Thinking about a 3DO

[Silanda]

It was basically a multimedia computer and to have that power in a kids toy was unheard of. Hence it cost way to much was geared towards videophiles. Once Sony came in, they could afford to mass produce consoles at lower costs and even sell them without making profit. They had the confidence they would sell enough games to make it back. I doubt 3DO could have done that.

3DO's pricing was caused by a broken business model. Various manufacturers would licence the rights to build the consoles from 3DO, and games developers would buy licences to develop from 3DO at a much lower price than the equivalent from Sega, Sony, or Nintendo. That situation was attractive to developers but left the console manufacturers high and dry. The problem then was that because of the lower priced licences the hardware manufacturers didn't get a cut of the software licensing money, or any money from 3DO to put towards advertising. This meant that, unlike the situation with the later consoles, they had to make a profit from the hardware itself hence the outrageous initial price.

[jesus.arnold]

I find there are more and more games I want to play on the 3DO, but I'd like to hear from 3DO owners where the best place to buy from is, what the best model to pick up is, and what I should look for if buying in an eBay lot (hard to find controller, hard to find power supply, hard to find A/V, etc.) Also, which model is most CD-R friendly?

To be honest, if you didn't like the Saturn and the Master System then there's no reason for you to buy a 3DO

Uh, that game looks pretty bad. I own the Saturn port, and it's pretty good gameplay-wise, but it's an ugly game. Terrible draw-in, everything's very blocky, and what is up with those squared explosions?.

The Saturn port of Starfighter is notoriously ass.

[kool kitty89]

I didn't get the feeling he was particularly disapointed with the SMS in his thread on it... The US library is a little sparse, importing is a good option (shipping is a pain though).

But we're talking 3DO, and I;m not sure it doesn't have the same problem as Saturn, though th elibrary is a bit different, so that could be the determining factor.

At least emulation is pretty good, unlike Saturn, so you can really try out a lot of stuff to get a feel for the system. (although that avoids using real hardware, and I've heard the controllers are a bit iffy, though soem have mentioned messing with the screw tightness can help)

One thing with the 3DO is there's no copy protection, like Sega CD, but some drives can still be picky, requiring expensive media... That and compared to something liek the Jaguar, it's still relatively inexpensive to collect for. (2-3 years ago the Jag was still pretty cheap, now it's getting rediculous)




And on the system itssef, yeah they went for the wrong buisness model, I think that may have been part of the original concept, a machine very open to developers, but without the "razor and blade" model, expensive hardware had to be sold for the major profit, with games being licenced very cheaply. (and games still not selling cheaply enough to make up for it) Basicly it was like a PC game console, expensive hardware the user bought up front with games being somewhat less expensive than contemporary console games. (except PCs have other uses, 3DO just played CDs and VCDs with an add-on, mainly important in Asia with VCDs being popular)

With Panasonic as 3DO's parent company, I don't see why they couldn't have pushed things in a similar manner as Sony did with the PSX, slash the hardware prices, selling at or below cost (obviously no longer getting any interest from 2ndary manufacturers), invest in a prominent 3rd party (like Sony did with Psygnosis, although 3DO was already tied to EA, so that could work). Still, the hardware would have been pretty expensive in 1993, and limited compared to later machines, I doubt (even selling at/below cost) that they could have gotten it to consumers lower than US $500 at release (in '93), still that's a lot better than $700.
Maybe it would've been best to keep it in development longer, a big cost factor was the expensive, large chips on 1 nm manufacturing processes, delaying the release may have allowed for newer processes (.8, .6, or .5 nm), so smaller chips, cheaper to manufacture (fewer, smaller, more integrated chips), and more practical to add caching. (if nothing else, switch to a CPU with cache, like the ARM 610) Faster RAM may have been a possiblity by then too. (3DO used pretty slow, 80 ns DRAM for main memory, a 12.5 MHz 32-bit data bus, ~50 MB/s, less than 1/2 of the PSX or Saturn's main bus) Still beating the PSX and Saturn to release (in all regions), but not by as much, and with a much more practical price point. (and remaining a lot more competitive, even the CPU cache alone shoud have helped a good deal, the CPU would still be less powerful and RAM slower, but the different could have been huge compared to the current 3DO, allowing games to have graphics more similar to tech demos on 3DO; the lack of cache totally killed the main bus)

Even with that there's still the issue with using quadrilateral primitives (like Saturn) rather than triangles, I don't know if they could make a radical design change like that within a few months, maybe, but that would also assume they'd realized the mistake of using quads in the first place...
Heh, maybe having another popular platform using quads would boost support for Saturn, and Nvidia's NV1...

[FoxHound]

my favorite Taco-man video.

[CRV]

There is a mouse, but it looks like the 3DO version of Syndicate doesn't support it (Lemmings and Policenauts do, though.).

Hmmm. The new HG101 article on Syndicate says the 3DO version does support the mouse.

[jesus.arnold]

Hmmm. The new HG101 article on Syndicate says the 3DO version does support the mouse.

Its nice to see that Hardcore gamer seems to give the 3DO a proper chance (unlike most retrogaming sites) I remember a podcast ages ago that went on about how good the 3DO version of Star Control 2 was as well.

On another note, the article mentions that the SNES version of Syndicate is much worse than the MD one, this is getting ridiculous now! most of the internet seems to say as a rule "most multi-formats are better on SNES than MD" but the more I look into it the more it seems that the exact opposite is the truth

[mrbigreddog]

Hmmm. The new HG101 article on Syndicate says the 3DO version does support the mouse.

I don't have a mouse for my 3DO.."wish I did".. But I do own Syndicate! Got the Case and Manual! But there is no word in the manual about using the mouse, just the controller... I'll definitely need to try and get a mouse!