In the 3DO collecting community, one single variant of the system has been eluding even the most diehard collectors for decades now. It is called the DMB-800 produced by a company by the name of DMB Korea Ltd. This unit is a combination music and Video CD player as well as a 3DO game console.

The search for the console seems to have been started after some members of the 3DO community found an old Korean website including photos of the owner’s game collection. With little to no information aside from these photos, learning more about this console would prove to be extremely difficult.

At first, some members of the community theorized that this lost variant might have a connection to an unreleased Samsung 3DO prototype. The main reasoning behind this theory was that Samsung is based in Korea, and the prototype shares a few similarities with the DMB model, namely the digital display and similarly shaped disk tray.

On December 18, 2020, A user in the 3DO Community Discord named Archive3DO discovered another image of the DMB-800 on a Korean social media website called Naver Cafe. Another user, Chad3DO, tried reaching out to the original poster but they declined to give any information and later removed the post from the platform. Although the post itself didn’t share any new information about the system, this new photo had a never before seen shot of the back of the system, revealing the company name “DMB KOREA LTD.” With this new information, we were one step closer to revealing the truth behind this rare piece of hardware.

For the next few years, users in the 3DO discord were finding Samsung karaoke units that shared similarities to the original prototype. This was in hopes that it would answer some more questions about the origins of the DMB-800 as many believed Samsung had a part in creating it. This was all until October 22nd, 2023 when I had discovered another huge piece of the puzzle for sale in China of all places. This was a rebranded Goldstar GPI-1200M portable CD-i unit produced by the same company, DMB Korea Ltd. The model number on this device, interestingly, was DMB-1000 which showed it had at least some sort of connection to the DMB-800 3DO.

With the discovery of the DMB CD-i, it brought Samsung’s involvement with the DMB 3DO into question. It seemed much more plausible that Goldstar was behind it, and those suspicions were proven correct when I had stumbled upon this:

This unit is called the Goldstar GVD-200P and it used the exact same shell as the DMB-800. This proved the design was at least partially based on Goldstar hardware. Discord user Archive3DO was able to purchase one of these units for himself but inside there were no traces of 3DO hardware to be found.

As things stand right now, this is all the information we have been able to gather about the DMB-800 3DO itself. During this search, we have also been trying to uncover more about DMB Korea Ltd. itself, however, there are very few records of Korean companies going back to the mid 90s and searches were mostly filled with unrelated results. One user by the name of glen6623 decided to try and get to the bottom of it by hiring a local business to try and dig up some old company records. A few months later, he received a report that gave some interesting information. We learned they were established on May 23rd, 1996, the name of the CEO and three directors, an old street address, an old phone number, and the fact that the company had been dissolved at some point. Unfortunately the information given in the report hasn’t lead to any new details on the DMB-800 but it does give some interesting insight into who they were.

If anyone has any more information about DMB Korea Ltd, the DMB-800, or the DMB-1000, myself and the rest of the 3DO community would be thrilled to hear about it!