xjas wrote:

EDIT: actually now that I think about it, it has to do something unusual at least for CD-ROM access since it goes through the SB16 interface via the ISA bus. Would love to know how that works.

Possibly the 3DO uses areas of a CD that are normally "out of bounds" on regular CD-ROM drives or the IDE interface? It might also mean you need a period-correct CD drive if it's the former...IIRC, that was used on some gaming systems as an early copy-protection feature.

yawetaG wrote:

It might also mean you need a period-correct CD drive if it's the former...IIRC, that was used on some gaming systems as an early copy-protection feature.

Yes it needs a certain model, the Creative or Panasonic CR-563. IIRC somebody on Assembler at least tried to get it to working with another drive.

It needs a drive that can access CD-ROM XA, which was rather uncommon back then. 3DO discs are nothing special otherwise, apart from the file system, but that is high-level and not important for the drive anyway.

Someone would definitely be able to make an adapter to use other drives, but considering how rare the card is, I doubt we'd see it. Would be good though, in the interests of preservation.

There is no copy protection on 3DO discs. 3DO games can be burnt to CD-R and will play (at least in Panasonic and Goldstar consoles) without modification, there's also no region locking. All games will boot in all consoles (though there are a few titles that won't run correctly on a PAL console). I guess the reason for the CR-563 was simply that the CR-562 didn't support the XA format. Perhaps if it has came out a bit later it could have used any IDE drive, but by the time IDE CD-ROM drives were standard the 3DO was already dead.

The point I was making is that a regular 3DO doesn't have an ISA bus, nor a Sound Blaster card with a Panasonic CD-ROM interface on it, so the 3DO Blaster must be doing some kind of bus translation or accessing the drive differently form a regular system, regardless of what's on the disc. Having a dump of the BIOS would be a step towards figuring out how that works (and maybe making a hacked version that can run any drive.)

I'd love to know if it communicates with the host system in other ways too. AFAIK the controller ports are on the card itself and video is sent over the VESA feature connector. Most 3DOs generate video as 480i exclusively, but I'm guessing the Blaster version doesn't output interlaced video either (there are some games that are known to screw up on 240p machines; Another World for example.) Not sure what it does for sound.

I have a 3do blaster and would love to dump the bios if someone could help me do it.

Notackan wrote on 2023-02-26, 07:10:

I have a 3do blaster and would love to dump the bios if someone could help me do it.

Hi! Interesting idea to dump the bios from Creative 3DO blaster. Did you have any kind of jtag programmer ?
Datasheet for contacts on bios flash we know, so need jtag programmer, software, wiring and iron.
Datasheet https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/vti/vl86cx/vy86c06020

Do you have a PC with ISA slot for this card ? If there is, then this can be done without soldering, a simple connection of ODE.

The PC it currently is in has ISA slots. I have a pentium overdrive 83 system that it’s in with windows 3.11.