One year of new hardware for 3DO

contezero

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In the last 15 month a couple of interesting new hardware projects for the 3DO console came to life. I try to give you a little overview of each one.

3DO FZ-1 Power supply.jpg


Diyer TZMVX shown a couple of days ago, a redesigned power supply for the 3DO FZ-10, perfect for all Europeans using a stepdown converter with an import console. No infos about pricing or availability but all his previous projects were open source

Fixel, the main developer of the 3DO emulator called "Freedo" last year announced an Optical Disc Emulator for the 3DO. It is priced at $249 for internal mount in the FZ-1 version of the console (solderless, but you have to remove the cdrom drive) and at $349 for the external XPort version (plug'n play, you can keep the drive and it's compatible with all the 3DO console revisions). The Xport version also will also act as a homebrew FZ-EM256, the Japan-only memory card used to expand the 3DO’s internal Save Game memory.
Althought the price seems steep (even worse for people living in Europe, because of import fees), the original memory card alone costs more than $150 and the only other commercially available ODE for 3DO, from russain developer Mnemo, cost $240-280 + postage and customs
Fixel announced initially that the device was going to be open source but, after more than one year, the source is not being released yet.

Fixel3DO_ODE.jpg


On november 2022 Fixel announced the availability of a native full digital HDMI out for the 3DO for $225. An excellent options since the 3DO rgb kit are out of stock everywhere because of the chip shortage.



I wrote "the only other commercailly available ode" because dev Francois Caron released an open source low cost diy optical disk emulator for the 3DO and since it went under the radar this is the main reason of this post: to drive some attention to his project (his youtube channel only had a few hundreds visualisations).
The ODE is called SataTo3DO, it is based on the RP2040 chip (raspberry pi pico) and can load cd images from usb or even a sata optical drive connected thru usb2sata adapter. It is designed for the FZ-1 3DO and it seems you can keep the original disk drive. There are no info about compatibility but the developer writes, in a youtube comment "all games I tested are working. It supports Photo CD and Audio CD. It does not support VCD because I do not have the MPG extension".

SataTo3do.jpg


The aforementioned TZMVX ported the pcb to many other 3DO models and released everything on github

3DO revisions.jpeg


Last but not least Francois also released the USBTo3DO adapter to connect USB hid controllers or an USB mouse to the 3DO. There was already the blueretro project but it is aimed only at bluetooth controllers while USBTo3DO is for usb devices. The board is powered by a RP2040 chip and it is open source.

PCB v1_1.jpg
 

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