In a previous thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=138548, you said this:
I’ve always been wondering, how powerful/good was the M2? I remember at the time it sounded really ambitious (96?). Can it be compared to an existing console, in your opinion? What where some features about it that the public didn’t know about or never got around to releasing?
I normally don’t do this, but I will give it a little bump just once… as it is directed to one person who may not have seen it yet.
Yikes, I just happened upon this now. You know, you could have emailed me…
anyhow, the basic answer is that it was very very good. I worked for a while on a racing game, which got far enough to be demoed to the press and written up quite a bit (for instance, here ).
M2 could have come out as early as mid-96 or so, if Matsushita had really wanted it to. And it was significantly more powerful than any system prior to the dreamcast (98).
It had two powerPC processors (I’m not sure any console system to this day has been truly multiprocessor, at least as far as the main CPU is concerned), 8 megs of RAM, and a very very fast graphics chip that could draw, in real-world numbers, something like 200 or 300 thousand triangles per second. It had an incredibly elaborate audio system, was planned to have DVD playback, and had a super-funky controller, a few pictures of which can be seen here .
One thing it definitely wasn’t was backward compatible, by the way… the first generation 3DO system used an ARM processor and was basically totally unrelated to M2 in all ways.
Email…? What is this “email” that you speak of? 
Thanks for the info. Do you remember which processors they had? Clock speed? Let see, 98 ish, would have that been a G3?
Did any of the prototypes ever make it out the door in the sense of do you know if they are all accounted for or where a couple sold?
I know they wouldn’t be much good to anyone without software or anything…
According to this page (about 1/3 of the way down the page), it says that the Turbografx 16 had two 8-bit processors and Neo Geo had both a 16-bit processor and an 8-bit processor.
Of course, you could make a case for there never being a successful dual CPU console system. 
Actually, didn’t the Sega Saturn have twin Hitachi processors?
Once again, Sucessful is an objective term…
Or better yet, a relative term…
M2 had twin 66 Mhz PPCs. I’m not sure what happened to all the prototypes. Plenty of production units exist, and were sold commercially, but they were sold in Japan as a multimedia kiosk system of some sort, not a game system.
I have one functional standalone prototype machine sitting in my cabinet. There were a couple of other ones floating around the company, and I have no idea what happened to them.
I also have a burned CD of the racing game, which is the only game that I can play on said prototype unit. However, if I plug in my old mac, I can boot up the M2 development environment and play with a bunch of sample apps, most of which I myself wrote, including one that does real time 2d morphing, and one which is the most fun little 2D shooter game ever.
Thats pretty nifty. I’d love to see it sometime.
Opinions on why 3DO sold it off? Where they cashstrapped at the time or just too good of an offer to pass up?
Yes, and yes. We would not exist today if we hadn’t gotten the huge cash infusion from selling it. In fact, rumor has it that our doors would have closed the very next day, although I don’t know that for certain.
Oh, and any time you want to stop by the 3DO main office in Redwood City, I’ll give you the M2 tour
Thanks. If I ever get down to your neck of the woods I’ll be sure to let you know.