Last year, a friend of mine very kindly gave me my first Panasonic 3DO, an FZ-1 model, in good physical condition but unknown operational condition – it had been stored in a loft for several years. I hadn’t actually seen one of these in-person before.
The Pansonic 3DO is are fairly uncommon, although you can pick them up in non-working condition for fairly cheap – they go for quite a bit when refurbished and modified. Their nostalgia value and interesting game library make them quite collectable.
The 3DO format was originally conceived by The 3DO Company, founded on September 12, 1991 by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins. The company’s objective was to create a next-generation, CD-based video game & entertainment standard which would be manufactured by various partners and licensees; 3DO would collect a royalty on each console sold and on each game manufactured. To game publishers, the low US$3 royalty rate per game was a better deal than the higher royalties paid to Nintendo and Sega when making games for their consoles. The 3DO hardware itself was designed by Dave Needle and RJ Mical (designers of the Atari Lynx), starting from an outline on a restaurant napkin in 1989, and was initially manufactured by Panasonic.
The 3DO FZ-1 suffers from several known issues due to its age, including physically leaky electrolytic capacitors on the PSU section of its mainboard, and a dead PRAM battery. As such, I wanted to take this one apart for inspection, which is easy enough to do – I tested it before doing so and the console seemed to work OK but didn’t output any audio, a common problem typically caused by the aforementioned leaky capacitors.
Mainboard Servicing
As I mentioned before, I wanted to do some preventative maintenance on the mainboard – primarily, replacing all of the aluminium electrolytic capacitors. See my general advice for electrolytic capacitor replacement for more detailed information on the process.
There are several production variants of the 3DO mainboard, each of which have different electrolytic capacitor values and locations, so take note of which you have. The FZ-1 1994 DFUP0648ZA M(a) mainboard in this particular unit was fairly in-depth to recap as it has up to twenty-six through-hole electrolytic capacitors.
You can usually buy capacitor packs for these machines from sellers such as Console5 or on eBay, but I just made up my own by noting the specifications of all of the electrolytic capacitors on the board, and ordering a set of high-quality known-brand parts. If you’re not comfortable doing this work yourself, some sellers also offer it as a service.
As expected, there was some minor electrolyte leakage under C35 (1000uF 6.3V) – I stripped and thoroughly cleaned the area with 99.9& IPA and inspected it for any trace damage before installing new parts, but everything looked OK.
I also replaced the PRAM battery, which is a soldered non-rechargeable CR2032. I had some Amiga CR2032 adapters that replace the original Varta rechargeable battery in these machines, which fit the same footprint as the FZ-1 battery – these have a charge-prevention diode which drops the battery voltage and is not needed on the FZ-1 as there is no battery charge circuit, so I bypassed it with a piece of wire.
Reassembly & Testing
Following the mainboard servicing, I reassembled the FZ-1 ready for testing, which is just the opposite process of its disassembly. I also took the opportunity to thoroughly clean each part of the system as it went back together.
The console now seemed to work perfectly, including the audio output which didn’t work previously, and both on its composite video and S-Video outputs – the optical drive loaded games OK and the controller worked OK.
