Need help with 3DO Station 5.0 (NTSC)

[dhau]

How are you, gentlemen? All your help belongs to us.

I am in a bit of stupor with the unit I aquired a while ago from eBay. It's a 3DO Station 5.0. It comes with FDDI linking cable for (I guess) older Mac with NuBus FDDI card... And no documentation whatsoever.

The unit starts, and depending on configuration of two switches (encrypted/unencrypted and debug on/off) it goes in one of the following modes:

- debug: "MAG-DEB 1.5, 6/23/93, DRAM: 2MB, VRAM: 1MB "
- normal encrypted: "3DO-NTSC-1.0fc2 encrypted"
- normal unenctypted: "3DO-NTSC-1.0fc2 unencrypted"

Now I expected that I should be able to run retail discs (originals) in normal encrypted mode, but if I put the disc in, station doesn't seem to recognize that it's there.

Question: is that normal? Or is my station partially toasted?

Not a big loss if it is (~350US$), but a good reason to forget the whole 3DO mania...

[dhau]

Ok, let me ask again, very simple this time :)

Can 3DO Developer Station run retail games?????

[ASSEMbler]

Given you were the one who outbid me on ebay:dance:no idea!:shrug:

However, all my debugs do.

[dhau]

Lol, looks like I saved you from a glitching devstation :) Dang!!!

[lwizardl]

hey dhau I have a 3do station 4.0 with manuals (4 volumes of 3" 3-ring binders) I have the FDDI cable & card with the macintosh computer. Let me get the manauals out of storage in the morning (raining hard outside now) and I'll see if we can't figure it out. I've never messed with my station since i bought it becuase I was told their wasn't a way to burn discs with anything homebrew on it, because they need to be signed to work, which i'm seeing seems false.

[lwizardl]

or a phantom SDK (custom sdk from the freedo emu people)
http://www.freedo.org/forum2/index.php?topic=783.0

[cdoty]

This has never been released, that I know of.

[lwizardl]

no it hasn't been released yet but will be soon it seems to have been writen by the same person that made the uncdrom tool for pc. here is a link to where the SDK will be http://www.felixl.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

[cdoty]

If it's legally reverse engineered, how would he be breaking any law?

Thanks for the link. I can't wait to hear more on this!

[lwizardl]

cdoty no problem, I've been waiting for a while and I want it also. But we can
wait for the time for him to release it.

[cdoty]

Because it will either break or reproduce the encryption, which is still proprietary of Matsushita.

That means that FreeDo has to patch the bios to skip the protection check... Hmm, that might be worth looking into. Never thought about that before.

[lwizardl]

dhau you still intrested in this? I found my binders of 3do dev stuff
4 3inch binders full of dev papers

[gamemaster]

Is there a way to get it to read game discs?