The 3DO: Well designed, but Poorly Timed. A Hardware Architecture Review

This one was an interesting one.
A special thanks to Chilly Willy on the Sega 16 forums and also Michael Buffa (users.polytech.unice.fr/~buffa...)
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#videogamehardware #3DOconsole #videogamedevelopment

[@julianregel]

A really interesting video, thanks. I’m not sure your equating the dual animation processors with Madam and Clio are correct though (although to be fair, there’s not a huge amount of information on this!). As far as I can understand, the Cel Engine is responsible for generating the graphics, and this is a component of the Madam chip. In the 3DO patents it was referred to as the “Spryte Rendering Engine”. The Cel Engine itself comprises of a data unpacker and pixel decoder logic and a “Pixel Processor” and “Projector”. The Pixel Processor merges multiple sources to determine final pixel colours and the Projector is responsible for projecting the 2D image using scaling, rotation and other transformations. There are patents which go into both the Pixel Processor and Projector in great detail. So you could possibly consider the “dual animation processors” to be the Pixel Processor and the Projector inside the Cel Engine. But wait, there’s more… Within the Projector there are two “Corner Engines”. These are components that do the calculations required to project the image into the frame buffer (presumably without any CPU intervention required). The Portfolio operating system allows the programmer to specify whether one or both of the Corner Engines are used (the default is both). I’ve heard from developers of the system that when both are enabled, one processes the odd lines and the other processes the even lines. So maybe the “dual animation processors” refers to the two Corner Engines inside the Cel Engine. Perhaps the diagram wasn’t meant to be completely accurate to the architecture :-) Either way, the 3DO was an interesting console and I don’t think we ever got to see its full potential.

[@ZygalStudios]

I spent days trying to get information on this and couldn't really get a clear answer, so thank you for providing more precise and colorful insight! I tried to be clear in the language I was using about the things I assumed and didn't know with this. It's frustrating how little of information (and misinformation too) is out there on accurate requirements. I took my best guess at this and described what these system pieces could do.

[@SianaGearz]

@@ZygalStudios consider reaching out to Optimus6128, he might have more insight, or maybe knows somebody who does.

[@A31Chris]

@@ZygalStudios I'll share this with Burger Becky(killing Time/Doom) and see if she can pop in here with any clarity.

[@A31Chris]

@@ZygalStudios Burger Becky says she'll stop by and check it out

[@artemusprine]

And, like the Saturn, they had to turn quads into tris. Could you explain to everyone why this wasn't as dumb then as it sounds now? I almost can. I understood it once for a short time. I only recall they were using sprite scaling as a texture mapping routine lol The 3DO was a great piece of hardware. To say it failed is to mis-understand the forces against it. Like the Amiga the hardware was confusing but also deep. If they could've moved 10M of them it would likely still be around today for that reason.

[@JD3Gamer]

The 3DO used ARM chips before they were cool

[@Optimus6128]

