How’s that for a model name? Rolls right off the tongue, right? I have to mentally prepare myself a bit to say it. But it’s quite a sophisticated machine. FM77AV is one of few Japanese 8-bit computers to support hardware scrolling, so in theory it should have some of the best-playing games. Unfortunately, I have very few games to test it with at this point.

I got this as a fairly standard auction on Yahoo Auctions from yugen2plus, a reputable seller, fully tested and working. It was a low-risk, high-cost purchase.

It is a pretty grand machine, though. It features a handsome black case and keyboard. One nice thing about the keyboard is that the cable is completely removable and replaceable with a standard S-video cable. In fact, mine had already been replaced with an exceptionally long S-video cable, which came in handy.

It comes with BASIC on ROM, which means even without games or system disks, you can poke around on the computer a bit.

But frustratingly, it has a separate, disk-loaded version of BASIC that you need if you want to access your floppy disks from BASIC. This means you can’t even format a disk unless you track down the disk version of BASIC, which has proven hard to find. Not impossible, though!

It also has a 6809 CPU, which I’ve heard referred to as the most powerful 8-bit CPU available. Earlier models had the choice of one or two drives, but by the time we got to the 77AV20 models, all systems came with two 3.5″ 320KB floppy disk drives. Stock RAM is 128KB, video RAM at 96KB, capable of displaying 4096 colors at 320×200.

Someday I would like to upgrade to the even more powerful FM77AV40EX, but for now I will be satisfied with this!