The M2 - The wasted summer of '96.

M2 related information in here please.
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Post by WindowsKiller » Sat Aug 09, 2008 6:49 pm

More info on Ironblood:

http://gtw3do.retro-net.de/index.php?id ... :ironblood

Now that the website is finally online, I hope to get all the stuff that I collected over the past 2 years added as fast as possible. :D

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Post by 3DO Experience » Sat Aug 09, 2008 11:31 pm

all I see is old data and a like to youtube
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Post by WindowsKiller » Sun Aug 10, 2008 9:31 am

3DO Experience wrote:all I see is old data and a like to youtube
Yeah, sure... old data... should I laugh? Apart from the scans, nothing of this had been published before. If you think you knew parts of it already, then because *I* mentioned short bits and pieces of it already in other places. And even if it *would* be old data, I fail to see where I said that it's brand-new, world-exclusive stuff available for the first time... You must have intentionally ignored that I said that this is part of the stuff I collected over the past 2 years.

Moreover, in case you didn't notice, even the YouTube video was uploaded by me three weeks ago.

So, please be quite if you don't have anything positive to say. But we both know the motivation for your post anyway, don't we? :lol: (that's what private messages are for, by the way! You don't have to like me for my attitude, but you shouldn't try to make a public flame war out of it.)

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Post by 3DO Experience » Sun Aug 10, 2008 3:08 pm

yeah Draxa posted a message w/ a bunch of videos & that one was in it, the scans are either cleaned up ones of the old scans or new ones, either way they look better.

That's why I used the word old. You said the site was finally online, I thought maybe there was stuff missing and wanted to let you know that maybe something was up. I didn't mean to flame you, sorry you took it that way. Thought you were having probs with your site. Didn't want to upset you. I'll just pop you a message next time.
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Post by parallaxscroll » Tue Aug 12, 2008 6:32 am

Some (not all) of the paragraphs on 3DO, 3DO M2 and MX mentioned in the book "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked".
Holmdahl needed more engineers to keep driving down the costs. That was a good thing for Baker and the others who had lost their Ultimate TV jobs. Their group was a tight knit circle. They had all worked for Tim Bucher, who was a lead designer of the 3DO video game console that debuted in 1993. This team had led a tortured existence, and they were used to losing their jobs or moving to new owners.
3DO was the brainchild of Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, the biggest video game software publisher. Hawkins wanted to control his own destiny, so he teamed up with R.J. Mical and Dave Needle, creators of the Atari Lynx game console. Hawkins bought the company that Mical and Needle had formed and plotted to bring their console, dubbed the 3DO Multiplayer, to market. In 1991, they were the first to design a game console that took advantage of the CD-ROM. At first, he operated it within EA. But after tensions developed between the hardware and game makers, 3DO spun off as a separate company. Hawkins became CEO of 3DO, while Larry Probst took over EA.

Hawkins had the novel idea of using contract manufacturers to license and build the 3DO hardware, the same kind of strategy that Microsoft would orchestrate with Flextronics years later on the original Xbox. Matsushita’s Panasonic was the main manufacturer, but Goldstar, AT&T and Sanyo all licensed the 3DO technology and brought the machine to market at $699. Its high price doomed it. It was labeled a rich man’s system, and, to make matters worse, the games made for it didn’t really stand out from the pack. Sony’s PlayStation buried 3DO with an avalanche of better games and a lower price.

