Hands-On With the Nintendo PlayStation

An anonymous reader writes: Several months ago, we got a look at a weird bit of technology: a Nintendo PlayStation prototype made in the late '80s during an unusual partnership between Sony and Nintendo. Despite cries of "hoax" and "fake," the console turns out to be real. Engadget got to try it out, X-ray it, and even open the device up to try repairing the CD drive. They brought in Daniel Cheung, a retro console technician from Restart Workshop, and he said, "I got to see the real deal so I can't discredit it. And there's even an OS. You can't question it. It can't be fake. Going back to the chips we saw earlier on the logic board: NEC used to make gaming consoles, and Sony also participated here. And with Nintendo as part of this team, you just can't discredit this."

X-Rayed a computer??

[Nutria]

Isn't that contraindicated to the health and well-functioning of ICs?

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[jones_supa]

I'm pretty sure most ROMs are Flash-based these days.

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[Agripa]

Flash based ROM uses floating gate technology and can be erased just like an EPROM.

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[Agripa]

X-rays will erase floating gate memory but it would take 10s of thousands to 100s of thousands of medical x-rays to do so which is completely feasible with a commercial x-ray generator. The IC however would be damaged requiring high temperature annealing to repair.

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[Joe_Dragon]

Some was thing there was some kind of suicide bomb in there.

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[wonkey_monkey]

Have you been through an aiport with a laptop any time in the last, oh, forever?

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[citizenr]

Yes, this is why you buy new phone and laptop after every flight!

Windows CE for Dreamcast

[tepples]

from the still-waiting-on-the-xbox-dreamcast dept.

That exists. Xbox was contracted from "DirectX box". A few dozen Dreamcast games were made with Windows CE [segaretro.org], which included DirectX.

Don't get it

[ArchieBunker]

This is the social media age. A team of people probably worked on this at one point. How hard would it be to try and track someone down? Same goes for how awful and unplayable some NES games were. Can't we find ANYONE who worked for LJN and ask them some questions? Like all this stuff is centuries old and we're guessing at the original intent?

Re:Don't get it

[ledow]

Qualified electricial engineers who were working within some of the world's largest companies in 1991 (when I was barely in secondary school?). They'd be about 60-something by now. Probably retired. Certainly not in the "social media" generation, in any large way. And probably still subject to NDA's.

Most of those people would have had a small part personally, be long out of the industry, and likely can't talk without checking with legal departments at companies they left years ago anyway. And most likely they are Japanese, I'd assume?

Good luck with that.

There are still coders online from the ZX Spectrum era, writing games and answering questions. Julian Gollop, for instance, has just released an update to Chaos. But... they are either celebrities or not all that interested in a pet project they knocked out over 20 years ago, most probably. Alan Cox used to write ZX Spectrum games. See how much information about that is online from "the man" himself. Not a lot.

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[AK Marc]

And probably still subject to NDA's.

Every NDA I've seen was undated. How long are they good for in practice? Are all the NDA's permanent, or only so far as the knowledge still would give an advantage? At least the military NDAs, though permanent, are tied to classification, so when something's unclassified, the NDA around it ends.

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[ArchieBunker]

So anyone that old is off the grid and unreachable? I doubt anyone would care what NDA they signed back in 1991.

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[tlhIngan]

Qualified electricial engineers who were working within some of the world's largest companies in 1991 (when I was barely in secondary school?). They'd be about 60-something by now. Probably retired. Certainly not in the "social media" generation, in any large way. And probably still subject to NDA's.

Most of those people would have had a small part personally, be long out of the industry, and likely can't talk without checking with legal departments at companies they left years ago anyway. And most likely th

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[sad_]

Qualified electricial engineers who were working within some of the world's largest companies in 1991 (when I was barely in secondary school?). They'd be about 60-something by now. Probably retired. Certainly not in the "social media" generation, in any large way. And probably still subject to NDA's.

6 degrees of seperation should enable you to find these people quickly. somebody always knows somebody who knows somebody that was involved in something.

