3DO ZONE Forums

@Ewhac Here's a pic of the 3DO software you loved so much :D [horrifying image] AAAGGHHHH!!! Yup, that's it. How we ever got anything done on that tiny little screen, I'll never know. Oh, wait, I didn't use that tiny little screen. I used an Amiga networked to the UNIX server... Hmm, looks like I h...

Episode 5 is up!

Let's Play - Monster Manor (3DO, 1993) - Level 7

We keep it well under an hour this time, I give an incomplete description of the game's level file format, and gammadev relates a tale of when a stranger came to the door...

Wow. I had totally forgotten about this. On the "source code" disc I burned nearly two decades ago are all the art assets we created for the game, including stuff we didn't use. Understandably, there isn't much of it -- we threw very little away. In the finished game, the "extra life" object appears...

And now my GIMP plugin is loading animated cel images. Here's the blue gem from Monster Manor, saved back out as an animated GIF:

Episode 4 is up! Let's Play - Monster Manor (3DO, 1993) - Level 6 In which we go way over an hour (largely because I died again ), gammadev speculates on Monster Manor's possible place in console gaming history, and I get to show off the fruits of my 3DO cel plugin for the GIMP. I encoded this one a...

This post is somewhat off-topic, but for the last couple weeks I've been working on a GIMP plugin to load 3DO cel files. I just got it working this evening: http://ewhac.org/images/3DOExperience.png Using my plugin, I loaded the original 3DO cel file, stripped the alpha channel, and then saved it ba...

Episode 3 is up! Let's Play - Monster Manor (3DO, 1993) - Levels 4-5 In which we go slightly over an hour (sorry), NTG's role in the development of the 3DO is discussed, and ewhac's greed receives immediate karmic feedback. I'll be traveling next week, so there won't be another episode for at least ...

Episode 2 is up!

Let's Play - Monster Manor (3DO, 1993) - Level 3

A couple pieces of 3DO tech goodness are discussed, gammadev reminisces about P.O'ed, and I get killed.

Let's Play - Monster Manor (3DO, 1993) - Levels 1-2 I guess this is the appropriate forum for these, so here's the first episode of our latest effort: Escape from Monster Manor . Since the game is too long to creatively edit down to even a gargantuan two hours, we're doing this one in episodic form...

You should be able to traverse the file system of a 3DO cd somehow. There's a Linux filesystem module called OperaFS . Unfortunately, the latest available version doesn't compile on the 3.0 and 3.2 kernel series. I tried mucking with it for a grand total of 20 minutes, but didn't really get anywher...

Possibly interesting trivia: PDWT used vertical blank as a timing source for the slide show. As a consequence, it fell out of sync badly on PAL systems such that, after about half a minute, the audio had nothing whatsoever to do with what was on the screen.

It was bad...

Let's Play - Burning Soldier I don't know if this is the appropriate forum to post this as it's not, strictly speaking, a review. However, what may make this Let's Play a shade more interesting to the readers here is that I and my co-host were both employees of 3DO and, as such, have a unique persp...

http://www.amazon.com/Composite-S-video-Audio-HDMI-Converter/dp/B003NS0UUQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1330294438&sr=8-2 You can plug a Composite or S-Video cable into one end and an HDMI cable into the other, it's magic. There's some more too, but try to get one with S-Video support to have better Blac...

Hey, John. Nice to see you. Although we used the word "sprite" when speaking to developers coming from other platforms, I never thought of the cel engine as a "sprite" engine. "Sprite" in my mind implies something that gets directly addressed by the video DMA engine. Your mouse pointer is a sprite, ...

Part of it was a lesson learned from the Amiga. If you display a typical computer UI on an interlaced television display, you'll get some degree of flickering. People complained about this on the Amiga. So when it came time to design the 3DO, they decided to put a box filter into the display output ...

The framebuffer depth was 16 bits per pixel, arranged in a XRGB1555 layout. However, each 5-bit color component indexed into a table (CLUT -- Color LookUp Table) which yielded an 8-bit output. So that's where the 16M colors figure came from. The CLUT could be reloaded at any time, which gave you a v...

I'm up to 5 draft pages. http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/will2097/Document-3-page001.jpg I think RJ's total contribution to that game was a couple dozen lines of code I stole from something else he wrote (if you discount his code in the operating system). RJ's official role was project manag...

Good heavens, now I have to remember all that stuff... The game was actually produced at NTG (New Technologies Group, original developers of the 3DO platform) before 3DO acquired us or, indeed, before it was called 3DO (previous name: SMSG -- San Mateo Software Group). RJ Mical was one of the NTG fo...