Nice videos, as I was "summoned" in another comment, I could add what I know as a programmer of the system and from what I understand by reading various docs. It can be confusing to understand what MADAM or CLIO does or what the dual processors and then the mention of two corner engines mean. I will write what I am sure of and then links to various mentions (I am less sure of CLIO about some things). MADAM definitely holds the most important part, the so called CEL engine, which is what I call the quad rasterizer. It's really a bitmap stretcher, so it doesn't take 4 points as your typical polygon, but one point of the first starting pixel of the bitmap (typically the upper left) and 3 vectors. With the 2 vectors (horizontal, vertical) you can zoom/rotate like a sprite or shear like a parallelogram, the 3rd vector controls how the 1st vector (horizontal) changes as you move through the 2nd vector (vertical) to the next bitmap line to be rendered. You can map a full texture bitmap to any arbitrary quad polygon this way (and with some wrong non-convex configuration you have weird bowtie, saddle, curved polygons that I don't think any game every used), but of course that's when you have the final projected points onto the screen, so this is just a 2d polygon renderer at this point, you have to do 3d math in other ways. For 3d math, they do have the Matrix engine, which is also contained in MADAM. It helps a bit, I did a benchmark between my own version on CPU (which I tried to optimize as much as I could in C and use fixed point integers to be at the same, instead of floats which would be slow) and the hardware matrix would be like 2x,3x times faster iirc. It helps using them. On the programming side, you use high level API functions to do matrix math and hope they use the hardware for that. No direct access to the hardware. But on my own tests it seems it does accelerate things with 3d transformation calculations compared to do it on the CPU. But you are right, the results have to be passed from the CPU (but from what I hear, the DMA will do it faster for you, you just use the high level API functions and don't think about it) and get back the results (final projected points)and you had to feed them to the CEL engine for rendering the quads. Now here is the catch. You rotated/translated 3D points, but the CEL needs the 3 vectors. There is some CPU overhead to convert the points to the suitable vectors (there are functions like MapCel, FasterMapCel, but sometimes it's worth it if you write your own, the math are simple ADDs, MULs and SHIFTS if your textures are power of two, if not you need few wasteful divisions). MADAM and CLIO are referred as dual animation processors, but there is another term mentioned "Two Corner Engines". This has nothing to do with the first mention of the two chips. This has to do that inside the CEL engine, there are two parallel processors for the rendering. These by default work together, one renders the odd bitmap rows, another the even bitmap rows (into the resulting projected rows of texels). There are flags that allow you to disable one of the two engines, or have them work syncronously or asynchronously, in case there are flickering artifacts (which in most cases there are not), but you don't need to change them. I did some experiments with it, I had a very special uncommon case with very tiny texture and twisted 3rd vector (to produce saddle) so that one bitmap row of texels was on top of the next, and I finally noticed flicker. When I disabled one of the two engines, flicker dissapeared but of course performance halfed). This parallelism is also shown in a test with flat (untextured) polygons. The untextured polygons are really tiny textures (usually size 1x1, a single pixel with a color), and I noticed I would have slower performance than if my texture was 16x16 in one benchmark I published (here kzbin.info/www/bejne/jHq5dK2Vga94eJI). But by the time I did this into a 2x2 or 4x4, finally there was more than 1 bitmap row in the texture, so the parallelism could take place. Then the flat texture had much better numbers. It's interesting technically how it works, but you won't need to bother, as by default the corner engines are both enabled and you almost never need to disable any of them. Now, I read CLIO has: - the DSP usually used for audio but there might be a way to program it to calculate other things, although I haven't found any example or an assembler to produce the binaries for that, so I haven't even dived into it. High level audio playing functions use it, and there might be some additional audio filters you can simply enable. - www.manualslib.com/manual/1674246/Panasonic-3do-Fz-1.html?page=7 says pixel decoder. Now, pixel decoder is a term for altmer.arts-union.ru/3DO/docs/DevDocs/ppgfldr/ggsfldr/gpgfldr/3gpgc.html which is normally part of the CEL rendering process. But it's the part of reading the texture from memory and decoding it, from it's bit depth (1,2,4,6,8,16) type (row, palettized, compressed), and also a lot of other extra bit flags in the CEL structure (it's called CCB (Cel Control Block) when programming) that affect so many bits which alter pixel color in various weird ways (I understand how hard is to emulate this, looking at emulator sources, how many different things happen to just get the pixel, there are weird things there that I don't know if any game uses). And it could be that CLIO reads and decodes the texture data for you from RAM to the final 16bit pixel (the framebuffer is 320x240x16bpp) and the MADAM part only needs to render the value to the screen (not knowing anymore where it got it). The decoder might even do the part where the SRC can be texture, DST videobuffer, with blending functions, or shading (to black or to white) or other, so it might even involve the extra blending/shading options, while the MADAM CEL renderer doesn't know anything about that, it only renders the final pixel color it's given. (I need to verify this, blending with the framebuffer might have to be done on the MADAM CEL rendering as it's the one that operates on the framebuffer, but initial shading of the texture color might not as this is operating on the source pixel) - Then I read here, 3dodev.com/documentation/hardware/240p_mode?s[]=clio that it also affects the way the 320x240x16bpp framebuffer is converted to 640x480x24bpp. This is well known on 3DO community, the final output comes a bit blurry because of some interpolation in the DAC from 1 pixel to four (2x2 blocks) in 640 (and there are some mechanisms even functions in code, I tried some but I don't see any results, so I don't know how to control this. Someone told me certain manufacturers don't allow to control this, others like a Jap FZ-1 with A/B switch and an RGB mod someone made, will disable from 640i to 320p, to get sharper pixels but can break timing in few games). - In other places I read CLIO also controls the CD-Rom and a video replay hardware. Not sure about these.. There are a lot of things to mention, there is the VDLP (which I don't know if it's in MADAM, CLIO or other place, seems it could be on CLIO if it also controls the output). It's a final step before rendering the 240p to 640i, you can program it per line and it can take CLUTs that convert the 16bpp color to 24bpp. The default value is a linear mapping of 16bpp (it's really 15bpp for the programmer btw, 32768 colors, R:5 G:5 B:5 bits) to 24bpp. But you could change that to fade the whole framebuffer or colorize it (give it a red tint or green tint or whatever tint you like) and do other stuff. You can do it per line (like raster colors in a way). I haven't played with VDLP at all, but there are some high level functions to do so. So far, I think the bottleneck on 3DO performance is the CPU. While ARM is a good processor, this one doesn't have cache, according to OpenLara coder who has also coded on GBA, seems to be a bit slower, and 12.5mhz is surely slower compared to what the Saturn and PS1 have. Most of the games are bound by CPU rather than CEL performance. Now the second bottleneck is on the CEL renderer, but you can be clever with it. The problem is, the texture rendering is forward rendering, not reverse rendering as most other hardware or software engines. So,. in a reverse rendering, if a polygon is far away and is 10 pixels on the screen, for each pixel a texture pixel will be sampled, so for 10 pixels on the screen, 10 pixels from the texture will be read. Not so with 3DO CEL. You can make a huge 1024x1024 texture (the maximum size as I read, if you can fit it in memory) and draw a far away tiny quad. And It Will Die!!! It will read a million pixels to write only 10. That's why texture LODing is super essential. Also using lower bits per pixel (it's really how much data can be read in one go rather than pixels), or compressed textures (very powerful, a single byte can tell "60 pixels in a row are transparent, or are of this single color that comes as the next byte, so CEL will read 2 bytes instead of 60bytes in 8bpp or 120bytes in 16bpp, you can have layers of transparent rain/snow for example, too much but compress it and it's much much faster, I did some experiments). But if you know what you do and what are the common bottlenecks and pitfalls, you can write more performant games in my opinion. There is still lot's to explore on 3DO and we have a 3DO discord where we discuss these things 3dodev.com/contact and also 3dodev.com/ Recently the creator of OpenLara ported a very early version of it on 3DO and for an early alpha it's doing from 12 to 20fps, and there is still remaining optimization. I could talk more about things related 3DO, but I'll stop for now.

