Weasel @wildweasel@computerfairi.es

Everybody needs a dramatic hype guy to pump them up in times of great need.

"I want to take the trash out but I'm so unmotivated to move..."
"IN THE GREAT BATTLE AGAINST THE REFUSE OF DAYS PAST, THE ENEMY GROWS MOMENT BY MOMENT, OUR HERO SHALL NOT FALTER IN THE FACE OF SUCH ADVERSITY! THEIR FORCES SHALL BE DECIMATED, LIFTED AS FEATHERS AND PLUNGED INTO THE CYLINDRICAL ABYSS BEYOND THE WALLS!"

By all of that, I can make an informed assumption about what the 3DO Content Library really is: a ready-made compilation of existing libraries of assets, images, sounds, music, and video clips, provided by the 3DO Company to its licensed developers. Perhaps its container formats are specifically formats already meant for use with the 3DO hardware, to remove the need for conversion?

Such a collection existing would certainly explain a lot about some 3DO games' aesthetics. Videos and all.

I can at least glean some things from reading the other files on the CD Browser disc; there's an Excel spreadsheet on there with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all contributors to the Content Library. This includes dozens of photographers, a well-known clip-art library, Sound Ideas (best known for producing the sound library used in Doom), and multiple stock video libraries, including Prelinger.

I would assume, the same Prelinger as this one: https://archive.org/details/prelinger?tab=about

The trickiest part of the whole thing is, since this entire thing is from 1993-1994, it targets Mac OS 7.x, on a hardware generation that I don't have. My oldest color Mac is my G3 that only goes back to 8.6, and my only 7.x-running Mac is my Plus which probably isn't strong enough to run the browser, let alone mount the CDs.

I did manage to get 7.6 installed to a Basilisk II instance, but nope, stuff still crashes in that... Probably need a real-steel Quadra or Performa here.

Through some hex-editing I've at least learned that the Clip Art collection seems to be in some version of Adobe Illustrator (hence my installing CS2 to attempt to force-feed it those files), and the sounds are allegedly uncompressed, but I'm unable to get anything to load even with that knowledge. I think these are in container formats that the CD Browser would know how to work with. If only the Browser didn't crash all the time.

update: the programs work, the files i was trying to open do not.

https://archive.org/details/3DO-Content-Library

this collection of 100-some CDs (and a further 140 not yet dumped, apparently?!) is what i was targeting - the discs are meant for a Macintosh (since that's what the 3DO development toolkit ran on!), but beyond getting the CD Browser and Text Index to start (and then crash when I search for anything!), I can't figure out how to browse it at all.

I do not know what it is specifically, whether CPU, hard drive, or format limitations, but StuffIt archives are the most miserably slow archive format I've ever extracted.

And I used to extract those "50 Rar files in a trench coat" archives from BitTorrents of PC games, like, 20 years ago.

Presently downloading and installing Adobe Creative Suite 2 on this 2004 iBook G4. For reasons.

It has taken multiple hours.