3DO: The Pi4 Emulation Nobody Loves?

gorgar19

I plead the fifth as to how many times I've played PDWT and the strip rock paper scissors game for the 3DO.

ecto

Another World is also very good - probably the best port of the game with very nice BG art. And it runs very well on my pi4.

sirhenrythe5th

I had a real machine (Panasocic FZ-1) back in 1995 and the favourite games were NFS, Wing Commander III and Myst :D

gorgar19

Almost forgot trip'd loved that game

notthesame

alien vs predator, street fighter 2 and nfs but it runs pretty slow atm, i know i played others but for now i been playing on pi4

ReadyPlayaWon

@notthesame said in 3DO: The Pi4 Emulation Nobody Loves?:

alien vs predator, street fighter 2 and nfs

Aliens Vs Predator was not a 3DO Console Game ... you're probably thinking about the Atari Jaguar with that title

In 2020, i still have my Panasonic FZ-1 purchased Day 1 (Still working fine) ... and have never seen a Alien Vs Predator game for it

George Spiggott

Good to see your suggestions. Keep them coming. Surprised nobody mentioned 3DO Battle Chess. It does have a weird graphical glitch, is that putting people off?

As far as I know AVP was Jaguar only. It runs well on a Pi 4 on Virtual Jaguar and has aged surprisingly well. Is Jaguar another system that deserves more love here?

notthesame

@ReadyPlayaWon ah yes my mistake sorry.
Yeah I was not thinking guys but 3do emulation seems better now, and will get better in time, alot of cool fixes are being done, I finally got a fix for psx on Driver 1 that had a crash after retry, battle chess should be interesting on running, I ran that mad dog and runs great, I need to test more games.

neek

I worked for 3DO from 1994-1996 in the graphics team. It's a shame they never figured out their business model.. it was a cool box for its time, with great tech potential. If you're going to talk about great games, I think you have to add:

Need for Speed -- NFS first appeared on 3DO, and it was a great edition of the game
Road Rash -- By far, my all-time favorite 3DO game
Twisted - The Game Show -- Again, for it's time, had so many unique capabilities

And yes, PDWT is probably the worst game ever made for that platform, and possibly for any platform. In Europe the game had huge sync issues because it was authored for the US ~60Hz refresh rate, and when it ran on a 50Hz system, if I remember correctly the audio and video were out of sync and the game basically didn't work. One of my coworkers wasted so much time debugging all the issues in that game to make sure it wasn't our fault in the operating system.

There was a small team working on an American football game for the second-gen platform (M2).. They abandoned that work and went on to become the SoCal team of Blizzard. They were the creators of Diablo.

trapexit

@notthesame Not sure about "fixes" but I had rewritten a few things and improved performance and flexibility which should have helped a bit on lower end SBCs. A big percentage of the emulation costs in Opera / 4DO / FreeDO is the DSP. I started to rewrite the interpreter to something that should be faster but got side tracked with other projects. We are also working on a new ODE so that's taken time. But I'll get back to Opera improvements at some point.

hooperre

@neek Are you able to shed light or expound upon their business model? I don't understand the whole thing about how the hardware was produced by Panasonic then Goldstar then Sanyo or whatever. Did they just sell to manufacturers who paid to put their name on the box?

trapexit

@hooperre

The Wikipedia article goes into the basics.

neek

@hooperre For what it's worth I think the wiki article is different than my recollection, but it's been a long time and I was a young engineer so I may have misremembered.

The gist was that 3DO designed all the hardware and built the operating system and development tools. The hardware partners actually manufactured and marketed the boxes, and tried not to lose much money. However, if I remember correctly they received something on the order of $3/copy of each game sold, and then a few dollars went to 3DO itself (by license fees paid by game developers for the operating system). I don't know how the accounting of it worked, i.e., how 3DO decided whether to credit Panasonic or LG for a given sale.

At the time, at least, the average tie-in for a console was about 8-9, meaning when someone bought a console, they'd be expected to buy 8-9 total games over the life of the console. The net would be that about $24-$27 would be paid to the hardware manufacturer, so they had to get close to break-even to make this into a profitable business.

Hope that's not too inaccurate and that it helps!

trapexit

Yeah. That's about right. As I understand Trip and the company made several changes over the couple years to try to rebalance where money went in the hopes to bring down hardware prices but clearly didn't work or was too late for it to really help.

The 3DO M1 is an interesting system and far beyond its time which IMO both helped and harmed it. All the forced abstraction harmed performance but also made it easier to develop for. I've been trying to document the platform more thoroughly in hopes of getting some more homebrew attention. Unfortunately, there is really only two of us really involved right now and my time is also split with the Opera emulator and other projects. There is also a new ODE in the works.

neek

@trapexit Well if you're one of the core Opera emulator guys I just want to say THANK YOU! Road Rash was one of my favorites, but it's amazing to relive these games from years past. And M1 was a complicated enough system that I was very surprised to find an emulator existed, never mind that it works so well! I don't have any technical docs on the platform anymore but I do have a few 3DO friends that I'm still in touch with, so if you ever get stuck trying to figure something out, let me know and I can ping some hardware guys, other OS guys, or whatever.

trapexit

@neek Glad you've enjoyed it. The Phoenix emulator is actually more accurate but closed source. As for Opera... I didn't write it. That credit goes to the FreeDO folks. But I did revive and adopt the libretro 4DO core. Cleaning up the code and adding some new features. I hope to work on core emulation in the not too distant future (the DSP and CPU both need work wrt accuracy and the MADAM and CLIO aren't the most performant and not entirely accurate.) I just need to get done with some other projects. I spent a bunch of time reading and rereading patents and SDK docs and trying to independently document subsystems in preparation.

As for your offer... that would be amazing. Any info could help out. Any official documentation would be great even if only for archival reasons. I'd really love to get access to the OS source code. I've seen evidence that it exists in someone's hands but it's never been released generally probably due to copyright concerns. TBH I really really doubt anyone cares about all that much which is why I've been pretty cavalier with uploading things to my website. Not that I'd not take things down if asked but the IP has been spread out so far and wide seems all abandonware now. If you think it wouldn't be uncouth to blanket ask if your acquaintances have and would be willing to share anything they might have that might be the easiest. Otherwise I'll reach out if I run into something specific.

George Spiggott

I'm seeing a lot of love for 3DO Road Rash. I remember a local electronics store had it to demo along with AVP on the Jaguar. I bought the PS1 version not long after I bought my PS1. Is there anything special about the 3DO version?

sirhenrythe5th

@George-Spiggott gosh, i forgot about that! I had this game too on my real 3DO and played it a lot!
I started to play the PSX Version on Retropie a while ago, still a great game.
As far as i remember the soundtrack is different, i could swear that the 3DO Version came with "black whole sun" from soundgarden(?)

trapexit

@sirhenrythe5th @George-Spiggott

As I recall there is no real differences between the 3DO, PSX, and Saturn versions (outside framerate). Black Hole Sun isn't on there. Superunknown and Kickstand are the tracks from the album Superunknown. Outshined and Rusty Cage from Badmotorfinger.

https://vgost.fandom.com/wiki/Road_Rash
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0263941/soundtrack?ref_=tt_trv_snd

Some comparison videos are on YouTube:

trapexit

BTW... not sure how well it'll work on a Pi4 but Opera allows you to overclock the CPU and that can improve the framerate on Road Rash.