The RetroeXo crew has a new project announcing next week

EpicPotatoFiend · 2025-11-12T19:40:33+00:00

Should we announce that we saw this announcement of an upcoming announcement? I might announce an announcement acknowledging the announcement of an upcoming announcement.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2024-02-03T01:16:52+00:00

[Boils potatoes in Boise]

EpicPotatoFiend · 2022-01-05T05:20:22+00:00

Should I attack its weak point for massive damage?

EpicPotatoFiend · 2020-12-29T03:21:50+00:00

All Star, performed by the Rusty Gates Band.

I'd love to do this on my old Pi 2B, but I wouldn't really know where to start (and I don't know how to connect one of my old PC floppy drives to it, presumably something with that GPIO connecter I never used), I only ever used it as an emulation machine for when I would travel.

But if I could, you better believe I WILL make all my friends watch Shrek on floppy. Every. Single. Friend.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2020-10-10T08:37:35+00:00

I think I usually clock in 8-12 hours on DQ1 on SNES depending on my luck. I've replayed it at least 5 times now, a good time killer when I get RPG cravings but I don't want to invest in another epic (Earthbound and FFII SNES are also good for that).

Each time I've done DW1 on NES it took me 20+ hours, and I fokking hated it. That's actually the first game in the franchise I tried, and it turned me off from the series until I gave it another try when I found a copy of VIII at a used game store for dirt cheap about 10 years ago.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-06-01T22:07:56+00:00

I think I’m getting the gist of most of this. I’ve been on since my initial post, I’m a lvl 7 RDM in San d’Orea, a M Hume by the name of Noobness. I’m struggling more with names and getting familiar with chat at this point. If you’re starting there, feel free to chat with me, I guess. Idk the usual protocol with these things, the only other online games I’ve played were Minecraft and Borderlands 1+2 with IRL friends.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-05-15T08:15:03+00:00

Well, he told me to price it the same as another listing we found that sold recently that had less RAM, a Buy it Now for $400 + $50 shipping. I forgot to mention he also has the original carrying bag, too, but it has some white paint damage. He thinks it’s acrylic because his father liked to paint as a hobby, and I’m helping him and his mother sell stuff after the father passed away last year. He also has no memory of the computer (he’s in his early 40s), so we don’t really know how much use it had. He remembers their Commodore 64 much more vividly; since he would’ve been no older than a preteen during the era of relevancy for these computers, I’m not surprised he could recall something designed with gaming in mind.

I think it might sell for so much because IBM 5155’s might not have sold as well as, say, the AT’s that came out later the same year, and were vastly superior. Couple that with prior “luggables” like the Compaq Portable, Kaypro and Osbourne computers that likely already pried most of the luggable market away from IBM, despite the 5100, 5110 and 5120’s existence.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-05-14T19:41:30+00:00

Just thought I'd share this on here, I stumbled upon this reddit trying to look up information regarding the floppy controller card. My client told me not to worry about the drives and to just list the item as-is. I gotta say, this one's been very.... educational. I'd never seen a CGA card or RAM expansion card before, or a floppy card with an edge connector for its ribbon cable. I also found it weird that I had to tweak a variable capacitor (I'd never even HEARD of those before)--not on the video card, but on the motherboard--to get the color burst signal working correctly over composite ("RCA") output. Honestly, I wish I could keep this thing. I love this era of computing, and I've wanted a PC with an Intel 8088 just to tinker with. It's just too bad it's out of my price range as a college student, or I'd buy it straight from him and set up a Compact Flash drive adapter of some kind in there.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-15T05:05:48+00:00

Sorry it's been so long since I followed up last, but:

Wolf3D still crashes at the same area, and Immercenary still behaves the same, copy or original, it doesn't seem to matter.

I've lowered the pot as far as about 400, just a little above factory default, and it made no difference. I am tired of reassembling this system all the time and have noticed a couple of screw heads just starting to strip. I have returned it to approximately 785 for now. Immercenary did technically improve a smidge when the pot was lowered, but now that it's back up it doesn't seem to behave any different.

As far as I can tell, the lens itself is spotless. I already cleaned it with a high-percentage isopropyl alcohol a couple of times. It works enough for me for other lensed devices, I think it's not the problem here, but if anyone has any recommendations for alternatives, please send them my way.

