My M2 just came in today.

Well not THE M2 console but the off-shoot hardware when Panasonic got out of the videogame console biz. Its officially called the Panasonic Interactive Media Player Model No. FZ-35S (original M2 was FZ-21S). I opened it up and compared it to the M2 hardware kit from NFGman's website:

http://nfg.2y.net/games/polystars/

When I compare mine with the one he has. It has the CDE2 chip (the 3DO chip), a few other chips. Now the Power PC chips could be on the otherside of the board because I see traces running into a PGA. I can't completely lift the board out because of the ports in the back also keep the board in place.

I booted up the console but all I get is a "Please Insert Disk" message.

Now time to hunt for software.

 

lucky one... rayer:

 

You can be lucky too.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...4&ed=1089513016000&ssPageName=ADME:B:EOT:US:3

Just click on the seller and look at his bids. I dont think he ships internationally.

Sorry I didn't post the link earlier. The seller has 18 of them left.

 

I picked up one of these things as well; the guy lowered his price to $25. I guess a $25 paperweight ? Can it play any media?
Glad to have found this forum....

BigK

 

Media for it is rarer than the hardware. I'd say for the price, keep it because you might someday find some softare for it on ebay.

 

Those things are nearly PCs! IDE hard drives, what looks like a standard IDE optical drive, an ISA bus (well it has serial, parallel and PS/2 sockets, so I assume it has one), VGA outputs... only problem is the CPUs...

 

But formating the HDD and configuring the BIOS to read a non M2X DVD/CD media is hard without the proper software.

 

Would a PowerPC build of Linux actually work on it? It'll be better than nothing if it does...

 

I uses the 3D0 chip for video display, i doubt anyone out there wrote a driver of it for use in Linux.

 

Plenty of code junkies here though no reason why it couldn'nt be done. Infact it would need a reason to be done if anything LOL

 

Yeah, I think hardware-wise, the thing is closest to a pre-G3 PowerMac, albeit with dual processors. Hell, with the dual processors, it would be closest to a BeBox.

Just wondering - has anyone out there who has a 35S kiosk taken their hard drive out and hooked it to a Mac or something and seen what exactly is on there? I don't have a working machine to hook it to...

 

Since I have 2 of these coming, I will take one apart. The problem is that I'm not a Mac guy :smt009 (please, easy on the flaming)

 

I don't think it would matter if the drive is hooked up to a Mac or not just because the processor is an older PPC. Of course it depends on what file system the thing uses. Maybe hook it up to a PC and use a drive utility when booted from cd to examine it (with something like: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/).

 

Has anyone ever seen this "M2 Model 2" in private circulation?

http://members.tripod.com/~faberp/M2.htm

This is the first I'd heard/seen of it. I'm not even certain this is an actual photo, could be some kind of rendering or something. I figure that if no one on here knows, then it probably doesn't exist.

 

Probably a really stupid and dumb question but does the Konami M2 arcade games do anything on the FZ-35 or FZ-21? Not read anywhere of anyone saying 'It don't work'.

 

hmm no The m2 hardware is sort of built in the box with the game :smt023 Lawrence had 1 for sale a while back ...

 

One colored pure white exists that I know of. I knew a person who possessed it and sold it for a pretty penny. I think more probably exist than that, though. I'm not even sure what his was capable of, but I can't imagine much.