Serge van den Boom informs me that he has written a Linux filesystem driver for the Opera filesystem. This is the filesystem that was used for CD-ROMs that played in the 3DO video game console.
I am so very jealous. I have wanted to write the filesystem driver for as long as I have been investigating old multimedia. No matter; the important thing is that the work is done. Now I have a backlog of at least 9 3DO games that I need to investigate. I am most curious to know if the 3DO port of Wing Commander III used the same custom FMV format and video codec as its PC counterpart.
Ever have any success with the Wing Commander 3 3DO footage? I’ve been forever trying to find a way to play it outside the game, bit more really the wc3 PSX version which houses all the movies in a *.lib file. Both the PSX version and 3do version have better quality video compression than the PC version. I managed to use a program called unCDROM on a 3do sampler disk that contains the wc3 3DO demo. It seems that the video files are all separate (for the demo at least) but I have no idea if this is also true for the full 3DO version. And they have a *.mov extension, though I have no Idea how to play the files as I don’t know the exact codec or compression used. It seems unlikely though that it uses the Xan codec.
You can get the Sampler ISO here : http://download.wcnews.com/files/wing3/WC33DODemo.zip
Please let me know If you figure anything out.
Thanks, AD
awesomead@hotmail.com
I have been meaning to get back to studying all of my 3DO games and searching for weird and wacky new FMV formats. Hopefully soon. Stay tuned…
Still tuned… ;)