Olympic Soccer

Disc Archaeology

Findings from a byte-level analysis of the US retail disc image (570,736,640 bytes / 278,528 blocks). Developed by Silicon Dreams; one of the last North American 3DO releases.

A PlayStation file shipped on the disc

The team-kit color data file exists twice in /Football/Data/:

File	Size	Location	Format
NEWSTRIP	4,356 bytes	block 4763	big-endian (3DO)
NEWSTRIP.PSX	4,356 bytes	block 266563, FS type PSX	little-endian (PlayStation)

The two files contain identical data with every 32-bit word byte-swapped (2,088 of 4,356 bytes differ; e.g. the word 0050B8E8 in the 3DO file appears as E8B85000 in the PSX file). NEWSTRIP.PSX is the little-endian PlayStation original; NEWSTRIP is its big-endian conversion for the 3DO's ARM CPU — and both were copied into the disc layout. It is direct physical evidence that the 3DO version was built from the PlayStation asset pipeline.

Engine and data notes

• The /Football data tree includes formation files named after their formations: F334.REV, F343.REV, F352.REV, F424.REV, F433.REV, F442.REV, F532.REV (3-3-4 through 5-3-2).
• Full staff credits are embedded in the executable (Silicon Dreams under general manager Gavin Cheshire; programming by Giles Park, Andrew Hersee and Rod Mack).
• Player rosters are fictionalized near-misses of real 1996 squads (Argentina fields a "D Ortega").
• The disc carries a /Catapult seek-optimization file (6,981,632 bytes) — the mark of a carefully optimized late-era mastering.

Unallocated space

Only 8,047 blocks (~16 MB) across 17 small gaps, all verified as standard iamaduck filler — a cleanly mastered disc with nothing hidden in its padding.