I worked at 3DO for three years, from 1994 to 1997. Those were some heady times indeed. In particular, I taught a series of technical classes on site at 3DO -- it was called 3DO University. We ran courses on introductory and advanced 3DO programming, as well as classes on art and sound preparation for the 3DO platform.
I also had the great luck to be heavily exposed to all phases of the development of the M2 platform. Believe me when I say that the M2 was at least five years ahead of its time.
While the original Opera system used cels as their rendering component, cels were essentially sprites on steroids. A cel was a rectangular sprite that could be positioned arbitrarily on screen. You could morph a cel by changing the dx, dy and ddx components in the rendering list for each cel. This allowed the Opera system to produce a lot of cool 3D-ish effects; however, the texture mapping on the Opera system was not "mathematically correct" in the words of Adrian Sfarti. (I think the words were more like "matematacaly carract" when he said them.) Anyway, I think it was this property that caused games like Escape from Munger Manor (as we called it, after David Munger, a developer tech support dude) to make a certain small percentage of the population feel a little seasick after long play periods.
The M2 rendering engine -- all custom silicon -- had a rendering pipeline that would be immediately familiar to anyone doing modern 3-D graphics programming today. It understood bilinear filtering, and proper perspective-based texture mapping. It was an awesomely powerful system, and game developers at the time really didn't know what to make of it. Everyone kept asking me how to do sidescrollers with it. Recall that 3DO was still, at the time, the only game in town in terms of 3-D game systems... the Playstation was still a little ways off when M2 was being developed, and PS turned out to be nowhere near mathematically correct.
Now... if you know anyone who has a 3DO Blaster and might be willing to consider parting with it... please review my post in the Marketplace section.
