The Panasonic 3DO

Hi everyone, today is console day, as I had told you in the post about my collection, I'm going to take a moment to talk a little about some of them, maybe all of them. I want to start with one of the few that I have taken advantage of, the Panasonic 3DO.

I remember that when I was in high school, in the early 90's, I bought a Spanish magazine called On-Off, which arrived in my country with a considerable delay compared to the publication date, I think of several months. On-Off is a home technology magazine, at that time I was interested above all in the advances in computers, consoles and electronic audio and video; When I started writing this post, I thought I had saved those old magazines in a plastic container, like the console accessories, but when looking for them to document the post, I realized that it is not, I suppose they were discarded in some moment.

Seeing the technological innovations of the moment, I dreamed CDs, CD-I, MiniDisc, DAT, the already veteran Laserdisc, as well as laptops of the time, or the, at that time, Apple's novel Newton, the predecessor of the Palm, which opened the way to the current Tablets. One of those novelties that I met on On-Off, was the 3DO, the only video game console, to date, developed by Panasonic, launched in 1993, was made in collaboration between the aforementioned company and the Japanese companies GoldStar and Sanyo. the time it had a wide repertoire of games, many of them imported from other platforms, however, its cost, raised by the standards of the time, did not allow it to position itself in the already saturated console market, which led to its failure and disappearance in 1995.

From the technical aspect, the 3DO, had characteristics comparable to those of the Sony PlayStation, more than a year before the launch of this, had an ARM 60 RISC 32Bits processor, two video coprocessors, a mathematical coprocessor and a 16-bit DSP. In addition, it was the first console to allow up to 8 commands to be connected simultaneously.

With an appearance that was more like that of a CD player that, to a video game console, the 3DO had a more or less respectable catalog of games, unfortunately most of the native games were of poor quality, standing out only those adapted from other platforms, such as: DOOM, Wolfenstein, Alone in the dark and Myst. This lack of good games of its own was, together with its high price, the determining factor for its commercial failure and withdrawal from the market in 1995.

I, in particular, have a great esteem this console, as I said it has been one of the few in my collection to which I have given real use, especially for the curiosity that inspired me when I bought it, she also allowed me to return to experience some games that I already knew about the PC, like Flashback, Out of this World, Wolfenstein and of course DOOM. I leave you with some images of these games while I review them a little.

As a curiosity, the 3DO was the only CD-based console, which did not have any type of region restriction or copy protection, which prevented using RW discs, making it extremely easy to duplicate the discs to 'share' with friends, even today you can download the entire catalog of games in the ISO version to be burned on CD-RW discs and use them in the 3DO. I must confess that I only have one original game of this console, the others I download them.

Well with this concludes this post about consoles, soon I'll do another, I hope you liked them, if so, you know what to do. Until next time.

Sources:

Wikipedia, 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Wikipedia.

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