3DO: The Pi4 Emulation Nobody Loves?
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@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.
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@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?
4B ~ RPi PSU 5.1V / 3.0A ~ 32GB SanDisk microSD ~ 128GB USB
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The Wikipedia article goes into the basics.
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@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!
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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.
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@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.
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@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.
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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?
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@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(?)-- Retro-Achievements Username: SirALX --
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@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_sndSome comparison videos are on YouTube:
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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.
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I took the plunge and added 3DO Road Rash to my collection. The 3DO version seems to have an option to see the bike's speedo which I cannot replicate on the PS1 version. I can also confirm that the game seems to run at full speed on my Pi4, although I am running a fairly heavy overclock as per my sig.
The game music was a big draw for me as it also includes Therapy? and Monster Magnet on the soundtrack. I was always rather dissapointed that it did not play while you raced.
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I've just got 3DO working - has anyone got any performance tips aside from Overclocking the CPU in the settings?
Sewer Shark is a little bit stuttery for me - I'd like to play it, it looks cheesy AF. :)
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Don't overclock the 3DO's CPU. That will make things worse.
The VDLP pixel format and VDLP bypass clut settings can be changed which may improve performance a bit. Make sure HiRes CEL rendering is disabled. I doubt OperaOS SWI HLE would make a difference on a non 3D game. WRT to core settings that's about it.
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@trapexit I just reached out to a few. There's some who would definitely have material, I'll just see what they're willing to share. :-)
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@sirhenrythe5th The 3DO version's soundtrack was from Soundgarden. Rusty Cage and Outshined, and a fair bit of other great music.
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@trapexit Yep! That has definitely helped. It's a hard game now I'm giving it a play....
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@AdamBeGood said in 3DO: The Pi4 Emulation Nobody Loves?:
I've just got 3DO working - has anyone got any performance tips aside from Overclocking the CPU in the settings?
enable runcommand from the Retropie Setup screen and hit a button before the game launches and select a lower resolution eg. 640x480 @ 60Hz (which is the 3DO's native resolution) you won't see a big difference in resolution if you run higher than that, but you should see a better performance by using a lower resolution.
also in the lr-opera 'options' screen select Threaded DSP = On ... which is supposed to improve performance on multi core processors.
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@trapexit said in 3DO: The Pi4 Emulation Nobody Loves?:
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.
I just sent you an email.. Got something which should be of help.
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@ReadyPlayaWon Threaded DSP is not stable. It's likely to crash. It was more of an experiment and would need a lot more attention to ensure proper synchronization.
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