Hardcoregaming101.net

[rsilvergun]

Did a pretty cool serious of videos on their site interviewing as many folks involved in the Japanese gaming industry from the 80s and 90s they could. They'll selling a dvd of the entire thing but a lot of it's on their site/youtube for free.

It always surprised me

[rsilvergun]

That Nintendo didn't manage to kill Sony as a competitor with legal wrangling. They were always really good at that sorta thing (ask Namco about their Sega Genesis games :P ). Apart from that this is one of those pivotal moments in the game industry I always love to hear about. Like when EA bluffed Sega into giving them a sweetheart deal on Sega Genesis licensing in exchange for not sharing their tech to get around the Genesis lockout chip (turned out the chip didn't work, though to be fair EA didn't know that, but Nintendo woulda told EA to go pound sand).

They should've asked someone who was alive then?

[guruevi]

I knew there were rumors of a Nintendo-Sony hybrid back then in the early 90's. It was going to be announced at a big con but never came to be.

Here's a 2012 article on the subject: http://kotaku.com/5876374/the-... [kotaku.com]

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[Anonymous Coward]

that's the same console.

there were only a few hundred of them made, and they were sitting in a warehouse at sony japan for some time. since the sony/nintendo/philips/nec(hudson) four-way broke down and they all backstabbed each other, only to eventually come together to finalize the cdrom format, the units were never sold as nintendo didn't want anything to do with anyone after that debacle.

nintendo didn't touch optical again until the gamecube, and they decided to use their own format because they were st

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[spiritplumber]

Philips did the CD-i and if you want to know what kind of games came out for it, just look for CD-i on youtube.

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[SScorpio]

The Sega-CD did have its own coprocessors that enabled more complex games.

I can't find sources, but I remember reading years ago that several prototype SNES-CD games were later made on the Playstation. For some reason Biohazard(Resident Evil) keeps springing to mind, but my Google-fu is failing to find any information as all I see are articles about this prototype hardware.

The trouble with early CD Systems

[rsilvergun]

was RAM. You just didn't have enough RAM to do complex games. So you got a lot of games that were just like their cartridge ports but with some FMV and CD audio thrown in. The only exceptions were RPGs, but those hadn't really caught on yet. There were some indications of success with games like Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD, but the load times were terrible and the game wasn't enough better than MK on the SNES/Genesis to justify the $200 price tag for the CD. Not when MKII for SNES was on it's way. If you w

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[SScorpio]

That seems quite unlikely, or at least the titles developed for the SNES-CD would have almost nothing in common with the later PS1 products due to the massive leap in hardware capabilities (e.g. 3D renditions on SNES hardware was... not great, even with SuperFX in the mix).

Not later games, but early games in the original PlayStation's life. The SNES-CD had it's own processor which would have provided some early 3D support.

I did know about SD2, I believe I also heard that the SNES version of Magic Knights Rayearth was also going to be a CD game that they then cut back.

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[drewsup]

Nintendo never kept up hardware or gamewise, they bet the whole farm on Mario, and lost.

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[Bing Tsher E]

You are so right. There is nothing out there called Pokemon. Harvest Moon is just an almost lost prototype that was never produced. Animal Crossing is just vaporware.

I will admit that Nintendo doesn't typically produce dickthrust combat games.

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[Bing Tsher E]

Yes, there was a Playstation 2 Harvest Moon, once.

There is a Harvest Moon subculture. It's mostly female players.

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[Billly Gates]

I give credit where it's due for the WII in 2006. Cutting edge where Nintendo set the stage of not losing $$$$ for each console sold where Sony and MS lost billions hoping to make it up by game royalities. Notice today they have crappy low end hardware with integrated graphics.

Nintendo recovered for a few years as a result and needed it badly in the middle of the last decade. I recall it outselling the PS 4 briefly after the surge during the holiday season as parents noticed the WII was $100 when the great

technical details

[Gravis Zero]

someone did a rundown of the internals. [tumblr.com]

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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