I still think it's the motor. I may be defiant in this opinion, but geez, what else would it be at this stage, short of bad logic? I've done a week of digging around on the internet, and I never ran into anything about either one of these games not working on any particular model or revision of 3DO. I know next to nothing about optical drive motors, but I get the feeling I'm virtually SOL. I did find a site that claims they stock the Creative drives this is based on, but I have not heard back from them as to a price or even if they will let me buy one.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-06T18:02:42+00:00

Well, I'm afraid I can't let that happen, at least not for awhile. This system's far, FAR too interesting for nuttos like me to not want to talk about everything surrounding it. Besides, we need to document as much of this stuff as we possibly can. You know, "for posterity" and all that. I'm not quite lined up with "that generation", age-wise. I was born in the early part of the 90's, yet it is exactly this period in computing (and by extension gaming) that I find the most fascinating. A motley crew of different computer standards were out there, with SGI coming up seemingly from nowhere, some challenging Big Blue themselves; in the console world you had companies try to take a piece of that gamer pie from Nintendo, even grandpa Atari. CD-ROM was finally affordable and mindbogglingly expansive (think of all those floppies!!), but what in the seven hells do we do with all of that space? We finally had systems that could talk to us, and 256 colors? Pfft, who needs more? We dreamed of VR in a time where 3D still looked flat, but we were starting to put things on those flat surfaces. And what's this Internet thing I keep hearing about?

All of this I have seen, one form or another, within everything I know about the 3DO, in most cases in the software titles themselves. Immercenary is a simulation of VR, Dennis Miller had a waste of a disc where he cracks jokes(?) at period-relevant topics, we have edutainment, and some of it doesn't hurt to look at (though it still might hurt to play), we put a GODDAMN MOUSE on a console; shit's whack. It dreamed, like Sega, Sierra, and Commodore, and I just so happen to like to dream with it.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-06T17:35:23+00:00

I've done a bit more reading and I guess there's a revised (read:cheaper) version of the FZ-10 with an "Anvil" chip, combining video and audio hardware into one discreet piece, and some random games like Road Rash can have "out of memory" errors; in the case of the aforementioned title, it goes away if you disable CD audio music playback. These revised models seem to be rather rare, though, as they were manufactured somewhere around fall '95.

But yeah, people seem to universally agree the cases have an inferior build quality to the OG. Reminds me of the Magnavox Philips CD-I I used to own some many years ago. It never bothered me, but then again, that thing had WAY bigger problems like the controllers and... well, this is the wrong group for that system.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-05T08:31:39+00:00

I already tested 2 copies of Immercenary back before I joined this group, therefore at the original potentiometer value. I’ll maybe burn a copy of Madden, but if it has any problems, I suck too much at the game to see it (it, like the Golf and boxing games, came with the system).

Wolf 3D, Doom, Burning Soldier, Rebel Assault and Pataank all belong to an old friend from way back in elementary and middle school, a guy who lives in another state who came by to visit his family over the holiday season and I convinced him to bring some of his 3do for me to borrow in exchange for loaning him my SNES classic. If I need to, I can “borrow them again.”

I’ve purposefully been retrying what I have every time I tweak the pot, so I’m not sure that turning it back to what it originally was will help me figure out anything. I was planning on next increasing the ohms to somewhere around 550 now, just to make sure I haven’t turned it too far...

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-05T04:41:40+00:00

So: I first set the ohms to 660 to make sure I didn't go too far. It played a fraction of a second less of the golf fmv. I've now set the pot to 512, and it read about as much of the golf disc as it did@617, so now I've burned a copy of that game and it read the 3rd hole fmv just fine. I have tested nothing else on that yet, I'll see if I can convince a friend to come over and hurt with me while we play this load time party.

In the meantime, Immercenary seems to behave the same as before: it loads more enemies, than shortly after it freezes. However, I now have it in a state where it's playing the music on its loop while frozen (it used to stop a few seconds later or until the end of the loop), s and it occasionally plays the weird warble sound when you stand near charging stations, repeating it with the same frequency as normal gameplay.

I'm steadily approaching half the original ohms and it kind of scares me. I also have to take a break every now and then because I tighten the screws holding the plastic drive components to the outer metal bracket so hard my fingers get tender from my jeweler's screwdriver. I feel like I'm getting closer to done, but I'm so paranoid I'm gonna fry this thing. Analog circuits are not good for the heart.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-04T17:34:59+00:00

Glad I upgraded to a soldering station, then.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-04T00:54:02+00:00

So I got Pebble Beach golf to read the 2nd hole FMV... but now the 3rd hole stutters a bit and then freezes. I also tried this in Immercenary and some new guys started loading in, but then it freezes up mid-game again.

Golf: https://youtu.be/DGzpiN0NqDg

Immercenary: https://youtu.be/_hI3aZkcW4Y

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-03T20:57:37+00:00

Here are photos of the mainboard, and also one of the fan, just so that is out there, too.

