and we'll fly in a sales team" price range. Plugging the hard drive into another system may reveal such details. Which in turn may provide clues about what industry the system was being used in, which might provide a clue as to the CRT port, if the system was made to connect to equipment found in some other industry rather than a standard computer monitor.

Gongrats you have commodore 64 there. And that is realy nice to see on 2019.

It is astounding how little their is on this computer. Not even Fujitsu knows they built this system. I checked their history pages. If nothing turns up, you might have to get a translator, maybe a student at university to help you dig for clues.

The connectors seems to be for VME 64 bus which was pretty common at the time for industrial/military/aerospace applications

Neil, speaking of mysterious Japanese PCs ... can you do one on the Peach please? ... I had access to one early 80s in my Uni days, and I loved it! It featured a 6809 processor ... years ahead of other 8 bit chips of the day, including my favourite, the Z80.

Hi Neil. Long time viewer, first time commenter. This PSU probably needs to be jump started if it's not connected to the motherboard. Your PSU seems to be a TDK EA00A977. Unfortunately I couldn't find anything online about this board... so finding the right pins to jump might be tricky. Did you try powering it on with the board attached? If none of the capacitors are bulging, I think this should be relatively safe for the machine. BTW, please turn it into a trash and treasure! Cheers, LD

I may have winced a bit when I saw all of those clipped wires

またマニアックなＰＣだなぁ 自分は嫌いだったけど、国民機とされたＮＥＣの８８や９８の方が情報は多いから 試すには楽かも知れないけど、出来たらシャープのｘ６８ｋを試して欲しい。 縦置きでマンハッタンシェイプと呼ばれる独特の、ツインタワー機構で中央に 持ち運びに便利なポップアップハンドルが付いてて、今売られてても全然遜色ない デザインが最高のＰＣがかつてあった事を、ぜひ知ってもらいたいね。

懐かしいですね。 しかし、富士通のＦＭＲシリーズはマイナーです。 ＦＭーＴＯＷＮＳと互換性は有りましたが、知っている人は少数。 日本ではＮＥＣのＰＣー９８０１シリーズが主流でした。

Strongly resembles Tandys of the same era, although IIRC (some) of those were Matsusha/Panasonic.

Great project! I really hope you can find some spares or upgrades!

I did think FM Towns at first glance. I suspect you might find that adaptors for the FM Towns could fit this machine. As a 386 based machine it really does appear to be a beast. It was probably a profesional workstation back in the day but we are still talking about when PC-DOS was still a thing. It does seem like an interesting machine and would be a very good basis for a Trash to treasure series.

Update on this??

Any updates to this mystery?

I thought it was funny how the floppy drives were hot-swappable except the molex power connector still had wires instead of a PCB edge connector.

These machines were used extensively at the Trust Bank of Tasmania. They ran the ATM network - they were installed in the machine cabinet and where what you interacted with when you beeped-and-booped the screen.