Adventure Game Builder for FM77AV 4096c

Adventure Game Builder for FM77AV 4096c

This software is a system designed for creating nostalgic text-input adventure games that run on the Fujitsu FM77AV emulator, XM7.

To help creators focus entirely on the creative process, there’s no need to develop execution code — all you have to do is write your game scenario and prepare your images.

While the visuals are displayed at 320×200 pixels, they support up to 4096 colors, providing the highest image quality possible for an 8-bit machine.

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**What Inspired This System**

In 1985, Fujitsu released its final 8-bit computer: the FM77AV series.

It could handle up to 4096 colors, making it state-of-the-art for its time.

However, looking back at the commercial software released afterward, hardly any titles fully used the 4096-color capability — and to my knowledge, no adventure games did.

One major reason was likely the hardware limitations: in 4096-color mode, a single 320×200 image required 96 KB of data.

At the time, a 3.5-inch floppy disk could only hold 320 KB — enough for just three images per disk.

Even a 640 KB disk would hold six images, and a 1 MB disk about ten.

This meant that an adventure game with over 100 images would have required so many disk swaps that it simply wasn’t practical.

Moreover, the disk access speeds were extremely slow, so loading even one image would have taken considerable time.

In short, the FM77AV offered impressive graphical specs, but its CPU speed and peripheral capacity couldn’t keep up.

What changed this situation was the FM-7 emulator XM7, which emerged around 2000.

While development of the original version ended around 2001, I only discovered XM7 around 2019.

XM7 faithfully replicates the real hardware, but its processing and disk access speeds are vastly faster than the original machine.

Although the disk size itself doesn’t change, I realized that even while the emulator is running, you can write new data to virtual disks from the Windows side.

For the FM77AV (running in XM7), this is like having an infinitely large hard disk connected.

At that moment, I felt that what I had once abandoned in 1986 might finally be possible to create.

So, forty years later, I decided to build an adventure game that fully uses the FM77AV’s 4096-color mode.

But just making one game wouldn’t be enough — it would be far more interesting to create a system where you can build various games simply by swapping out the scenario data, with no need to change the execution code.

That is how this system was born.

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**About the Included Manual**

A user manual is included with this package.

It explains how to convert bitmap image files for FM77AV display and write them to floppy disks, how to write your own game scenarios, provides tutorials, and describes how to save your scenario data to disk.

I hope you enjoy the nostalgic atmosphere this system offers.

*Note: This package does not include the XM7 executable or ROM files.*

// KKTamu