The History of 3DO Emulators

The first 3DO project to be developed was 3DOpen, created in November 1999 by Invictus for possibly Windows and Linux systems. In his first month, he had already figured out how to run a 3DO game and which graphic model to choose, Glide or OpenGL. At the time, he also created a document called 3DO notebook, with all the technical information he had collected about the console. He managed to make good progress with the CD layout and even started building a debugger. However, as he was unable to see much progress, he felt pressured by the dozens of emails he received per day and also because he had a wife and children to take care of, he decided to give up on the project. At the time, he even thought about building another emulator that someone had asked him to build and that would be easier to build, but in the end he gave up on 3DOpen altogether. The project lasted from November 1st to 29th.

FreeDO (2003)

FreeDO

The first 3DO emulator to be released began to be developed in 2002 by Allen Wright and Felix Lazarev, with support from John Sammons and Alexandr Troosh. It all started when Allen's wife wanted a 3DO console to remember her youth. After buying a second-hand device, Allen began to admire the original hardware, which was way ahead of its time when it was released, and decided to develop an emulator for it. He spent a few months studying the work done a few years earlier by the Japanese Kashi and the Russian Troosh in an attempt to develop an emulator for the console. In April 2002, Felix appeared and offered to lead the coding of the Panasonic console's hardware, and together with Troosh and Jammons, they began the project, developing the first alpha version of the emulator in a few days, still in April.

FreeDO (Menus)

A year later, it was finally released publicly in April 2003 with its first beta version for Windows. For minimum performance of the emulator, a Pentium 3 with 1.0GHz was recommended, and for near 100% performance, a Pentium 4 with also 1.0GHz was recommended. RAM memory was 64 MB or higher. In May and June 2003, two more versions were released, 1.3 and 1.4. When it was released, it did not yet offer full support for CD-ROMs, but it could already run files in .ISO format. From February 2004, in version 1.6.2, it began to provide full support for the device. In October 2004, another version was released, 1.7, and the project took a break. In August 2006, Maxim Grishin, Altmer, joined the group. At the end of that month, another version of FreeDO was released, 1.8. In January 2007, version 1.9 was released.

FreeDO (Road Rash/ Control Configuration )

FreeDO was already in development for ports to Pocket PCs, MacOS X and GP2X, but this never happened. After that, the emulator took a long hiatus, returning in 2009. At that time, they changed the emulator icon and the team's brand to The FreeDO Project. The first version released in this return was in September 2009, as 2.0.2 Alpha. The final version came out in January 2010, as 2.1. And since then, FreeDO has never had an update, being later surpassed by 4DO, the emulator that became the 3DO brand in the emulation world. After its termination, the team decided to open its source code in November 2010. FreeDO had several options for use. In the video section, there were improvements in quality, with the higher resolution option, in addition to support for frame skip and others. It supported save states, screenshots (formerly called snapshots) and required a bios to run games, like all consoles via compact disc (CD).

FreeDO (Interfaces)

FreeDO also had the ARM function, in reference to the technology used in its main processor, which gives the option of increasing the CPU's MHz, bringing greater speed to games, hence the requirement of a good computer to run it. When it was finished, it emulated practically everything 100% of the emulator, the CPU, the DSP (which is a digital microprocessor), PBUS (which makes the communication of all the joypads supported on the console), CD-ROM, DAC (which gives visual clarity to the games), among others. Regarding its front-end, it added a background to it from 2004, with three different backgrounds that alternate between each other each time the emulator was run. Regarding its logo, it changed only once, in 2009. The only fork the emulator had was 4DO in 2011. Regarding its compatibility, of the 83 games tested, 45 ran well, 19 so-so and 19 bad. They ran 50% of the games tested well, which makes them an average emulation performance.

4DO (2011)

4DO

4DO (or fourDO) was developed in 2011 by Johnny Dude, after the release of the source code of the FreeDO emulator. Its first release was made in August 2011 for Windows. In its first version it was simple, with only loading bios and saving state. Its interesting features were the addition of video, audio and input plug-ins, like in PSX emulators. Later this feature was removed. In its first version, the emulator was signed as FourDO (in written form), changing this in the second version, released in the same month, to 4DO (with Four written in numerical form). Its first beta was released in October 2011 for Windows. In February 2012, the newly created 3DO Play emulator, by Viktor, was incorporated into the core source code based on FreeDO, bringing improvements to the emulator, with support for some languages, such as French, Russian, Chinese and Portuguese, the latter thanks to the contribution of Enio Marconcini, in the same month.

4DO (3DO/Interface)

Later, Spanish and German were also added. From March 2012 onwards, it also began releasing its versions in installer mode, allowing the emulator to be installed on the system in addition to the usual unpacking method. In September 2013, there was a hiatus of over two years without any releases. The last release of 4DO was in December 2015. The latest version already supported scarling mode, screenshot, frame advance, pause, volume control and configuration of up to 6 joypads. The emulator had 44 releases in total, 13 alphas and 31 betas. Of the 263 games released for the console, 181 were tested on the 4DO, and of these, 172 ran well, 6 averagely and 3 did not run well. The emulator even had a version for Android developed from September 2015, but it never went ahead. It was also developing a version for Linux, which was also never released.

