rabidrage Posted June 10, 2020 I don't have one of these, don't know if it would even work with a modern PC. But if anyone has any knowledge of it, I'd like to know--does playing 3DO Doom through a PC via the Blaster make it any faster? I'd love to see video of it in action. I found one video where someone runs it for like 5 seconds in a small screen size and it looks good, but that's not enough. It would be hella intriguing to see this version of Doom actually run well without tweaks on legit period software. Might make it look like less of a mistake. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
ZeroTheEro Posted June 10, 2020 You mean this one? I don't think Creative 3DO Blaster would make any good difference once the screen sizes go up. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
rabidrage Posted June 10, 2020 Yeah, pretty sure that's the video. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
Redneckerz Posted June 11, 2020 19 hours ago, rabidrage said: I don't have one of these, don't know if it would even work with a modern PC. But if anyone has any knowledge of it, I'd like to know--does playing 3DO Doom through a PC via the Blaster make it any faster? The 3DO Blaster was a pass through ISA card that worked from within Windows 3.1. On paper, it should allow for all 3DO games to be playable on PC. A few things however, stood in their way as this blog piece shows : The price tag. the Blaster costed as much as a full blown 3DO system. Back in an era where a 486 PC would still be 1500 bucks, this was a hefty add-on. Creative made the fantastic decision to only allow one particular model of their CD-ROM players to be compatible with this. Without it, the 3DO Blaster is simply not useable. 3DO Doom played on a Blaster would not make the game any better, because the 3DO Blaster is an entire 3DO on a card. The PC hardware is not used in anyway as a co-processor but to integrate it all neatly within Windows 3.1. So performance should be the same as on a 3DO console - Because the Blaster is simply a 3DO console in ISA card format. In retrospect, the 3DO Blaster is a predecessor of some sorts to a GPU and technologies like CUDA - Cores that offload the PC by doing general processing themselves. But back in the 90s, things were a lot more expensive, and 3D was just on the rise. By limiting itself to a particular CD-ROM Player, Creative actively released the Blaster dead on arrival. 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
rabidrage Posted June 11, 2020 @Redneckerz thanks for the info! Now I know. That was a delightfully complete response. 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
Vic Vos Posted June 12, 2020 20 hours ago, Redneckerz said: Creative made the fantastic decision to only allow one particular model of their CD-ROM players to be compatible with this. Creative being Creative, as usual. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
Dark Pulse Posted June 13, 2020 21 hours ago, Vic Vos said: Creative being Creative, as usual. Which isn't very creative of them at all. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
cybdmn Posted June 13, 2020 On 6/10/2020 at 2:55 PM, rabidrage said: I don't have one of these, don't know if it would even work with a modern PC. But if anyone has any knowledge of it, I'd like to know--does playing 3DO Doom through a PC via the Blaster make it any faster? I'd love to see video of it in action. I found one video where someone runs it for like 5 seconds in a small screen size and it looks good, but that's not enough. It would be hella intriguing to see this version of Doom actually run well without tweaks on legit period software. Might make it look like less of a mistake. I own one, and can tell you that Doom runs as crappy as on all other 3DOs. The 3DO Blaster won't run on modern systems for various reasons. First, on modern standard motherboards you won't find an ISA slot to plug in the blaster card. And second, it is very unlikely that you can run Windows 3.1 on a modern PC, but the software you need to run 3DO games on the blaster is only available on Windows 3.1. Maybe it would run on Windows 9x as well, i haven't tried that. To build a system with a 3DO Blaster today is a serious task. Not only that you need the card and a specific CD-ROM by Creative Labs (CR-563-B), as stated before and all the cables, some of which aren't available for more than 20 years. You need a graphics card with a Feature Connector on board to pass the graphics from the 3DO blaster to the graphics card, and a soundcard with an analog cd audio connector. 0 Quote Share this post Link to post
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