Numerous issues found in the 3DO section

[trapexit]

I apologize in advance for this large list of corrections but I figured a single ticket would be better than many. These were found in the v1.2 PDF from your site.

1. Page 342: "Panasonic 3DO GZ-1" but I believe you mean FZ-1 or "Panasonic FZ-1 R·E·A·L 3DO Interactive Multiplayer"
2. The Goldstar and Sanyo units were not released at the same time as the FZ-1. They were released the following year.
3. Page 343: The RetroGamer quote suggests 3 megabit (Mb) vs the correct 3 megabyte (MiB)
4. "viability of the adventure"? Did you mean "venture"?
5. I don't know if you want to get into the details of pricing but not only was the 3DO's sales model different which helped push up the prices of the hardware but was also designed and released earlier. The PS1 release in NA was almost 2 years later and prices for RAM and other components had dropped materially.
6. Regarding cut-scenes being FMV. That was also true of Sega-CD, CD-I, PC, and Amiga CD32 and later Saturn and PS1. Many of the games were ported around of that type. 3DO (and Sega-CD) were probably just at the peak time for it.
7. The 3DO Company didn't go bankrupt till 2003 but the original 3DO hardware was discontinued in 1996.
8. Page 344: (1) is the CLIO (VDLP, DSP, runs at 24.5454MHz (for NTSC))
9. (2) is the MADAM (CEL Engine, Math Engine, DMA, MMU, runs at 25MHz)
10. (6) is the video DAC
11. (8) is not the video DAC or VDLP. It is the audio DAC (the AK4316-VS)
12. (9) is the CDROM 32KiB RAM buffer
13. (A) is the 32KiB battery backed SRAM (usually referred to as the NVRAM)
14. (B) is the CDROM DMA controller
15. (D) is the CDROM microcontroller
16. (E) is not the CDROM firmware. It is a 4 channel linear driver IC for the CD player
17. (F) is more accurately referred to as the PBUS (peripheral bus)
18. Page 345: The M2 "was never completed" is not accurate. It was used in information kiosks and some arcade games in Japan. It was never released to retail but it had a small use otherwise.
19. Regarding the "trivia" about the M2. There was always an intent by 3DO to be forwards and backward compatible. That was why they invested so much into the operating system. Which was more advanced than MacOS and Windows in many ways for the time.
20. Section 6.5.1: CEL Engine is only in MADAM. The spelling of CLIO and MADAM are all caps as they are really acronyms.
21. "The CEL engine was able to process several CELs simultaneously." This is not accurate. At most it has 2 "Corner Engines" which allow a single CEL to be processed ~2x speed depending on other settings. The CEL engine otherwise iterates over a linked list of CELs stored in memory serially.
22. Page 350: "but a bug had forced Rebecca to render flats in software" I can't speak to what exactly she means here but from my speaking with her it was more time constraints and differences between how CEL renders and the Doom engine's design.
23. "Their covers were played directly from the CD." 3DO does not allow the playback of Redbook CD audio from software titles. All music has to go through the DSP. In the case of Doom 3DO (and most 3DO titles) it is via AIFF or AIFC files spooled live from the 3DO filesystem on the CDROM disk and fed to the DSP which decompresses and/or mixes it and spits it out to the DAC.
24. The block diagram is not correct: It is "CEL" not "CELL" and it would only be in MADAM.
25. MADAM and CLIO are separate chips before the later "ANVIIL" chip combined them. It is a logical diagram but just to be clear.
26. "ARM60" not "ARM-60". The ARM chip had no corner engine. That is part of the CEL hardware in MADAM.
27. DSP is part of CLIO
28. VDLP is part of CLIO
29. Inputs come on the PBUS which is part of MADAM

There might be more but this what I found in a once over.

For context: I am the maintainer of the 3DO emulator Opera, maintain 3dodev.com, and the author of numerous dev tools for the platform. Happy to answer any questions you might have about the platform or do additional passes on the 3DO section if/when you get the time to fix the issues.

[fabiensanglard]

Thank you for taking the time to share your extensive expertise :) !

I don't know where I will have time to address all of these. If someone feels the courage, I would gladly merge PRs.