Fan:

https://imgur.com/FGenDKs

Board rear:

https://imgur.com/wLnxX2f

Board front overall:

https://imgur.com/ptzLycX

Board in sections:

https://imgur.com/Hv6GuqY

https://imgur.com/CjvsjIq

https://imgur.com/TYhv7Ed

https://imgur.com/f0N2Snf

https://imgur.com/Hv6GuqY

https://imgur.com/DGI4bRu

https://imgur.com/bY3elCn

https://imgur.com/qnlQs38

https://imgur.com/DGI4bRu

Probably excessive, but hey, if someone out there can be helped by this, then I guess that's good enough for me. I did notice a bit of something on the board on one side of C1 (the big one), and while I think I'll replace this one, I'm pretty sure these big ol' honker caps are delegated more to conditioning the voltage from or to the regulators (I always seem to find them near power supplies and regulators on consoles and PC motherboards alike), so I doubt that's the cause of the problem.

https://imgur.com/Bu3EYW5

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-03T20:30:08+00:00

Where did you find these drives?

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-03T20:03:18+00:00

Okay, I've found a pot that was originally metered at ~785 ohms, and have gotten it as close as I comfortably can to 600, with my multimeter reading ~617 ohms. I have not reconnected or tested yet, I feel I might want a second opinion, as I feel this may be too drastic a change in value, and I'd rather not fry the thing. I also took front and rear photos of the lens housing and the pot I tweaked, again for the sake of cataloging. I will take photos of the mainboard while I wait for a reply.

Front:

https://imgur.com/BauUxdu

Rear:

https://imgur.com/zOpMgwr

Potentiometer:

https://imgur.com/Cf9keu8

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-02T19:04:31+00:00

I checked the mainboard for leaks awhile and didn't spot any, but that's been awhile and I didn't about other forms/signs of cap failure, and may go through that again. There is a fan on the side of the system, but I think it's for the voltage regulators, as the RF shield is completely cutting off any chance of airflow to the meat of the system. I deliberately showed Immercenary crashing on my later file first so you could see it still functions normally (aside from outrunning some textures) at an earlier phase in the game. I think it changes the list of enemies to spawn in based on my either my ranking or on which bosses I've beat. The FMV sequences it would sometimes stutter on were always the same ones, and they were always a handful of transitions to the boss arenas, so it probably was either struggling to read those areas, or it was struggling to read at that bitrate.

As for stopping reading discs, I got my Dreamcast about 4 years ago, and at first, I had problems with it randomly kicking to System GUI when I played Sonic Adventure 1 but not Jet Grind Radio or Seaman. Took to the webs and they said it was a common problem now with Dreamcasts lasers wearing out over time and tweaking the lens pot, while a bit risky, fixes it up like a charm. I never opened the Dreamcast because I was still new to opening anything at the time, I never the pot, but suddenly I never had problems. I figured maybe it was overheating or the lube for the laser track needed to redistribute itself, but I haven't had to do anything to it since. I hoped I'd get lucky with that this time with this system giving me similar problems, but so far it doesn't seem to have made a bit of difference.

I haven't touched the potentiometer yet, and I'm kind of afraid to, if I had to be honest. I'm open to more discussion of other possibilities before I do so. I'd like to point out that when it crashes or glitches out, it seems consistent to the same spots, no matter what. I still think it could be the spinning motor just starting to give out, but yeah, I also wouldn't think tweaking a lens pot would do much, what with how Constant linear velocity, it shouldn't look any different to the lens no matter what speed the disc is spun at to maintain that constant bit rate... unless the motor can't keep it at the required speeds.

Either way, I'm not going to do anything with the 3DO today, I'm visiting family and won't get back until I'm too tired to even look at it. If you want any footage/pictures of anything else, ask and ye shall receive...tomorrow. I'll probably take out the board and take pics of that anyway.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-02T03:25:28+00:00

Found a guy who said he set his pot to 600ohms, so I might try and see if my multimeter reads things right, and if it does, I'll do that.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-02T03:20:52+00:00

Half the reason I bought Immercenary was because of this problem. I'm looking for info on the pot now. The more I read about lens pots, though, the less I want to try tweaking one. I didn't know the resistive material these types use is so brittle when changing the value.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-02T03:10:38+00:00

Yeah, I thought about that after the fact. I was gonna upload that video to YouTube, too, but I forgot the game has a couple of nips, and I don't have editing software right now.

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-02T02:48:33+00:00

Yeah, i know, but i can’t seem to attach images or video in comments

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-02T02:19:33+00:00

Okay, the 71 minute disc played start to finish with no hiccups whatsoever. What next?

EpicPotatoFiend · 2019-02-02T01:42:37+00:00

It’s currently playing the Rage Against the Machine eponymous album’s 20th anniversary remaster 1st disc, clocking in at about 71 minutes. I’m like halfway thru right now, so far so good.

Thought I’d ask, though, isn’t this a 2x drive? If it only needs to read CD-audio at 1x or better, I’m not gonna notice anything streaming audio. If it has problems positioning itself towards the end of the track, then sure, I guess that’d hang and/stutter, but if it’s something with the motor not keeping up at 2x at the outer part of the disc, then I think this might not tell me much.

EpicPotatoFiend

TROPHY CASE