I'm not much of a console guy. Oh, sure, I have a Famicom, there are certain experiences you can only get on a Famicom, and it's the Japanese counterpart to a big part of my childhood nostalgia -- the NES -- so yes, I have a Famicom, but I'm otherwise not big on consoles. Oh and a PC Engine because it's so small. So small until you put it in the docking station with the CD-ROM drive. So I have that, too, but mostly I'm not into consoles. And there was that console from Toshiba that I'll write about soon, that looked so cool I had to get it, but as you can see I'm clearly not much of a console person.

But I managed to get a Marty at a pretty decent price, and while I don't have much long-term use for a Marty, I did want to give it a photo session and write about it a bit. It's got some nice angles to it, makes for an interesting photography subject.

When I first got it, it didn't work very well. It would spin the drive but then stop pretty quickly and return to the opening screen. As we all know, I can't repair my way out of a paper bag. But with some very technical futzing, I was able to get it working. Mostly I did it by poking semi-aggressively at the laser device. Anyone who saw me doing it would probably yell at me to stop, but hey, it worked in the end!

When you boot up a Marty, you get three screens: the logo, the bouncing ball, and the starfield simulation. It's been a month or so but I think the ball turns into the starfield when you start a game.

The Marty is most well known as a game console, but it can be a regular ol' computer, too. It has a CD-ROM drive, so plenty of (read-only) storage for the time, a floppy drive, 2MB of RAM, and a 386 CPU. Unlike most consoles, it also has a keyboard port and a PC card slot so you could even hook up a modem to it. I didn't go quite that far in my exploration phase. Here is the Marty, first in console form, then powered up into PC form.

So let's look at the games first. I picked up a batch of games a while ago, with a couple of premium titles in it. One was Indiana Jones. And King's Quest was a copied game I'd made a few years ago for my first FM Towns.

As a computer, you can imagine it as the Japanese counterpart to the Amiga CD-32. It boots up into the standard FM Towns OS and you can do anything on it that the same-spec FM Towns can do. Here it is loading the OS and venturing into the command prompt. Bonus: an older, simpler version of the OS, which is actually the launching point for Indiana Jones.

But it's not all chocolate and roses using your Marty as a computer. If you didn't notice, take another look at that command prompt. Blurry! Why? Because Marty only supports composite and S-video. Now, S-video's pretty decent, it produces great content for games, but it's definitely a bit painful to deal with large amounts of text unless you blow it up to a bigger font size like you would for a video game.

Here's a pair of comparison shots, composite and S-video side-by-side. It's not exactly a scientifically controlled experiment or anything, but I think you get the idea.

I wasn't trying to be unfair to the composite, but it has a kind of squished screen in the Towns OS photo. I think I had taken it on a same model monitor but with different adjustments. King's Quest should be a more straightforward comparison.

I have since sold the Marty so it is no longer a part of my collection, but I think it was a worthwhile investment of time to give it a little love on my site.