“We had a great system with a stupid price tag,” Mical said.
Hawkins tried to recover with a second machine, dubbed the M2. The M2 contained a few key technologies: DVD playback, MPEG-3 (a video compression standard), and a new chip set dubbed the MX that used two PowerPC 602 microprocessors. Announced in 1995, the 64-bit system was designed to leapfrog the 32-bit competitors from Sony, Sega and Nintendo.
“There was a lot of seminal research they did in digital video encoding and decoding,” Hawkins said. “Compression technology. Critical aspects of architecture, CPU design. The team was familiar with the IBM Power PC architecture.”
But Hawkins had to sell off the chip design division as a separate business as the financial picture worsened. Samsung bought the chip division and renamed it CagEnt, hiring more than 100 members of the team, which was led by Toby Ferand. Samsung gave the division a couple of years to make money. Meanwhile, Hawkins sold the M2 rights to Matsushita in early 1996. But Matsushita’s Panasonic division never brought the M2 to the market as a game console. It did sell some pachinko and arcade machines that competed with Sega’s arcade machines, but sales of those machines topped out at around a million. Meanwhile, Samsung failed to do anything with the chip engineering team. In late 1997, Nintendo visited CagEnt in search of a new 3-D chip set. 3DO transformed itself into a software company but it eventually went bankrupt in a war against EA.
Nintendo’s N64 console wasn’t selling as well as expected, and its relationship with Silicon Graphics was sliding downhill. In early 1998, Nintendo terminated the relationship with SGI and offered to buy CagEnt. Howard Lincoln, chairman of Nintendo of America, and Nintendo executive Genyo Takeda visited CagEnt in Silicon Valley. As the details of the negotiations were hammered out, CagEnt began planning to move the MX architecture to the MIPS microprocessor architecture that Nintendo used. The plan was to launch a new console to replace the ailing N64 in time for the holidays in 1999. But CagEnt’s architecture, which was only an improvement on the M2 design, was starting to look less impressive with age. The talks between Nintendo and Samsung broke down. Nintendo chose to work with ArtX, a team of engineers who broke away from Silicon Graphics. ATI Technologies eventually bought ArtX.
“Life at CagEnt was getting a little old,” said Nick Baker. “I started looking around.” Jeff Andrews said, “To be honest, we deserved to fail. We weren’t aggressive enough. If you looked around at others like Sony, they were more aggressive.”
Then Microsoft stepped in. In April, 1998, it bought CagEnt and incorporated it within the WebTV group. The gang from 3DO was once again working for a company with ambitions in the video game market. Having come from Apple, Baker liked the idea of working for a systems company. And Microsoft’s hardware engineers realized that they had a team of talented game console designers. For a time, the CagEnt crew was preoccupied with the UltimateTV project. But when the company cut that project loose, about 70 of the WebTV team members, including CagEnt, joined the Xbox team. The group included electrical and mechanical engineers, materials management, silicon chip designers, and hardware quality and testing engineers. The CagEnt team would lend their graphics expertise so that Microsoft could launch a casual games business on UltimateTV. That plan for a casual games business would resemble the Xbox Live Arcade business that came years later.
“We need to use this time to prepare ourselves for the next battle, so we can continue to move the bar up on our development activities and business,” Todd Holmdahl, the head of Xbox hardware, told his new teams.
It was through this series of setbacks that Nick Baker, Jeff Andrews, and the rest of the 3DO engineers fell into the Xbox 360 work. Both Baker and Andrews had ridden the 3DO rollercoaster together, as had about a dozen or so ex-3DO engineers who remained at Microsoft. They had been devoted to making hardware for game consoles since about 1993, but they all had yet to deliver a machine to the market. And, while they weren’t the luckiest bunch of engineers, Microsoft was lucky to have them on board.
“By the time I got to the Xbox 360, I had worked on six game consoles,” Andrews said.
Interesting perhaps, but not 100% accurate. notably about MX being based around two PowerPC 602 microprocessors. That was the updated/upgraded, final M2 chipset, not MX. We don't know what CPU(s) MX used but some rumors said MX had a PowerPC 604 or two 604s and that one 604 in MX was faster (or more powerful) than both 602s in M2. They also didn't mention the new graphics features MX had in-hardware that M2 lacked: anti-aliasing, clipping and anisotropic filtering.

Also, the M2 was actually first announced in 1994 IIRC, as Bulldog, with some basic specs. It was all over EGM, GameFan and other magazines, and the internet. Then in 1995 it was more fully revealed as the M2 upgrade and standalone console with the media bliz and everything.

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Post by 3DOKid » Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:14 pm

No bickering. Understand? It upsets me.

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Post by parallaxscroll » Wed Aug 13, 2008 4:12 am

slightly off-topic babble: Here's an impressive real-time demo of SGI Onyx2 with InfiniteReality (actually IR2) graphics technology from the late 90s, an update (but same generation) of the IR graphics system introduced in 1996.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrgdjzPwQDo

That's really really fast, sweet looking demo running on 4 screens. I forgot how amazing IR graphics were, for the time. So perhaps this extremely expensive highend hardware, far beyond anything consoles could do, or even arcades, could've done something in realtime that is somewhat close to the pre-rendered CG videos (car demo, fps demo) used to promote M2 in 1995. Maybe

The M2 itself (about 500K polys/sec) was probably half of a RealityEngine2 (1M polys/sec) thus about 1/20 of IR (10M polys/sec).
The MX (around 1M polys/sec) would've been only about on par with RE2 thus nowhere near IR. So it would've taken at least to the M4 to get upto SGI IR graphics in a 3DO-designed game machine.

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Post by WindowsKiller » Sat Nov 15, 2008 3:46 pm

Some IMSA Racing footage I uploaded to YouTube and that hasn't been posted here yet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_24GhAwlv0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obRrdIKswF4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ackXME-pE4

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Post by 3DO Experience » Sun Nov 16, 2008 4:59 pm

Great footage, especially the Mardi Gras video!
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Post by bitrate » Wed Jan 28, 2009 12:56 am

Recently acquired a playable version of the Dolphin M2 demo.

Sorry for the crappy pictures with the glare and everything- was in a hurry to post some pics before having to step out. I'll grab some proper shots and probably do a video encode a little later.

