I've been tinkering with Optimus' OptiDoom, as he's been calling it, and it's like a tasty hors d'oeuvre from my "if I were a billionaire" fantasy, brought into real life!

For those readers who don't recall, if I were rich my first vanity project would be to restart 3DO development: sponsor some kind of modern, reliable hardware re-implementation of the chipset with a contemporary wafer process, then get brand new sequels made to games like "The Need for Speed". On that list was also "fix the Doom port", and here comes this Optimus fellow!

So far I've made two custom ISOs, the first using the "xdelta" method, with the second done manually by hand. Both of them work in 4DO, but neither of them get past his custom bootstrap image when running on my actual Panasonic FZ-1-- which incidentally has a hell of a time reading my cheapo "Verbatim" CD-Rs, possibly indicating the root of the problem.

Nonetheless, the game is almost playable now: if he can just squeeze one or two more frames, and then cap the whole thing at maybe 15 fps to keep it consistent-- right now the game fluctuates from 56 fps down to 8-- it will be perfect! It's been a nice accompaniment to this fellow, who has been doing a lot of M2 videos lately.

The M2 was a pity: I already had the money in hand to buy it, right on day one-- it was settled! What a shame I never got to experience that.

I'm still not clear how it would have functioned as an "add-on" to the 3DO: the 3DO was basically an Acorn Archimedes with Dave Needle's "CEL Engine" chips bolted on, while the M2 was a PowerPC board with 3DFX or PowerVR-style 3d acceleration. Maybe it would have just physically latched onto the 3DO somehow, just to share the disc drive bus and some of the RAM? We'll never know now!