3DO Bargain Purchase...or is it?

[Music] hello and welcome back to Ker's Forest now this week I thought I'd take a look at an item that I managed to pick up from Japan in one of my Sendo deliveries I'm talking about the Panasonic 3dio now growing up of course I didn't own a 3dio I didn't play on one I don't think and I only ever really saw them in magazines or on the TV and shows like bad influence in games master and they were of course extremely expensive I think in the UK they launched at around about the price of £600 which you know when you think about a Super Nintendo going for about £ 150 it was just really no contest there was no way I was ever going to afford one but funny enough I actually never really liked the look of the games either I mean it was supposed to be extremely powerful the name implies 3D there were some 3D Graphics but you know they just kind of didn't really appeal to me and I was never really that bothered but when I man to get this one from Japan and hopefully I can get it working it only cost me around about £40 I mean it didn't come with a controller so I managed to get one of those for £10 and of course I do have to add shipping onto that as well but once you bundle it all in and if you collect your items together like I do you know these things really come out around about5 a piece in shipping which really isn't that bad so I got myself a console I got myself a controller I got myself a game let's see if I can't get this thing working play some games and see if I really have been missing out on the 3dio all these years let's take a look so once I've plugged in my adapter and my composite leads it's time to fire this thing up and see if it even works at all and yes we got power we got a boot screen so off to a good start I'd say um but obviously I'm not entirely sure yet whether it even plays games because my main concern here is the CD drive so I did buy myself a pal game it's star blade and the 3dio is multi- region so this should in theory play straight [Music] away nope it doesn't like that um but that's not a surprise I did think maybe this is what was going to happen um and as you can see it's got this fancy over long I've actually reduced the length of this boot screen in title sequence animation thing that it has um and while I ejected and put it back in and ejected and put back in I did eventually manage to get something to happen so that you know the game is actually now playing but as you can see it's extremely choppy and stuttery so obviously the machine itself doesn't have much RAM and it's playing straight off the disc and so therefore reading speed is really important here if you're going to get any enjoyment out of these games whatsoever so uh as anticipated I'm going to have to have a little look at the CD drive so let's take it apart and see what we find [Music] now there's actually a fair bit to getting access to the mechanical side of the drive itself and whilst trying to take this apart one of the screws just did not want to come out so unfortunately I did have to drill it out and as you can see I left to CD in which uh probably wasn't the best idea but uh as you'll see later on it didn't really affect the play of it but yeah managed to get that out and then no big deal replacing that with a different screw so what we got to do then is just remove the top plate here which is holding the disc and then flip the whole drive over to remove the uh circuit board from underneath which will then eventually give you access to the rest of the drive pulling it out of the metal chassis just requires a few more screws and then yep you can lift it up and see the mechanical side of the drive itself so there's the worm uh I guess it's called and the motor I put a bit of IPA in this switch here which is kind of that the uh the sort of back end switch that stops IT from moving too far forward and as you can see there's grease in here but it looks a bit it's not dried but it looks a bit sticky and a bit sludgy and it's probably not helping matters so I thought I might just take the whole thing out give it a bit of a clean and then replace it with some nice silicon grease and I'm just giving the uh lens itself a bit of a clean too it did actually look okay but no harm in giving it a clean while I'm in here so that's the uh the worm Cog worm screw that I've just removed giving that a nice clean down with some alcohol and then I'm going to replace the grease and then we'll put it all back together again [Music] [Music] while I'm here no harm in adding a little bit of grease to the rails there and I'm also adding some sewing machine oil to the spinning cogs the spindles I guess um to allow that to move a little more freely I find that works really well so plugging it back in and putting it back together again we can give that a new test and see if it's done in anything to the playability of this [Music] [Music] game and unfortunately we're back to where we were before it's just not playing I took the top off the player so I could have a look and as you can see the disc itself is spinning up and the laser is also trying to find the track so there is power getting to the laser I gave it a little tweak with the potentiometer and tuned it and I did eventually eventually manage to get the game to play again and as you can see it's now playing at the right speed it's not choppy it's not stuttery like it was before so this is great it's a it's a it's a bonus but I do only own the one game because 3dio games are very expensive and my intention here is to try and play some Burn games because there's no copy protection on the 3dio now I'm using my trusted brand here verbatim but I did actually try a bunch of different brands to burn and play in this machine and and absolutely it was a noo nothing played whatsoever the only thing I could get it to play was my single copy of starblade which obviously is great I'm really happy with that um it's an okay game