element14 presents
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2016–2022
26:38 · 828K views · Jul 15, 2016
A Ben Heck Show episode tearing down the Nintendo PlayStation prototype, one of the rarest consoles ever, with its owners Terry and Dan Diebold. Part 2 then gets it working again.
HN uses it to show what the Nintendo PlayStation prototype hardware actually looked like, essentially an SNES with a CD-ROM drive.
3 comments from Hacker News
The first part of the video[1] is also worth watching. It has the current owner explaining how he got it and some careful investigation of the device before the actual repair. Ben Heck has some impressive videos in general, watching him work always makes me wish I was better at electronics. [1] this video
He is completely wrong and must be confusing PS1 with the unreleased add-on, which would make more sense. The Nintendo Playstation is not much more than an SNES with a CD-ROM drive and some extra memory: this video He is probably too young to have grown up with a PS1. I believe reading at the time that Sony poured close to $1bn into developing the PS1 hardware. This made sense-- the Sony brand then was what Apple is now, and this was their first full foray into the games industry. If you compare Star Fox running at 15fps on a SuperFX chip w/ untextured polys to Gran Turismo 2 running at 30fps, you will see why OP is spewing clueless garbage. The PS1 was a monster for its time. It blew away the hardware of Saturn and 3DO, when it came to 3D at least. 3D acceleration was new, and even PC gamers were jealous of what the PS1 had to offer at launch. And arguably it was not even dethroned by the N64 a year later. Get off my lawn.
The concept system actually materialized and was pretty underwhelming: this video The big issue is that most of those early consoles were designed with the expectation that games were on ROM chips directly connected to the CPU bus and mapped into memory so you wouldn't have to load all the assets in RAM (which was miniscule, a few dozen or low hundred kilobytes at most). If you just bolted a CD-ROM onto that architecture it can't be mapped into memory so now you have to cache things in RAM or architect your game to allow for seeking and getting them on demand. Sony did take all the learnings from the SNES CD-ROM and used it to design the Playstation hardware. They added 2 megabytes of RAM, a huge increase over the SNES, which worked much better with games on CD-ROM.