Remember 3DO M2? There was also 3DO MX -- EGM column talks about it -- Also, Nintendo & Microsoft's interest in MX
parallax-scroll
http://s5.tinypic.com/dzwht3.jpg
quote:
"The new hardware picture wouldn't be complete without including 3DO,
so we'll now shift gears over to the MX. Like the M2 before it, 3DO
claim the MX will be its generation's top gun. Our Q-spies report that
the M2's successor is already past the design document state and is
actually living breathing hardware. At the moment, the MX chipset is
physically huge (it can barely fit on a good-sized table) but once 3DO
gets all the bugs out, they'll work on reducing the size (common
practuce in the hardware biz). By all accounts, the MX is a screamer,
with close to 5 million polygons boogying around the screen at once.
Not only can the MX produce N64/M2-type graphic effects like Trilinear
Mip Mapping and Edge Antialiasing, but it can handle such esoteric
realtime graphic functions like Anisotropic filtering, Phong-Lighting
and Surface Antialiasing. The secret to the MX's ultra-high
performance lies in its radical hardware architecture. Unlike all
others before it, the MX's RAM is incorporated into the same chip as
the CPU and graphic processor. Set up in this manner, game information
can now run at the same clock speed as the CPU (a 110 MHz Power PC
604) or the graphic processor (which is basically a 128-bit ASIC). The
MX is less than a year away from completion, but 3DO has already shown
the technology to a large Japanese software company who has shown
interest in developing for the machine and perhaps even buying the
hardware rights outright. The mystery software company is led by a
certain Mr. Hironobu Sakaguchi, but you didn't hear it from me."
Both Nintendo and Microsoft had an interest in the MX.
Further reading:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.video.sony/msg/b4477af5daddd0c7?dmode=source
http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/17783/17783.html
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-103341.html?legacy=zdnn