but really I wanted to explore the library a little bit and that's really not going to cut it so unfortunately although I'm having fun with star blade I am going to have to try and pursue this a little bit further and see if I can't find another way to get this to play burned games now in preparation for this I did kind of anticipate that the drive wouldn't work at all and although that could be down to the laser it could also be down to the power I had heard that the capacitors on the uh power supply on the 3dio are a little bit unreliable now the ones I have in here actually looked okay but I had brought myself a replacement set so I thought why not just replace them anyway and see how we get on because you know maybe the laser itself isn't getting quite enough power to read those burn [Music] discs as I say everything actually looked okay so I don't think the capacitors really were having any effect at all but there was a little bit of corrosion on some of the contacts so I gave them a scrape and a clean and then put the new ones in anyway and this is where I hit a bit of a snag and there was no power at all which is weird because obviously these are new capacitors and it was working just fine before so what's going on I sort of traced the fault to the fact that this fuse had then blown as soon as I put the new caps in and checking the AC input you can see that it's actually supplying 19 volts and I believe it's supposed to be supplying 60 but I'm going to assume that that is actually the correct amount because it's not turned on yet and once it starts pulling power that will probably drop somewhat now I was going to do this anyway so I bought a UK power supply and I'm then going to swap that out and make sure that I can then plug this straight into the wall without having to use the power adapter for Japanese to UK power supplies it doesn't quite fit so I had to get the old Dremel out and just make a little bit more room but I didn't have to do too much damage to the case and as you you can see this Transformer is now uh fitting in quite nicely and looking at the schematics it needs to be wired up a certain way um now what I did here was I tried to reuse the sort of strain relief for the new plug and I thought I might melt my way through and cause you know cause it to be a little bit wider and made an absolute Pig Zer of it as you could see but putting a bit of shrink wrap on there it actually ended up looking okay and then I said to wiring the Transformer up to supply the correct voltage from a UK [Music] plug now obviously I'm going to need to find a way to plug this new Transformer directly into the board so I'm just clipping off the uh plug from the old Japanese transformer and then reattaching it to the new one bit of heat shrink and we're away unfortunately though when I did plug get back in I noticed that the power was disconnecting and it was making basically a poor connection to the board so I tested the continuity of the plug itself and that seemed okay and I also then tested the other end of the plug to the Transformer itself and that was also coming out okay so the only thing I could think was that there was something wrong with the pins themselves these little miniature plugs that go on the uh on the prongs and I uh decided to just give them a clean and then bend them out to make them maybe be a little bit tighter make a little bit of a better contact with the pins on the [Music] board so putting it all back together a quick test and yes we're back in business [Music] and unfortunately although it didn't make anything worse it didn't help with the problem I had reading burnt discs so my next option was to buy a a replacement laser from AliExpress which I'm going to try and install now so I'm just removing this solder blob from the uh ribbon cable which you have to do it's kind of like a a protection for static electricity I think when they transport it so I dropped that into the mechanism and put it in the machine and as you can see it's um well it's not doing anything taking the disc out and trying it without you can see that the laser is trying to find a disc it is it is working and I did a bit of tuning again with the potentiometer like I did before and I did enough to manage to get the disc to actually spin up but no matter what I did and no matter how hard I tried I really just could not get it to read anything at all not even my original copy of starblade so I turned my attention once again to AliExpress and I took a gamble on this OD which has been made based on a Raspberry Pi Pico looking in the uh small print here it advises you to copy some boot software from a guy called fixels homepage so that's what I did but um the more I thought about it the more I realized in fact what they've done is they've essentially just cloned somebody else's hardware and put it on Raspberry Pi Pico and then have essentially directed people to use his software so I think at some point I'm going to have to find a way to remedy that because I'm not a big fan of ripping people off and copying their stuff um I did look on his website to see how much it would actually cost to buy one of his drives officially and they are considerably more expensive and much as I'm interested in playing a 3dio I'm not interested enough to Fork out that kind of money I just want to for the sake of this video just get a few games running to see what I'm missing out on and then if I really like it I might try um upgrading I also don't actually know whether this thing is going to work at all because you know it is cheap it has come from AliExpress and probably won't last more than 5 minutes but let's let's find out so to prevent any shorts from the casing I'm just going to put some electrical tape on the back there and then put this whole thing back together and see if it works at all [Music] but before we power it back on I thought actually it might be an opportunity just to give this a bit of a