old interview with Phil Burk on 3DO M2 and M2's successor, Cagent's MX

GigaDrive · Jul 6, 2013

Interview with Mr. Phil Burk

NikeX: Mr. Burk, do you have any information about 3DO and your former time at that company?

Mr. Burk: I was one of two people in the company with an office. It was because I was an audio guy and made lots of strange sounds that would disturb other people. 3DO was the first 32 bit game console with CD-Rom, 3D graphics hardware, and an audio DSP. But it is often overlooked in the history of game hardware.

I started NTG (New Technology Group) in September of 1992 when there were about 2 people. By the time I got there they had built the 3DO prototype using wirewrap technology. It consisted of 14 boards and ran at 1/4 speed. I worked on the audio DSP and was able to make a few changes to increase performance. I also developed the audio software which was a unit generator based library.

Once could create oscillators, filters, envelopes and other audio units on the DSP and connect them together to make complex sounds. All this was controllery by a 'C' API.

NTG merged with 3DO and we shipped the 3DO Game Console. I then started working on the new M2 product, which was code named Bulldog. It was named after John Sell who would not let go of an idea after he got a bite of it.
(Mr. Burk uploaded a picture of the first Bulldog design team. From left to right are John Sell, Phil Burk, his Boss RJ Mical, (?), Peter Broadwell, Don Gray and Dale Luck.

M2 had a new design for the graphics engine and an enhanced audio DSP. It was used in some arcade machines but was not shipped as a home unit. We then spun out as Cagent and designed the MX system. MX had high performance graphics engine and a new RISC style DSP. Nintendo liked it and almost boght it for their console but they could not reach a deal with our new Korean owner Samsung.

(Mr. Burk uploaded some photos) of one of the first dev kits and a later dev kit and one of the wirewrap boards after the PALs had been removed. He wrote: Note that MADAM and CLIO on the first kit are up on a multi-layer riser. That is because AT&T wired the silicon backwards in the first chip that we got from the fab. They rotated it 180 degress. So we had to create a riser board to map the wrong pins to the right pins.

NikeX: Many people didn't understand the philosophy behind the 3DO. But maybe you have heard such things often.

Mr. Burk: 3DO was both underestimated and over-hyped, if that's possible. The 3DO was a technical success and we dominated the market for about one year.
But, in my opinion, three things killed it. One was the high price of the unit which orginally cost about $600. 3DO was trying to make money on the console sales. That high price limited our market penetration.
Second was the stock market bubble. 3DO was over-hyped by Wall Street. Reporters were outdoing each other to praise 3DO. One analyst wrote a story right after CES that burst the 3DO stock bubble. After that it became hard to sell stock to raise money and the stock options were not useful for attracting new hires. A more realistic slow ramp up in stock value would have been better for us.

Third was a fab disaster. SEGA was very interested in buying our M2 chip for their next console. But when we got the first prototype chips back from the fab, they were missing a layer of metal. Some engineer at the fab left a line out of a script. This killed all the on-chip RAMs including the graphics texture RAM and the DSP RAM. So, the demos we showed to SEGA did not have any textures and ran very slow. The next chip worked fine but it was too late.

NikeX: Only because of the layer and the script. A whole system development, and a deal with SEGA for nothing. What were the feelings of the M2 dev. team?

Mr. Burk: We were bummed but the new fixes chips came out a couple of months later. We just concentrated on getting the software working. We figured out there would be other buyers.

NikeX: What happend then? What did 3DO tell you?

Mr. Burk: Everything. Trip Hawkins was honest with the employees.

NikeX: Mr. Burk, you are the founder of Mobileer, and Mr. Hawkins founded Digi-Choc. But he is not a rival in business, isn't he?

Mr. Burk: We are not rivals. I sell ringtone player software. He sells video games.

NikeX: Samsung and 3DO cancel MSP project - what does that mean?

Mr. Burk: They talk about forming a new company. That was Cagent. We developed the MX chip, the successor to M2. When that closed, Microsoft bought the technology and hired many of the engineers for WebTV. They tried to hire me but I wanted to do contracting.

NikeX: 3DO sold the M2 technology to Panasonic. And the CORE M2 / Bulldog team? What were they doing: New projects, making updates?

