3DO ZONE Forums

I recently ran into a claim that some GoldStar 3DOs have copy protection. While I dismissed the idea at first -- we all know the 3DO has no copy protection, right? -- I researched it further and found a discussion on the Russian 3DO boards that seems quite unequivocal: the GoldStar GDO-202P has copy protection that needs to be bypassed with a swap trick or mod chip. And from what I understand, other GoldStar models like the GDO-203P also have it.

It's all academic to me since I'm not a GoldStar owner, but it does have me curious, especially since everyone usually assumes that GoldStars just "don't like" burned discs. (Actually my brother's GoldStar runs them very well, but that's another topic for another day.) And it's also something that could have a small but significant impact on any homebrew for the system.

So, is all this already known? Do we have any clarity on where the GoldStar models with copy protection were sold, or whether all consoles with a given model number have it? And am I correct that only units released toward the very end of the 3DO's life have it?

I had a Goldstar toward the end of time back in the day, bought it for the games it had with it. No match for the FZ10...

Very interesting: the person I'm speaking with on NintendoAge, who's having problems with CDRs on a GoldStar, bought his GoldStar 3DO in Russia in 1997.

Did GoldStar offload a lot of their leftover consoles in Russia around then? I've noticed the 3DO is surprisingly popular in Russian-speaking circles, so maybe that explains why. And if they introduced copy protection late in the GoldStar's lifespan, maybe that explains why reports of anti-CDR protection have been mostly/exclusively coming from Russian sources -- if GoldStar made the change late in production, perhaps those consoles never made it to the US, and were confined to South Korea and Russia.

Maybe it is simply the weak cdrom drive lasers not being able to read from CDRs 20+ years on? I have an FZ-1 here that won't read CDrs at all, but will read pressed disc games 90% of the time. I've actually coaxed it to read CDRs just a few times immediately after cleaning the lense, so I know its not any special FZ-1 copy protection

dark wrote:Maybe it is simply the weak cdrom drive lasers not being able to read from CDRs 20+ years on?

I would've thought so, and I had similar experiences with my first FZ-1 (it only could read CDRs after warming up for 20+ minutes, and they had to be high-quality discs). But the Russian posters on the link above are 100% certain that it's copy protection on these GoldStar models, and have posted about swap tricks and mods to defeat it.

dark wrote:Maybe it is simply the weak cdrom drive lasers not being able to read from CDRs 20+ years on? I have an FZ-1 here that won't read CDrs at all, but will read pressed disc games 90% of the time. I've actually coaxed it to read CDRs just a few times immediately after cleaning the lense, so I know its not any special FZ-1 copy protection

Nah, I think what you are experiencing is the fact that 20 years later, the components in the FZ-1 systems are starting to go bad. I am now reading of many people having these issues, regardless whether they are dealing with burned games or not.