The 3DO (1993) was not a console built by one company: it was a standard, licensed to Panasonic, Goldstar and Sanyo, who each sold their own machine. It cost far too much, but it ran on CD from the start, and collected a strange, interesting library.
We have about 230 3DO games on My Abandonware. They are disc images, most of them 100 to 650 MB, and a few games fill several discs.
3DO emulators
Opera, in RetroArch, is the most active 3DO emulator and runs everywhere. 4DO is the simple Windows program it came from. All of them need the console's BIOS.
- Opera: the 3DO core of RetroArch, on Windows, Mac, Linux and more. It grew out of 4DO and gets the most work today. Recommended.
- 4DO (Windows): a stand-alone program with its own window, easy to start with.
- Phoenix (Windows): another emulator, useful when a game behaves badly elsewhere.
The 3DO BIOS
Every 3DO emulator needs the BIOS of one of the machines. The usual file is panafz1.bin or panafz10.bin, from the two Panasonic models.
Other machines work too: goldstar.bin for the Goldstar, sanyotry.bin for the Sanyo. Put the file in the system folder of your emulator, next to the other BIOS files. See our page about BIOS files to get one.
Japanese games sometimes need a second file, a Kanji ROM such as panafz1-kanji.bin, or their text does not show properly.
Running a game
Unzip the game and open the disc image: the .cue file when our archive holds one, or the .iso or .chd file. The console starts from the disc.
Opera and 4DO read .cue with .bin, .iso and .chd. Always prefer the .cue file when there is one: 3DO games often kept their music as audio tracks on the disc, and only the .cue knows where they are.
Some of our games have several discs, marked "Disc 1" and "Disc 2": download them all, and change the disc in the emulator when the game asks. Saves go to a memory area shared by all games, as on the real console, so keep it if you move your files.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. The 3DO scene is small, but well documented.
The Opera documentation lists every BIOS file and setting. 3DO Development Repo collects what is known about the machine and its emulators.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.