[@ZygalStudios]

This is unbelievable insight! Thank you for the resources as well. Thank you for stopping by!!

[@marcianzero_yt]

Thank you for taking the time to write all this information. Really interesting. :)

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

On the N64 they just limited textures size to 4k . On the Jaguar you load 4px at once over the 64 bit bus. In a tiny polygon you will throw away 3 of them.

[@Tolbat]

Those popular science magazines from the 90s are awesome. People dont realize how long much of the tech they enjoy has been in the works. Also so many things burried that were ready for market.

[@mutalix]

I think this is the only video, let alone channel that has ever taken the trouble to delve into these venerable retro consoles at the level you portray. Because of that there is an aire of mystique to them, unless we get the original engineers and programmers that created the system and games, your channel is the next best thing! I appreciate you making this for your viewers! The 3DO was my first disc based console I ever had, I still love it, unlike my folks with the price at the time lol. Can't wait to see what you will upload next!

[@SamMcDonald83]

Wow who knew the 3DO had The Cell😅 And yes 3DO OS video pls!

[@1ace1000]

I personally would like see whatever else you are able to learn about the 3DO M's OS in another vid, since this is actually not only informative, but also really quite neat looking into it more in-depth.

[@ZygalStudios]

You're in luck! I did a video on the 3DO portfolio OS a few months back! Take a look!

[@amberdean1263]

Yes please, more videos! Would love more Saturn stuff as well. Love your content.

[@zzco]

Would love to see Portfolio!

[@ZygalStudios]

It will be in a future video! :) Looking at the documentation of it I think it's worth a video. Glad to see there's some interest in it!

[@zzco]

Can't wait!

[@zzco]

@@ZygalStudios It reminds me of a UNIX variant, kinda?

[@TheSocialGamer]

You deserve more subscribers. This is quite unique information. I'm no programmer but I'm still intrigued by this information as a fan of the 3DO. 👌

[@282miguel]

Great video! I learned a lot !!

