Friend gave me 2 towers to tinker around with. One is a 3do Station 4.0 and the other is an international station 1.0. The 3do station is the red pcb and the international station is a green (looks to be much more final pcb) There is only 1 working cdrom for both as the other one has a dead laser that we are trying to source. Up until a few days ago my friend said the 3do station was working fine for playing retail games (the red mobo), but he fiddled around with it and now it only boots to the start screen (IE the one where it displays the memory and colors). What happens is on boot up of the machine, the cdrom gets checked quickly, then gives up no matter what I do. What I wanted to do was show these (it seems the rev of the roms on the break out board is .9 for both dev and production) and hopefully get some help from the people that have these. I know one of the cables (the encryption goes to the rom board) but I'm not sure where the debug one goes to. Also do these need a controller plugged in to have the system recognize the game? Anyway, here's some eye candy for people.
I'm just guessing but maybe one of the security checks is for the CDROM drive that doesn't seem to be connected, looks like both CDROM drives are removed from both towers. Maybe connect the CDROM and fire it up!
I forgot to mention even with a cdrom drive connected, it spins up for a second (and you see the hdd light, or in this case the cdrom light) on the tower go on for a second or 2, then it stops and nothing happens
Not sure if SCSI or IDE but confirm termination & SCSI ID# or Master / Slave / Cable Select if IDE. I'm going to throw a shout-out to @Ed Hunter as well, I've never owned a 3DO let alone a dev kit for one, it could just be a software setting your friend changed.
Yeah in the 90's some controller/sound cards had odd CDROM interfaces for Panasonic/Sony/Mitsumi if I recall correctly. Packard Bell's used them. I do know this, check pin #1 as the colored side of the ribbon cable should go to that.
Well I mean you can hear it checking the cdrom, so it should be in the right area as the flat flex cables can only go in one correct way.
If it uses the same or a similar drive to the 3DO fz-1, there are several old non-3DO drives that can be used for parts. Here's one: http://www.welovemacs.com/2xcdrom-i.html Apparently the laser assembly is identical. Here is information I previously aggregated on the topic. http://3docentral.freeforums.net/thread/3/replacement-cd-drive-parts-3do The FZ-1's/FZ-10's drive and Matshushita drives made for PCs all had a proprietary Matsushita IDE-like interface that wasn't actually IDE. Another issue that renders these drives "broken" is that a particular gear inside the drive that is used to move the laser sled can crack due to brittle plastic, even a minor crack can then give the drive the appearance of a dead laser (the laser typically won't move or give any appearance of trying to read anything if this gear is cracked). Maybe this happened to the drive that apparently worked recently but then suddenly stopped working. (More aggregated info and pics re the gear in this thread) http://3docentral.freeforums.net/thread/7/system-replacement-gears-cdrom-drive I can't speak for the developer tower, but the FZ-1 does not need a controller plugged in to load a game. In reviewing a video of someone booting up one of these developer towers (), it looks to have the FZ-1's bios/startup sequence on it.
I wonder if it has the bios from a different model of 3do on it, or something proprietary to the dev machine. For reference Here's the startup to the fz10 model of 3do. There is also the goldstar and Sanyo models of 3do with their own startup graphics but those models are more uncommon and it seemed like Panasonic, who made the fz1 and fz10 made way more 3dos than other manufacturers, manufactured 3dos before other companies did, and collaborated more closely with the 3do company, so they felt a lot more like the first party manufacturer than the other manufacturing firms.
Well, it was figured out that it was a ROM problem. From what a friend who repaired it told me the Bios ROM board has a chip on there that shouldn't have floating lines, so he replaced the chip and now it's fine, however it seems the bios roms themselves were taken out when the chip went bad, so I need to find someone who has the roms.
bump! Even after a year I'm still looking for someone with a similar tower that can dump the 4 roms off the card for me as I need to replace mine. If anyone could help that would be fantastic!
Hello CoolMod, I have a 3do developer tower. It's been years since I took it out of storage, but I believe it has the red PCB. I don't work on computers, so I may not be capable of helping. However, I'd be happy to dig the tower it out of storage and attempt to dump the ROMs if it's something you can walk me through remotely. Please contact me if your interested.
