It's not often that the Panasonic 3DO gets a mention these days when it comes to people porting or remaking games for different consoles. We hear a lot about the Dreamcast and N64, but people seem to forget about the 3DO. To be honest, I think even Panasonic have forgotten about it, but Eyepatch Entertainment is doing their best to keep it alive and kicking by bringing Super Mario 64 to the system.
Showcased on ReCollect64, the game has been built up from assets taken from the Super Mario 64 decompilation project and rendered using the 3Do's cel engine. It's odd to see the game on the 3DO because, while the console had 3D games like Tomb Raider, it's not as capable as the PS1 or N64 when it comes to producing polygons. The result means that we're seeing a 2D Mario that gives the illusion of the game being 3D, and ends up looking like Duke Nukem meets Mario.
So far, Eyepatch Entertainment has Peach's Castle and Bob-omb Battlefield working on the 3DO and on the 3DO emulator Opera. I say 'working'; it's all very rough and there isn't any sound yet, but this is a mammoth task to undertake, and the fact that Eyepatch Entertainment have got this far is amazing! According to the YouTube video description of the product, 'The hard part isn't the geometry, it's the 3DO's fill rate: its cel engine pays per on-screen pixel, so big close-up surfaces are murder. Getting it to hold a framerate on real hardware took a lot of very specific tricks and a lot of builds.'
Eyepatch Entertainment have also been working on a PS1 port of the game which looks more like you would expect a port of the game to look. It's glitchy as heck, the same way that the Ocarina of Time PS port looks like a bit of a fever dream, but it runs with music and cutscenes. This one looks less like Doom and more like the game that we recognise, so that's promising!
Keep an eye out on the Eyepatch Entertainment YouTube channel for more progress updates!
