3DO Emulator ?


Ian J

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I've been watching a lot of youtube video's on consoles I never owned,

One that I did play at a mates which I was very impressed with was the 3DO.

Is there an emulator for it that could run on the Pandora?
 
Some digging around it seems finding a working 3DO emulator in Linux is even hard to find..

I had a friend in high school that had a 3DO.. At the time it seemed like a pretty cool system depite that it only had a handful of decent games.
 
IIRC the idea has been floated a few times (even back in the old forum days) but the only remotely potentially portable emulator appears to be defunct/has gone awol (at least, it's source code or something, it's been a while!).

I have a couple of the Panasonic originals, tbh the novelty wears off pretty quickly!
 
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I have had a 3DO but never opened it :)

But question is what games on 3DO that other systems don't have?  But yeah, would be nice to have a 3DO emu for Pandora.
 
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A recent article in RetroGamer magazine on the 3DO said that some of the titles on it (Road Rash & Need for Speed to name a couple) were better than the conversions made for newer more powerful consoles.

I just wanted to take a look at some of the games to see for myself.
 
Star Fighter on it was an enhanced port of Star Fighter 3000 for the Acorn Archimedes. As far as I know the 3D0 port is the best commercial port done by the original authors, although it was later backported to the Acorn RISC PC platform. Not sure we can run the latter on Pandora OS, though it'll probably run on RISC OS running natively.
 
Some digging around it seems finding a working 3DO emulator in Linux is even hard to find..


I had a friend in high school that had a 3DO.. At the time it seemed like a pretty cool system depite that it only had a handful of decent games.
there os an emulator, but its too slow on pandora.
 
Just for fun i compiled this http://code.google.com/p/3doh/

It run but framerate is near to zero on my CC pandora using the glshim library by lunixbochs..tested with a game called Icebreaker.

I compiled with the optimization provided by PND codeblocks..but don't have touched the code.

So maybe having an optimized ARM code (instead of using the actual x86-->ARM version) and maybe using DSP......but this task is not for me.
 
Wasn't 3DO the console where there was one guy that had a fullspeed emulator for GP2X and it was coming soon I promise...(From the GP32X days of course...)?
Yes. There were trumped up release dates that came and went with the guy vanishing. I have no idea what his deal was. He pulled the same sort of thing with alleged ports for several consoles.

The weird thing about it is he was the legitimate maintainer of the source code and clearly understood how the console worked, so it wasn't your typical emulator hoax..
 
A recent article in RetroGamer magazine on the 3DO said that some of the titles on it (Road Rash & Need for Speed to name a couple) were better than the conversions made for newer more powerful consoles.

I just wanted to take a look at some of the games to see for myself.
The Playstation version of Need For Speed looks identical (actually, a little crisper) to the 3DO version, and has extra tracks. It's true, the 3DO original was a show-stopper when it came out, so has historical interest, but the PS1 version is so close it's indistinguishable unless you know what to look for. Also, the Playstation had RGB out, the 3DO didn't (but RGB mod was possible).

Road Rash - yeah, the 3DO version isn't directly copied on later conversions. Played it to death in the day - it was quite a step up from the Mega Drive version for sure...

I have boxes of the crappier games that never sold, 'edutainment' and multimedia (ie FMV laden) stuff. They released video discs too, mostly cartoons.
 
Return Fire on 3DO was a classic game I'd love to replay. The AI was shite, but it was still a great game (at the time). Wonder if it still stands up today? I won a copy of that and something else (long since forgotten and never actually played) from a videogame mag and eventually swapped both for Cannon Fodder on the Jaguar.
 
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Return fire was also released on psx which is better than 3do version.

If you like that game take a look on game mass destruction. It was released on dos and psx. Im playing it a lot in dosboz
 
There were good 3DO games which were superior on that format. Wing Commander 3 was one of them, if I remember correctly it was better than the Ps1 version, especially for the videos. 

Need for Speed was the original one - the first one released was on 3DO. And again i think it was better than the PS1 version released later. 

The 3DO also had an excellent arcade port of Street Fighter 2, the best at the time it was out. That's why the system had some kind of success in Japan, despite the price. 

Policenauts was great, too. The original Metal Gear Solid was supposed to be released for 3DO in the first place. I have the "Policenauts pilots disk" where Konami released some artworks for the Metal Gear Solid being made on 3DO. Really interesting to see this, many years later. 
 
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Return fire was also released on psx which is better than 3do version.


If you like that game take a look on game mass destruction. It was released on dos and psx. Im playing it a lot in dosboz
I knew it was also released on PS1, but as I had it on 3DO there was no point in getting it for PS1 as well. Maybe it's time to get it now though.
 
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