It's really hard to beat the aesthetics of the early gray FM Towns towers with the vertically aligned CD-ROM drives. But the FM Towns II HR20 is also a really slick looking desktop re-imagining of the tower.

I picked it up on Yahoo Auctions a bit ago. The machine works well enough, although there is an issue with the CD-ROM drive mechanism where it doesn't quite seem to align with the rails so re-inserting the tray is met with a grinding sound and has to be pushed in manually, and it seems once the drive starts spinning, it doesn't want to stop. Reading and writing is fine, though. The system was also upgraded to 12MB of RAM from its stock 4MB. Also, the HR20 did not come with a hard drive, but this one was upgraded with one. Slightly surprisingly, as I've not had a lot of luck with hard drives of this vintage, this one actually still works!

Being a 486 (even if it is just an SX at 20MHz), this is my fastest Towns that works reliably. While my 386-based Towns really chugged along with Street Fighter II, this machine makes it entirely playable (not that I especially care about the Street Fighter series). I mean, there's probably still room for improvement, but I don't think many would have major gripes about the performance. I have to track down my Sim City 2000 CD and see how much better that plays!