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Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Pt 1 Teardown

element14 presents

810K subscribers • 2 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Ben Heck, hardware hacker and host
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 10 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

827K views10 years ago1 recommendation

HardwareGame developmentRetro computingElectronicsRetro games and consoles

Ben Heck performs a detailed teardown of the extremely rare Nintendo PlayStation prototype console to inspect its hardware and CD-ROM drive.

In this special episode of 'The Ben Heck Show' Terry and Dan Diebold brought us the Nintendo PlayStation Prototype thought to be one of the rarest consoles ever. We plan on tearing it apart and then in part 2 get it working again. Let's get started! Enter the ZX Spectrum giveaway - bit.ly/29HSE08 Join the element14 community - bit.ly/29S2Vrq

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended for its fascinating look inside one of the rarest gaming console prototypes ever created.

mschwaigon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Repairing the only known prototype of Nintendo PlayStation [video]”

The first part of the video1 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 link to this video
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codesushi42on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Nintendo Switch”

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: link to 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…
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qbasic_foreveron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Sega announces a tiny Sega CD retro console”

The concept system actually materialized and was pretty underwhelming: link to 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 hu…
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