Mr. Burk: By this time we were already starting MX. I was developing a RISC style DSP for audio synthesis.
Click to expand...

http://www.3do.cdinteractive.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1796&sid=3af350e5b7f8c78e899776e4f810bb67

DefectX11 · Jul 7, 2013

Very interesting. I hold a place in my heart for the M2, I really wish it would have taken off.

NotMessi · Jul 9, 2013

The 3DO was a technical success and we dominated the market for about one year.
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All I remember is that the 3DO was like $2000 here in Argentina when it launched and nobody had one

GigaDrive · Jul 9, 2013

An M2 article from Next Generation (#6 - June 1995) I don't think ever got posted.

http://i.imgur.com/cmvtDQF.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/RVvNMKY.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/aWz8ADJ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/WFum75b.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/MLpb1UW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/LjL4Edp.jpg

GigaDrive · Sep 29, 2015

Regarding MX, here are a few other things.

NG notes that after the sale of M2 to Matsushita, 3DO maintained the right to develop upgrades to M2.

M3 was almost certainly the MX, and beyond that, there was an intended design for a chipset have a processor beyond the 64-bit generation, that M2 and MX both were. There was expected to be a peak in realtime 3D graphics before the end of the 90s. Networking would also be a large part of the next generation. The design for it only existed on paper, but it is what we would call M4 if development had been able to continue.

EGM's Quartermann on MX capabilities from issue 91 - February 1997:

Note: PS2's Graphics Synthesizer and GameCube's Flipper GPU were the first two graphics chips to have RAM incorporated directly on the silicon in products that made it to market. EDRAM and embedded 1T-SRAM, respectively. But the development of MX most likely pushed Sony to use EDRAM and probably also convinced ArtX and Nintendo to use MoSys 1T-SRAM in Dolphin.

Samsung press release from 1997, acquired 3DO hardware division, including MX technology.

http://www.samsung.com/us/news/newsPreviewRead.do?news_seq=74

Samsung Electronics Acquires Semiconductor Division of 3DO
Seoul, Korea on May. 2. 1997

- A new company is established in the United States to bolster the non-memory business of Samsung Electronics.
- Next-generation multimedia processor to be developed for DVDs.
- Groundwork laid for major advance into non-memory sector.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. signed a contract on April 29 to purchase the Hardware Division of 3DO Company, a US concern that is world famous for games, and which possesses some of the best graphics technology in the business. At the same time, Samsung Electronics announced an agreement to establish a new company called Advanced Graphics Technology (AGT).

With this acquisition, Samsung gains patents and technology for 3DO's MPEG II, which features outstanding picture quality, as well as MX, with Dolby Pro-logic AC-3 functions. Samsung Electronics plans to fuse this technology with its own digital video disk (DVD) system know-how to develop a DVD processor for next-generation video systems and computer support devices.

The technology and engineers from 3DO will be joined with multimedia signal processor R&D people from the company's local subsidiary Samsung Semiconductor Incorporated to establish AGT in California's Silicon Valley. The new company, will be independently operated by locally-hired management, and plans call for it to go public within three years of its establishment. Samsung Electronics is scheduled to supply AGT with wafers.

AGT will begin with an invested capital of $25 million, and its first task will be to develop the new DVD processor. Samsung Electronics will have the intellectual rights to the DVD processor, while AGT will be licensed for the same technology so that it can develop different applied products.

The contract between Samsung Electronics and 3DO has been under negotiation since the end of last year. The two parties came to a mutually-beneficial agreement. Samsung Electronics has needed core software functions and systems for developing multimedia chips, while 3DO has wanted to focus its business on developing (software) titles for (electronic) games.

Samsung Electronics` System LSI Division was restructured early this year to strengthen Samsung Electronics` non-memory business lines, and the new management approach is behind this latest acquisition with much support. The new company, combined with the CPU |(Alpha chip) developed by Samsung Electronics last October, is seen as opening a new chapter in the creation of system-on-chip devices.

Samsung Electronics has also secured the core technology and local personnel, who are well experienced in independent development projects to develop multimedia signal processors.
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old interview with Phil Burk on 3DO M2 and M2's successor, Cagent's MX

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old interview with Phil Burk on 3DO M2 and M2's successor, Cagent's MX

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