[@fazares]

great informative video...one of the few ones on this matter...3do deserves such in-depth technical coverage..kudos to you 😁

[@KungKras]

If 3DO had built their own hardware and used the razor and blade model of selling hardware at a loss and making the profits on software it might have had a larger impact. Might also have lost a lot of more money, but then again, it seems like the risk-averse hardware licenscing model is what ironically doomed it.

[@jesuszamora6949]

Taking no risks is a risk in itself, as has been proven over and over.

[@MaxAbramson3]

Alternately, if they'd built a lightweight, low cost version, far more people would've bought those machines, and the games made for the lightweight console could play on the established base of 3DO's. They had way more RAM, a more expensive CD-ROM, a higher clockrate, and more hardware than most games needed. Most games at that time just needed more colors, more buttons on the controller, and better audio.

[@ronalds9478]

@@MaxAbramson3 The 3do was powerful enough to be relatively future proofed against the Playstation and Saturn IF it did gain a decent base of buyers. There is a unofficial port of Tomb Raider on the 3do now and it is very playable, it has less frame rate than the PSX/Saturn but it proves that the system was way ahead of it's time to be able to run it. If they cut down on it's hardware capability then it would have been similar to Atari Jaguar, which cut corners everywhere and it showed in it's games.

[@MaxAbramson3]

@@ronalds9478 Jaguar suffered because the hardware was rushed out by Tremel. 3-4 more months and a CD-ROM, and the machine would've given the PlayStation a hard time. 3DO could've sold for about $300 with a 1x CD-ROM like the Sega CD and SIMD added to the ARM CPU, obviating the need for those extra chips. In fact, had they charged the SONY $9 license, 3DO could've taken another $50-70 off the base console, and another $50 by letting enthusiasts by the RAM upgrade.

[@BubblegumCrash332]

Your videos are chicken soup for my nerd soul. Thanx again for your great videos

[@enhancementtank5876]

Cities simulation of hell and the relationship with the country and forest are what brought me here. If a city is to simulate a computer mother board this is the foundational structure of our society. Ram is ra sata is Saturn. This is the recipe book for Egypt. Living in the forest as a feral human being while also attending a private school in my early life I can attest that this is can give you a true understand of the fibers and functions in how society works as well as how the system can be exploited for maximum profiency and subsequent results i.e success rate. Please help fill me in on your perspective of how we could equate societal functions from computers which. All of us are unwilling imposed into and onto directly. What is the only other origin we can't influence, our family / genetic make up

[@SonicBoone56]

The 3DO and Nuon are interesting because they both licensed hardware out to manufacturers and were created by former Atari hardware teams, the Lynx and Jaguar respectively. Shows how wonderful the 3DO is given the Lynx was well ahead of its time and was shockingly easy too.

[@madcat789]

I did enjoy this video, and I will subscribe to you to see more. Would you ever do a video, if you haven't already, on the old Acorn or BBC Micro Computers?

[@finaltheorygames1781]

Remember the system cost $699 back in the 90's. You had to be rich as fuck to have this as a kid.

[@A31Chris]

I got yet another suggestion. Perhaps one on the difference between single and dual port ram?

[@deltakid0]

I would really appreciate if Automatic-captions are available for this video since it's a very technical speak.

[@finaltheorygames1781]

3DO design team: hey so we are just going to make like a Sega Genesis controller clone right? The Team: Right, and make sure you daisy chain them all together.

[@MrDeepee69]

Have you ever did a video on snes enhancement chips?

[@Darth001]

Great video. Maybe next the Phillips cdi

[@The.love1]

amazing video plz continue ,,is the 3do capable for doing 3d games , better than the saturn

[@jesuszamora6949]

No. Nowhere near that good. The 3DO could barely do 3D at all. Look at games that ended up being multi-platform, like Need for Speed. Compare Need for Speed for Saturn to Need for Speed on 3DO. Saturn: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qXncZ4GpiZmmd6s 3DO: kzbin.info/www/bejne/lYOzgqmfopqpq6M The Saturn is more detailed and runs faster than the 3DO. And whenever 3D elements are introduced, the 3DO always lags behind. It would have been HELLA impressive two years prior, but when it DID come out, yeah, the 3DO was poorly timed.

[@FantasyVisuals]

The 3DO was amazing , for a 12MHz system with twin graphic processors. Compare it to the 55MIP Jaguar on paper then in practise. 3DO Starfighter Vs Jaguar BattleMorph.

[@ronalds9478]

Someone ported Tomb Raider to the 3do, it shows t hat it was capable unlike the Jaguar.

