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It seems that more than handful of FM-TOWNS/Marty units are working outside Japan. Probably those who are maintaining a piece of Japanese computer history may be facing difficulties in understanding what Towns OS says.
Hoping to be of some help, I wrote an English localizer program. You can download from here. It includes a source. I spent about 30 minutes to write this C source. It looks to be working. It took more hours to make localization.
Since I can only replace N-byte Japanese message to up-to-N-byte English message, I needed to crunch "Cancel" to "Cncl" or "Config" to "CNFG", but probably better than mysterious Japanese characters.
There are two usages. One is you copy .EXP files from FM-TOWNS CD or HDD to Windows, and set up a directory like:
english.exe
textlist.txt
TMENU.EXP
DISKPAT.EXP
EDIT.EXP
Then go down to command prompt, CD to where you have all the files and type:
> english.exe TMENU.EXP
The program will search and replace Japanese messages into English messages. Do the same for other EXP files.
The other usage is to do it in the FM-TOWNS. Make a directory (maybe in a hard-disk) and put
english.exp
textlist.txt
run386.exe
TMENU.EXP
DISKPAT.EXP
SETDSK.EXP
EDIT.EXP
Then go down to command mode, CD to the directory, and type:
> run386 -nocrt english.exp TMENU.EXP
But, make sure to take a backup of those EXP files before running this.
Either way, it is for running these EXP files (or EXG files) from an HDD installation. After localizing, copy them to appropriate locations of your boot drive. There is a method for creating a rescue GUI-bootable disk using an utility called LZEXP, which will be extremely useful for rescuing a FM-TOWNS with a dead CD drive. Yes, minimum TownsOS GUI can be started from a single 1.2MB floppy disk. There is a way to connect a SCSI-CD drive externally, boot from a floppy disk, and start a CD-based game. I'll describe how sometime future.
So far, I took messages from critical programs like Towns MENU (TMENU.EXP), Disk Partitioning (DISKPAT.EXP), Disk Utility (HDUTIL.EXP), and Drive-Letter Assigner ( SETDSK.EXP). The critical roles of these files are to set up hard disk partitions, assign drive letters, and select boot drive. You need these files to maintain FM-TOWNS in working condition.
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