A Closer Look at the 3DO 

He definitely had some great ideas and really helped to pioneer some things that lifted Electronic Arts into their golden age! It'd be a real shame if the values and ideals of the foundation they built upon would be sullied years later along with any shred of credibility among consumers.... EA used to constantly innovate with yearly sports games back then so it was exciting to see the new Madden or NBA Live! But yeah, like you said, it's nice that Tripp's failure with the 3DO provided more information those afterwards could use to succeed.

Dreamcast wasnt a transition console. Games are still being made for it.

@@mikemoss9559 Yes it kinda was a transition console, since it was the first 6th gen console that was released TWO YEARS before PS2.

@@Ex0rz in the US the dreamcast stopped and microsoft started to make the xbox. And future dc titles and sequels made for the dreamcast overseas ended up on the xbox here.

@@mikemoss9559 Well they're still making SNES/Genesis games too so that doesn't mean anything. Dreamcast was definitely a transitionary console. I mean look at the overlap of games it got, it had quite a few PlayStation titles on it that looked better. I liked the Dreamcast but it was definitely a transitionary console.

Panasonic don't own the rights to the 3DO and lost a fortune on it.

The system was a convoluted joke of a system.

@@bigbabatunde1218 you've clearly never used one son

@@FantasyVisuals That's the point, hardly anyone has. It was a massive flop. Not so much a hot mess but a mediocre mess. Didn't you watch the video? One controller port! Daisy chaining! FFS.

No one would buy that

@Lassi Kinnunen 81 I think most negative things people say about it are mostly true. But it did have potential and was useful in many ways as you stated. But it's like it didn't know what it wanted to be, a Phone that can function as a game console, or a game console that can function as a phone. Emulators could also be an interesting topic as well!

They’re currently extremely cheap from China. They’re the real units, but I guess some warehouse bought them and they never sold them until now. I got one myself and I’m trying to design an SD card adapter similar to ones like AceKard and the more popular adapter for the Nintendo DS. I’m planning on creating a Doom port to the N-Gage as it’s definitely capable of running Doom thanks to its adequate GPU.

@@NikoKourouklisBut can it run Namco Museum?

My mom had one, it was cool and I loved playing with it when I was bored outside Unfortunately it was lost as part of her habit of losing/breaking a phone every year

Step 1: build own developer tools, without any guidance. Step 2: figure out how to run Doom on a machine much slower than the Super FX2. Step 3: Demand the boss's band play the entire soundtrack. There's a reason she's regarded as a legend. A shame this time she couldn't pull off the impossible.... But. She knew it would be lost cause. Since the M2 was supposedly on the way, she thoughtfully included a way to play the game at full screen with an uncapped frame rate. Today, it means an overclocked emulator can play the game as it was originally intended. I guess that's a partial symbolic victory?

@@GeeCee-pv7ik Yes, she.

@@juststatedtheobvious9633 I don't think the 3DO hardware is "much slower" than Super FX2. In fact, most 3D 3DO games obviously demonstrate that this was not the case.

William Salvador Heineman

@@rars0n I'm referring to raw cpu clockspeeds. They're easy to look up, and things aren't looking good for your theory. But clockspeeds are also misleading. A ZX Spectrum has one higher than an SNES.

Yes. I almost forgot the good sensation of buying an EA Game... That feeling only lives in my memory

@@lacuevadegolum9448 The last EA game I bought was .skate back in 2007

Trips doing fine I have him on Facebook and he’s currently traveling around the world atm.

The jaguar version has a map too.

@@WickedElement oh cool

@@junethefox5834 3DO version has a map too lol (press A+C)

@@DoggoneNexus oh

Absolutely! 👍

I kind of doubt it. I think the fundamental flaw with the 3DO was the fact that really anyone could publish software for it. You get a handful of good games underneath a mountain of shovel ware.

Who shot Johnny Rock , Starfighter , SpaceHulk were amazing fun on 3DO. I had so much fun on the system. Never got far on Sherlock Holmes tho ......

Completely right. This idea that only tri-based rendering is 'proper' 3D is nonsense. Using quads instead of triangles means that you don't have to spend as much processing budget mapping square textures to flat planes, but each individual plane uses more memory as there's an additional point to plot relative to the other 3. As a result you can render less polygons on screen but those polygons can be more efficient and less prone to texture warping, so it's as if you were just using the raw textures as the polygons. That's literally the only difference and it's really frustrating seeing people with limited technical knowledge repeating this fallacy. The 3DO name also has nothing to do with the 3D rendering of the system (Audio+Video+Games=3DO. It's a play on words and the system was supposed to be a replacement for CD players, game consoles and VHS players as justification for the launch price. Once the hardware standard was licensed to multiple third-party manufacturers the price to the consumer went down in line with the aforementioned media players. It's basically a modern console made with technology 2 generations too early to be good enough for the job. The implications of what could have happened to the industry if it had succeeded are incredible) I'm really disappointed that the information in this video is still completely wrong.

