3DO: The Pi4 Emulation Nobody Loves?

George Spiggott

Looking back through the old posts it seems that there was lots of speculation back in Pi3 land about how slow 3DO emulation would work better on a more powerful machine. As far as I can tell 3DO runs pretty well on a Pi4 yet nobody here is talking about the new games we have access to.

Does nobody love the 3DO? Shout out if you do. Not literally, just tell me about the games you've found for it that are worth playing especially if they're exclusive or better than other versions. Also if they're super bad and should be avoided.

gorgar19

I personally love the 3do even though I have to admit it is a terrible system it was overpriced when it was released and it had more limitations than what it had pluses for it.

Unless you lived in Japan or could get your hands on the memory expansion you only had 32kb sram for all of your saved games. And in all honesty theme park alone used up almost all of that.

With there being multiple manufacturers of the system and each manufacturer putting its own little twist on the system didn't really help any but for my vote the fZ10 being the cheapest was still the best.

But as I said I love the 3do it's one of my favorite game systems and finally being able to play Icebreaker is definitely worth the wait.

So for my game list of 3do games I would have to put them in this order
#1 ice breaker
#2 Icebreaker 2
#3 Guardian war
#4 the horde
#5 the Daedalus encounter
#6 Way of the warrior

I should probably include D in that list but I have never been able to play that game to completion one way or the other unless I died almost immediately

as far as better versions of the 3Do games almost every game that was on the 3do that was eventually ported to the PlayStation look better on the PlayStation in my opinion but some of the games had things removed when it went from 3do to the PlayStation. Psychic detective is a good example of that but even if you played them both side by side very rarely would anybody even notice the deletion

and nobody should ever play any of the titles by vivid or plumbers Don't Wear ties

trapexit

Starfighter is a good game on 3DO that while ported to other platforms it didn't look as good generally.

theretroprince

I've been really happy with the 3do performance on Pi4. A great port of Wolfenstein and a few guilty pleasures (Sewer Shark - much better than the Sega CD version) and Lucienne's Quest.

Totally agree with @gorgar19 on Vivid games and PDWT. Not worth the space to play with those turds...

gorgar19

I should probably add Robinson's requiem and lost Eden and Zhadnost - The People's Party .

the only reason I didn't put Zhadnost - The People's Party in top five is because it has to be played multiplayer .But it's definitely a blast to play with multiple people preferably four

I think myst on the PlayStation plays better but all of my memories of myst was on the 3Do

trapexit

PDWT is silly fun. Then again I'm biased... I wrote the only walk through back in 2002.

We might be getting the source code to Wolfenstein on 3DO so there could be enhancements coming in the future to the title.

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.