Enjoy :wink:


Image
Image

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Post by Doskias » Wed Jan 28, 2009 2:44 am

Post a video please :shock: .

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Post by 3DOKid » Wed Jan 28, 2009 7:44 am

OMG.

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Post by bitrate » Wed Jan 28, 2009 8:06 am

Oh... and also of interest... :wink:


Image

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Post by bonefish » Wed Jan 28, 2009 8:28 am

HOLY FRIGGIN GRAIL! :shock:


Bitrate, you just keep raising the bar. Just when I thought all this stuff was just unicorns.

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Post by Lemmi » Wed Jan 28, 2009 8:52 am

bitrate wrote:Oh... and also of interest... :wink:

Image
well atleast thats one piece of history that ive actually held in my hand once
:)
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Post by bitrate » Wed Jan 28, 2009 8:59 am

Hey there Lemmi.
I gotta ask, when did you get to hold one before?

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Post by Lemmi » Wed Jan 28, 2009 3:50 pm

bitrate wrote:Hey there Lemmi.
I gotta ask, when did you get to hold one before?
there was a guy at the local gibralter trade center who sold videogames and DVDs at his booth. he had one and brought it in the following week.
he had it in a small clear plastic display case. thats when i found out he was a collector and why i couldnt find to many rare items anymore at the damn place :)
Last edited by Lemmi on Wed Jan 28, 2009 5:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by 3DOKid » Wed Jan 28, 2009 4:54 pm

bitrate wrote:Oh... and also of interest... :wink:


Image
In fairness to Panasonic it isn't as good looking as the FZ-1 but it's a decent looking piece of kit. If that appeared on the shelf tomorrow as the Xbox 360mk2 or PS4 I'd be quite pleased.

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Post by WindowsKiller » Wed Jan 28, 2009 5:11 pm

3DOKid wrote:In fairness to Panasonic it isn't as good looking as the FZ-1
That's because this was not the final design for the M2. The final design was never revealed (cf. NextGen, Oct. 1996). And when Matsushita finally produced the units in 1998, they kept using that case design, as they had a patent on it (but not on the final one, apparently).

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Post by 3DOKid » Wed Jan 28, 2009 6:06 pm

I wonder what it would have looked like?



Of the eval units, the white one was cooler IMHO. although a white one would now be considered a me-too product.

The electric blue one was pretty neat too :)

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Post by pitsunami » Wed Jan 28, 2009 8:57 pm

I would give anything for any colour! :lol:

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Post by 3DOKid » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:02 pm

Stupid question - does it work?

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Post by pitsunami » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:09 pm

3DOKid wrote:Stupid question - does it work?
The demo with the dolphin is running on it if i am correct!

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Post by bitrate » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:22 pm

Hey guys.
It works with the Dolphin demo and a couple of other M2 related disks that I have. It also plays VCD's.
When playing VCD's it has it's own internal on-screen-display for various functions and it shows a neat looking control pad that looks very similar to an N64 pad.

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Post by WindowsKiller » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:28 pm

bitrate wrote:When playing VCD's it has it's own internal on-screen-display for various functions and it shows a neat looking control pad that looks very similar to an N64 pad.
As shown here:
http://sflynn.info/M2/FZ21S1_ScreenShots.html

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Post by bitrate » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:34 pm

WindowsKiller wrote:
As shown here:
http://sflynn.info/M2/FZ21S1_ScreenShots.html


The M2 in those pictures on his site is the unit that I have.
A guy (I won't name for now in case he doesn't want it known - but it is easy to find out) on another board bought the unit from sflynn and then 2 to 3 years back I bought it off of him.

Now to find that control pad that is pictured in the OSD and also in a couple of magazines at a trade show.

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Post by WindowsKiller » Wed Jan 28, 2009 9:39 pm

Yeah, I know. It's easy to see by the spots on the lid that this is zappenduster's unit, which he in turn bought from sflynn.

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Post by 3DO Experience » Thu Jan 29, 2009 12:26 am

Stephen Flynn... yeah I know. He found it at a flea-market for $20, didn't know what it was so he bought it and Googled the sticker. I know someone who sent him $2,400 and he changed his mind! At least he got his money back.
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Post by bitrate » Thu Jan 29, 2009 4:29 am

Video is up.

M2 Dolphin Link


Make sure you click on the high quality option. It makes the video appear a little closer to how it actually looks although it's still pretty far off :/

I tried to give a fair presentation of what is available in terms of effects that can be applied to the dolphin as well as some of his moves and camera positions etc., etc.

Enjoy :wink:
Last edited by bitrate on Fri Feb 13, 2009 8:48 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by 3DOKid » Thu Jan 29, 2009 6:15 pm

realistically, how powerful is the M2 compared to say the PS2, Xbox or the DC would you say.

Looks to me like it would have been more than a match for the DC/PS2 but...

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