@@casanovafunkenstein5090 ikr

true and honest

To add to this post, the CEL hardware is really doing the final rasterization step of a 3d engine pipeline, so in the case of 3DO you provide some vectors that tell where the upper left corner of a bitmap starts and how to stretch horizontally and vertically to fit a quad polygon area. It's a little bit more involved than other hardware that will take directly vertex coordinates, but at this final pipeline stage after the 3D projection, it's not much different than PS1 rasterizing triangles (at this stage we have 2d final points on the screen and just want to fit a bitmap). There are some other significant difference though, the 3DO is a forward renderer (it has read every texture pixel and fill the screen, instead of the reverse that PS1 and most renders do) and so it can't support texture coordinates, while the PS1 does. I do remember a video in Digital Foundry I think where it presented what happened in Tomb Raider if you reset the CEL vectors, and it was like a mesh of random sprites, so people where naturally "OMG, what a horrible idea these 3DO engineers thought?!". But it really is not that bad, it's just another way of rasterizing a bitmap over a polygon (being it quad or triangle in the case of PS1). I thought that take on the video was, while cute, misleading in it's perception that they thought something alien for something that should be simple. Meanwhile, one would claim that PS1 is 3D because it also had hardware matrix math, but I did found that the same exists in 3DO too (the math matrix functions are running on the hardware and proved to be in some cases 4 times faster than my pure CPU equivalent). Yet, obviously there are no direct functions on the API that just take a mesh and do all the work, I bet even in the PS1 one had to do some work, construct the 3d rotation matrix on the CPU before giving it to the hardware (something I also do on 3DO). The 3DO really suffers on the CPU side, but for a complete 3D engine more things have to be done anyway. The CEL on it's own, if used properly, was quite good for it's time I think. The issue with the bigger texture, wasn't necessary that you have to split in many textures. You could have the same big texture in the screen as long as it wasn't going out of bounds. If you render the same amount of pixels/texels in both cases, it wouldn't matter if it's 1 big quad with the whole texture, or more quads with the same texture split in pieces. I think what happened in your game was that there a was big texture that was going out of bounds on all sides of the screen. And I realized, in a new project the CEL capability of "super-clipping" is not enabled by default (and needs some more extra steps to really get it working, there is a CEL flag but then one needs to enable a bit in the framebuffer creation too, I don't know why in the original init functions they didn't enable this by default). This means, a big portion of the quad that is outside the screen would still be interpolated (but later the pixels discarded) instead of early terminating. Now, if the whole quad is outside the screen, there is a different kind of clipping which will discarded, but if it's partially out it's not doing a good work skipping those pixels unless one enables the feature. It was even not enabled in the original Doom source and would make the framerate too slow if I stuck my view in front of a very tall wall (very tall columns rendered with CELs extended very high outside the framebuffer). If the big screen is split in small pieces, some of them will be whole out the screen so the first clipper (not the super-clipper) will at least work. The advice in the SDK docs I think was rather talking about a different bottleneck, where if you have a very small polygon in the distance that could be few pixels, yet the texture it tries to render is very big, it will still read every pixel of the texture (because of forward rendering) which is a waste. Then you have to switch to a lower version of your texture. But in the case of your 2d game, probably enable super-clipping was another easier solution.

I'll always remember the line, "Variety is the spice of life!"

No. FM Towns has only 16bit data bus. Amiga CD32 (released month before 3DO) is fully 32bit. If we go that "partially 32bit" route, then Amiga CDTV, CD-i and Sega Megadrive are also (partially) 32bit.

EDIT: This is now being trimmed out with the YT editor. That comment was taken from my older video. Surprisingly, I have no memory of anyone pointing this out last time. I didn't double check that part as a result... clearly I should have. My mistake.

Hello you.. You 're Guru Larry.... 😆 love that every time

Hello uncle Barry

@@jpjokela1 Sadly, the main memory controller of the CD32, the Alice chip, is also only 16-bit, which is why 2D graphics throughput is so poor. Having a 32-bit data bus isn't enough if only the CPU can access the full bus (and even then, could never get more than 50% of available memory cycles). The CD32 was a weird mix of cutting-edge, ancient, expensive, and cost-reduced hardware all in one box.

I have played over 130 games on 3DO and Star Fighter is one of my favorites. Definately a top ten must have!

Okay, at best. It was really underpowered for what it was trying to achieve. . PC prices without PC power isn't a good look.

I paid $100 for a brand new one in 1996 * Edited, i didnt realize i put "1906", lol.

Hey floppa

The $699 price was only for the first few months the console was available in 1993. I remember very distinctly trying to save up enough money to buy a 3DO in early 1994 and the Goldstar verson was $399 and the (cooler, in my opinion) Panasonic one was $499. I couldn't get that much together and ended up buying a Jaguar for $199. By the end of 1994, though, Panasonic released the FZ-10 for $299 and by 1995 when the Playstation and Saturn were available, the 3DO was actually cheaper than either of them.

@@Louie_The_Dago "The last time I bought a 3DO was in nineteen-aught-seven. What a wild year that was." (cheers to anyone who gets the reference)

Putt-Putt & Freddy Fish

I am guessing weak laser. I have the fz-10 and it works with cd-r's just fine.

Holy cow he’s Canadian?😮

3DO didn't natively support parallax scrolling as I understand it, which made developing platformers kind of a pain. Pretty much the only ones worth mentioning are Gex and Soccer Kid

You still have it?

Also the 3do version was the best console version.

As a matter of fact, Video CDs were popular in my country from the late 1990s to the late 2000s.

That's Shantae, and he uses her in all of his outros.

After