clean although it actually arrived in pretty good condition it is a bit dirty a little bit Dusty so you know I might as well while I'm here [Music] [Music] I mean it's come up pretty well although there are a few blemishes on the front I will try and address that later but all in all looking pretty good there we go first time okay this is cool I actually grabbed a few more games and put them on the route of the drive here and I'm going to go through now and just try out a few 3dio games and see what I [Music] think I don't like hot shots if you want to impress me show me control and discipline without them you won't stand a chance against the empire do I make myself clear I'm not sure why I fired this one up first but it's actually one of the few games that I have actually played already although that's because this isn't exclusive to the 3dio and yeah it's kind of on the rails shooter I think most people are familiar with it by now but it kind of sums up the uh early '90s uh aesthetic of of 3D or pseudo 3D games for me Super Street Fighter 2 was supposed to be the way to play this game at home on a console and I never got a chance to play it and it's it's a really really good version the music's great uh the controls are really tight but I'm not really liking the the control pad another cool thing about this particular Japanese version of the 3dio is that it has s video out but also this switch at the back which takes it from 480i to 240p and I'm trying to show you here zoomed in on my CRT mon monitor the difference but it does make it a bit sharper um I don't know it's personal preference I guess but I quite like it so yeah pretty happy to have that at least as an [Music] option now a game that comes up quite often when you ask people what should I play on a 3dio is this version of Road ratch and yeah it's really good it's sort of got that 3D uh photo realistic look to it but also some absolutely hilarious full motion videos so yeah kind of fun to see someone being kicked in the nuts there and another one I've heard quite a lot of positive things about is gex and this is a you know it's a platform using some again some pre uh pre-rendered Graphics but yeah once I got used to it I actually really like the controls on this game and it was kind of fun it had a bit of a sense of humor to it it's not amazing but you know I really liked it so yeah definitely worth checking out on the system and this last one here is called return fire now I hadn't really heard anything about this game whatsoever but on looking on a few lists and and forums and YouTube videos of recommendations a lot of people pointed me towards this and yeah I actually really enjoyed it it's it's a good fun the graphics aren't exactly anything to write home about but yeah definitely worth checking [Music] out when I think about the 3dio at least when I did this game rise of the robots is the one that kept popping into my mind and I never actually played it and I'm glad I haven't played it because it is absolutely rubbish and then this game Crash and Burn really needed to uh maybe up the budget on the costumes there for the liveaction actors because they looked atrocious the game itself was okay but honestly it's pretty boring so there you have it the Panasonic 3dio now while I was putting this together I kind of remember remember the games I saw running on it back in the day when I was a kid and they were rise of the robots and crash and burn and of course those games are now that I've actually got to play them truly awful which is probably why I wasn't really that fussed about the 3dio in the first place if that's all I saw I probably wasn't going to get a very good impression of the system but I did really enjoy the version of Super Street Fighter 2 that we got on there I did really enjoy road rash that's an excellent I mean the graphics on that are kind of funny because they're sort of realistic but still running in an extremely low resolution you know the kind you would get in the early '90s and I really enjoyed return fire which is to me a kind of mix of desert strike and a game I really enjoy on the N64 called Blast cores I'm definitely going to go back and play a bit more of that so what did we do well we recapped the machine to make sure that it's going to last for another few years and I replaced the Japanese power supply with one from the UK so that I can now plug it directly into the main without using an adapter I never really trust those adapters I never really feel that safe using them and of course above all else we did replace the uh CD drive with an OD drive now I do need to stress that I didn't buy that OD from an official site by the guy that kind of created the hardware for that I did buy a clone version from AliExpress the price difference is really quite striking we're going from sort of 200b down to about 40 you know however I am going to find a way to compensate him for the software that I ended up using because that is directly taken from his site he has made it freely available to everybody but nevertheless I do feel like he's not making any money out of me and something really sort of needs to happen there so I will be doing that but how about you what are your favorite 3dio games what games should I be looking out for to try out I'm really looking for something that's kind of exclusive to the system it didn't really make its way over to you know the PS1 or the PC or a game that's just definitely much better on the 3dio than anywhere else I kind of suspect that the list isn't too long but I'd like to be proved wrong anyway that's all for this week take care of yourselves and I'll see you next time on Ker's Forest [Music]

Channel: Kester's Forest

Views: 586

Keywords: 3DO, Panasonic, FZ-1, ODE, Disc Drive, lense, belt, review, mod, games, retro, power supply, recap, fuse, Sendico, japan

Id: Bb6gdmXqYrQ

Length: 20min 49sec (1249 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2024