[@A31Chris]

Zygal studios do you have any of these old systems?

[@ZygalStudios]

I do! I have 10 different retro consoles/handhelds. Unfortunately the 3DO is not one of them though.

[@A31Chris]

@@ZygalStudios I have 3do, Jag, Saturn and TG16. You should be able to pickup a 3do for cheap

[@fringeelements]

Here's what I'd be interested in, but I understand if it would be too much of a task for you. And that is - I'd like to see you design a console for 1988, and then a CD add-on for this console to be launched in 1990 or 1991. Kind of a role playing. You can pick whatever company, most likely would be Sega, but Namco would also be a decent choice. Atari, Bally-Midway or Konami would be a bit more esoteric, though Atari might be the most interesting since you might get some VERY early 3D capabilities with them using some bit-slicing that was used in 1983. Of course you may have to invoke some fantasy hardware; i.e. the bit-slicing that was done for battlezone and I, Robot (I, Robot being more relevant since this is a home console that can't use a vector display). I understand if you don't want to do that as you like to keep things very tight.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

SegaCD, turboGfx Duo?? SegaCD could draw Wing Commander quads ? Or not?

[@fringeelements]

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt - I don't think the Sega CD had hardware for it. Technically the Genesis could draw quads and triangles, but it was all CPU.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

@@fringeelements then look it up. It hogs the bus though. I Wonder if the designers of many cheap consumer hardware skipped a lesson in parallel processing.

[@AlphaFox78]

focus lock!

[@NorthWay_no]

I've read comments that the 3DO company was in many ways Amiga Inc v2 and that the 3DO OS was similarily AmigaOS v2. The hw itself seems a bit further advanced though.

[@humansrants1694]

The people that designed Amigas graphics board designed the 3DO.

[@el-danihasbiarta1200]

Nice content but your camera angle was to high.. too much head room, and you use to wide angle lens use 35 or 50mm it would be better. In the end great content keep it up 👍

[@ZygalStudios]

I was thinking the same thing on the angle front, thank you for the feedback and comments! I will incorporate this in my next video.

[@gametourny4ever627]

I just got a 3DO recently. I ordered the Japanese variant with the 480i/240P switch. Come to find out, it won’t read games. Was so bummed. I processed a return but they didn’t want to pay to ship it back. They just refunded me and here I am with the system. Any chance you know anyone who repairs these systems?

[@jesuszamora6949]

Rapid Fire Gaming is where you wanna go. I sent my Goldstar to him some time back, fixed it good as new.

[@gametourny4ever627]

@@jesuszamora6949 Cool! Is that a store or an individual? Where can I locate them? I entered that online and it doesn’t look like console repair.

[@peterpereira3653]

3D0 console aren't region locked, but some games are.Possibly the laser isn't calibrated properly as could have been knocked out of alignment.Or the laser not working.Not sure who now fixes these old console systems these days.But you could try looking up various channels on KZbin that fix old technology.And contact one of these and maybe they can help or point you to someone who possibly can.And good luck.

[@marshmower]

I had to basically remove a gear and glue it back together. The gear swells and won't turn. This is causing the problem. There are problems with controllers too.

[@jesuszamora6949]

The system wasn't bad at all. There were clearly some good titles, judging by just how many of them ended up going to other systems after the 3DO died. But between the price model and coming out JUST before the superior PlayStation, there was never a chance. It was much like the Jaguar. Had Atari gone with the Panther, they might have had some time being impressive, but by skipping ahead, the Jaguar was at the absolute wrong place, at the wrong time.

[@ZygalStudios]

Totally agree. Thanks for your thoughtful insight!

[@peterpereira3653]

I bought an Atari Jaguar over 3DO at the time.3DO was a good console but it had a ridiculous price tag.Atari Jaguar served me well as I was able to play Syndicate, which would have cost me a lot more money for a PC or 3DO at the time.

[@jesuszamora6949]

@@peterpereira3653 Haha, fair. Jag's also where Rayman got his start. Still, I think we can all agree that going with the Panther in the early 90s instead of canning it to work on the Jag exclusively was the better dea, mostly because canning it left Atari without things to sell for several years (the ST had lagged FAR behind the Amiga at this point). Coming with a completely badass, CD based Jaguar at the time PSX and N64 came out would have been interesting to see.

[@gatosgataros2218]

could the 3do performance be compared to ps1?