4DO (Menus)

In December 2014, it began running on LibRetro/RetroArch. The project had been developed since early 2014 on top of the penultimate version of 4DO, 1.3.2.3 from September 2013, and was known as 4DO/LibFreedo. Due to the closure of the 4DO project, the LibRetro group rewrote, restructured and added new features in October 2018, changing its name to Opera in February 2020 to avoid confusion between the two projects. Opera would then be a fork of 4DO. The 4DO/LibFreedo project was also worked on in 2014 by the MacOS multi-emulator OpenEmu, but was never released in its project. It appears that in 2021 OpenEmu was still developing this project, named by them as 4DO-Core. 4DO is considered the most popular 3DO emulator.

3DO Play (2011)

3DO Play

The 3DO Play project was created by Russian Viktor Ivanov in 2011, with the first beta version released in October 2011 for Windows. The project was born as a fork of FreeDO. Since the first version, the English version of the emulator was released together with the Russian version.

3DO Play (Interface/About)

The emulator supported extensions such as .BIN and .ISO, required BIOS to run, had CPU acceleration, volume control, save states, screenshot, skip frame and configuration of only 1 joypad input. An interesting fact about it is that for running joypads it brought with it the JoyToKey application, which is used for external joypad configurations mainly used in PC games without this support, configuring the keyboard keys as joypad commands.

3DO Play (Control/Menu Configuration)

3DO Play was the emulator that had the shortest life. Maybe a year since the beginning of the project. In February 2012, it merged with the 4DO emulator, and became part of Johnny Dude's team. The last release of 3DO Play was on February 12, and the release of the 4DO version merged with 3DO Play was eight days later, on February 20. Eight versions of 3DO Play were released in total. Victor remained with the 4DO project until its end in December 2015.

Phoenix (2014)

Phoenix

The Phoenix project, also known as PhoenixEmuProject, was started by Russian Grishin Maxim Leonidovich, or as he is known in the West, Maxim Grishin or simply Altmer, in August 2006. At the time he was part of the FreeDO project, and was helped by the project members in his emulator. He had hoped to re-found the FreeDO emulator, but ended up not getting support from the group, and so he continued his project alone. The name Phoenix comes from the game Phoenix 3 for the console that Altmer won along with the console in his childhood.

Phoenix (ColecoVision/Antarctic Adventure)

Phoenix (SG-1000/Wonder Boy)

Phoenix (Game Gear/Batman Returns)

Phoenix (Sega Master System/Monaco GP)

The emulator was only released eight years after its launch, in early 2014 for Windows and Linux. At that time, Altmer had already rewritten the emulator from scratch. The emulator is able to develop 100% compatibility with the console's games. In July 2015, it began supporting 64-bit mode for Windows and Linux. In April 2016, it introduced the possibility of being translated into other languages, through the translation.xml file, which never ended up happening.

Phoenix (3DO/Road Rash)

Phoenix (Atari Jaguar/Rayman)

Phoenix (Controls Configuration)

In May 2016, it became a multi-console emulator, initially adding ColecoVision, followed by Master System in August 2016, SG-1000 and Game Gear in October 2016, and Atari Jaguar in May 2017. In May, it also began to provide CD-ROM access for 3DO games, something that was never actually implemented. All emulators ran almost 100% of the games. The emulator also supported frame skipping, save states, screenshots, full-screen mode, filters such as 2xSAI, among others.

Phoenix (3DO/Super Street Fighter II Turbo)

Phoenix's only drawback was that it was only available in Russian. Its performance recommendations mainly require a processor of 1.6 GHz or higher, and a 64-bit processor for Jaguar emulation. Its last release was dated June 2017. The emulator had 36 beta versions released in total. In January 2018, it gained a version for MacOS X. In February 2016, Phoenix was released for Android and placed on the Play Store. The difference is that it was released in a series of separate emulators. Initially, it released Real3DOPlayer from 3DO and NumPadPlayer from ColecoVision. In October 2016, GearMasterPlayer from SMS and GG arrived. And finally, in June 2017, IrataJaguar from Atari Jaguar arrived. All were updated until November 2019, when they were discontinued, leaving the Play Store.

Other Emulators

3D'OH

In addition to the projects already mentioned, in August 2013 a very promising 3DO emulator project called 3D'OH emerged, created by Guaripolo for GNU (similar to the UNIX system) and Linux systems. It was created specifically to run on portable systems, such as PandoraOS, SteamOS and Debian 8. A port for Dreamcast was also developed in January 2014 using the KallistiOS library for creating games for the console. The project promised audio, video and input output based on the SDL library, as well as optional video output in OpenGL. It was a fork of FreeDO, but also used some code from 4DO. The emulator was released as an alpha in August 2013 and a second release in January 2014, with support for 44,100 Hz stereo sound, joypad, keyboard and even some games like Gex, Need For Speed, Fifa International Soccer and Doom, as shown in the prints on the project page. Unfortunately, it never had a public release and the project ended in the second version of it.

The 3DO was the last console of the older generations to gain an emulator. This is most likely due to two factors. The lack of popularity that the console had, coupled with the difficulty of creating emulators for CD-based consoles. See the examples of the PS1, Sega Saturn, Sega CD and PC Engine CD, which had their considerable emulations many years after their release.

Regarding multi-emulators, in addition to the aforementioned RetroArch, which supported the console from December 2014, MESS also supported the console from 2007.