[@eponymous7910]

It's definitely closer performance wise to the PS1 & Saturn than the SNES and Sega CD. But the former were still significantly more powerful than 3DO. I don't think a game like Tomb Raider would be possible on 3DO, at least not with a playable frame rate

[@humansrants1694]

Some games on the 3D0 used pre rendered 3d running as video as the track and background with the real-time cars or ships being 2D it gave the impression it was a lot better at 3d graphics than it actually was.

[@Sinn0100]

Wait, wait, wait I refuse to believe the 3DO was easier to develop for than the Jaguar. That's impossible...;)

[@3doyoyolifestylegood534]

I still got my 3do from 1994 that my father got for $399.99. So excited driving hom with box on my laps. Great system with at least 12 really good games. I used it until I started working and brought n64 in 1998.

[@The.love1]

and should i study cpu Architecture to understand the video in full

[@wf7625]

caption man, please!

[@finaltheorygames1781]

They should have done what Sony did, mark the price down on the console and sell it as a loss, then make it up with the software to earn a profit.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

You just killed the foundation of 3do

[@MrMarianoamigo]

just a buffied amiga's architecture

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

But Amiga allowed direct access to the hardware in case the AmigaOS kool aid wears off.

[@peterpereira3653]

3DO just too expensive for a video games console.Which stopped it ever selling to the majority of console video gamers.The hardware was decent for the time.

[@craigvard1639]

So the main problem of 3DO - it's business model. Just imagine, what if Matsushita Electric decided to go full "Sony" mode and bought 3DO to had their own console. Or even better, NEC had understood that "Iron man" (PC-FX) was pile of shit and decided to bought 3DO as next PC Engine. In both variants 3DO could had big technological and financial backing, and as the result - start price 299 and some good launch games. And this would be completely another story for 3DO.

[@jesuszamora6949]

Haha, you ain't wrong about the PC-FX being shit. 3DO would have made a FAR better successor to the PCE.

[@GreyMatterShades]

The business model was interesting, and I think it actually had a lot going for it, but it was a terrible match for the hardware. Ironically, if the 3DO and Jaguar had swapped business models (or their companies had swapped hardware), I think both would have been much more successful! The Jaguar hardware was designed to be produced and sold for a reasonable consumer cost, meaning it could have had the 3DO business model and still launched for $250-300. The hardware competition could have driven down costs quickly, and low games licensing fees would have helped it build a large software library. Meanwhile if the 3DO were manufactured by an established company that had an incentive to take a loss on hardware to make money on games, it could have launched at a more attractive price for what was essentially bleeding edge tech for the time. So basically I don't think the business model was flawed, it was just not right for the hardware. It also would have worked well for an innovative but inexpensive console like the Wii. It just wasn't suited for cutting edge (expensive) tech.

[@craigvard1639]

​@@GreyMatterShades Interesting thoughts, but I have some disagreements. 1)First of all - we need to establish the term "cutting (bleeding)" tech, because I, personally, think that Jaguar is kinda "cutting tech" too (for 93). Just severely unfinished. Full of bugs, bottlenecks and with very lacking dev tools. All this lead to very technically dissapointing games. Only when really talented developers (id and Carmak personally) got down to business we see a full potential of Jag. Also don't forget that to make the price down Atari limit the amount of RAM, exclude CD-drive and lowered the build quality. And do not forget that Jag didn't use 3DO business model. If it did Jag would cost much more than $250-300. And I think $250 was the highest price most of customers would agree to pay for Cart base console at that time. 2) After all 3DO is not he only console to use 3DO business model. There were Pippin and Nuon. And they all failed even more spectacularly than 3DO. I understand that it's not the only reason they failed but we can see trend there. 3) If you do not "cutting edge" (somewhat) console you can easily do console which would be obsolete from the start. Amiga CD32 is the best example. NES, MD, SNES, PS, N64 - they all very powerful for their time. 4) As for the Jag. Jag could have been a success if TOM and JERRY had been ready in '92, and Atari would have started creating Falcon computers using them. And Jaguar would have come out in '93 using this computer as a base. That would solve a lot of Jaguar's problems.

[@lemonapocalypse414]

More poorly priced than timed.

[@kusumayogi7956]

3DO is weak, only 12.5 Mhz cpu. Equivalent with Sega CD. It's tech was too early to come

[@humansrants1694]

3Do had a more powerful chip though its not just about mhz.

[@mariuszszarek1992]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAmiiiigaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!