The Nintendo PlayStation's CD drive is now functional



It's been while since the Nintendo PlayStation was discovered, and while it could boot Super Nintendo cartridges perfectly fine, no one was able to get the system's CD drive to work. After messing with the console for months, the man in charge of trying to get the CD drive to function, Ben Heck, said that after simply moving some cables around, he was able to get the Nintendo PlayStation to read discs. Of course, there's no known software for the prototype console, but audio CDs loaded up. Ben Heck then attempted to burn discs of two homebrew games, which were created after a BIOS for the system was leaked online, about a year ago. Super Boss Gaiden, and Magic Floor were tested, with the former resulting in an error, and the latter astonishingly working on the console, with only minor graphical errors. At the end of the video, Heck muses that he should lend the Nintendo PlayStation to an emulator developer, so that programmers can learn more about how the system works. However, he will soon be displaying the console at the Midwest Gaming Expo, where it will be returned to its initial owner, Terry Diebold.
 

smf

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And Sony wanting profits from the CD-based games, can you blame Nintendo for not wanting that?

No, but you can blame them for signing the contract in the first place. They were either too stupid to realise what they were signing, or they thought they could screw Sony over at a later date.

If was to be japanese, why the bios/system are mostly in English them?

It could be memory usage, it could be that they wanted to only write the code once and not have to localise it and it's safe to assume that everyone around the world can cope with english. It might be that not all of the code was written by japanese speaking people, engineers from america and europe go to work in japan all the time. If you're trying to get a product out quickly then you would give that job to the people that can do it quickly, most of those screens were never going to be seen by end users.

where are the rest of the 200 prototypes made? official confirmation from sony or nintendo?

All of them were supposed to be destroyed. Like how all the PS1/PS2/PS3 development kit is to be returned and destroyed. All it takes is one person, working at the recycling company that destroys them, to pay off a security guard.

So it's possible that some escaped, but either someone isn't aware of what they have or they want to keep quiet about it for some reason. Nobody expected the Sega Pluto prototype to turn up, nobody knows whether a Sega Neptune or Jupiter will turn up.

I don't see why Sony or Nintendo would officially comment on something like this,
 
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FAST6191

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Missed this one yesterday. Good to see more pulling apart happening.

because this is stupid! you never opened an old eletronic ? everything on the age of N64 (maybe even the GC?) is too simple to take part that they used uncommon screws to try avoid that any people just open the thing up, if you think a guy can damage a SNES(or relative) by simples opening it with a screwdriver? maybe if you ask Hulk to do that , but not someone that live by opening eletronics ...
really looks like thes eguys made all a show (lol) to show it ... too many unnecessary things idk

There are any number of arcade boards with self destruct wiring, there are many older electronics, especially low volume prototypes, with UV sensitive components like UV erasable eproms, prototypes and demonstration devices often have a kill switch inbuilt to prevent theft, depending upon the orientation you can get some clues how to pull something apart before you get to the "well this cable is quite tight and now snapped".

At some level "it was cool and we had access* therefore" was probably the dominant reasoning but there are valid technical reasons for doing so.

*depending upon the rules in your country a lot of electronics people these days are getting xray gear to test BGA devices, and prior to that, or in those places opposed to fun currently, they would often be friendly with a vet or a dentist or someone that had such toys for these sorts of purposes.
 

AkikoKumagara

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The skeptics are funny, lol. You really think this thing would have been conceptualized but never prototyped. Prototyping is an early stage in R&D, usually happening before many core concepts are even finalized. There are early prototype versions of most hardware devices that look and perform radically differently than what we, the consumer, get out of the end product.
 

Issac

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Slither, they have tested the cartridge and such stuff too, at the very beginning.
Also it isn't Ben Heck who found it, it is someone else but Ben have gotten the honor to try to fix the device just because of his skills and show.

The solution wasn't just to mess with the cables, in previous episodes they replaced a lot of parts inside. Changing the cd control chip, capacitors... And I take it he replaced a lot of cables now (he said he would probably do that) since they seemed to cause random problems.

I suggest watching all the Ben Heck videos about this console, they're really interesting. And then check some of the other console hacks and fixes.
 
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gamesquest1

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because this is stupid! you never opened an old eletronic ? everything on the age of N64 (maybe even the GC?) is too simple to take part that they used uncommon screws to try avoid that any people just open the thing up, if you think a guy can damage a SNES(or relative) by simples opening it with a screwdriver? maybe if you ask Hulk to do that , but not someone that live by opening eletronics ...
really looks like thes eguys made all a show (lol) to show it ... too many unnecessary things idk

if you have every worked fixing consumer electronics you would know how "paranoid" the normal end user can be, while I might be totally confident I could fix it in 5 minutes , the owner demands I hold it with anti-static wrist straps and other random crap they read on the internet and want to sound like they know how this stuff works :teach:

and with a one of a kind device I couldn't really blame him,

as for just moving it fixing it, that's actually something else that's kinda common, when disassembling something you may discover that it suddenly works, and as soon as you put it back together it stops again, this can be for a number of reasons, bad solder joints, small tears in flex cables etc that can be "fixed" simply by moving the wire etc, obviously this isn't a permanent fix but its enough to give you a lead to look at what changed between it being packed in and opened up

as for all the yellowing etc, when this was first discovered I had exactly the same reservations, as their original story was "its been packed in a box forever" but then they shared that the original owner olaf had had it on display in his office, which then explains away the excessive yellowing with a shadow of a controller

basically for all the people vouching for this being genuine you would have to be paying off a lot of respected people, and if it ever came out it was a fake they could face charges for fraud as they have no doubt benefitted a lot from free holidays etc on the premise this was genuine, not to mention it could easily have been debunked by olaf or sony straight away, at this point unless some proof of it being fake was uncovered anyone with conspiracy theories should just quit it XD
 
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Saiyan Lusitano

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This piece of classic video game tech should be in a museum for everyone to glance their eyes at. I personally have never been too interested in this because there's not even a single game that it officially had to demonstrate its capabilities.

However, surely Nintendo must have made one beta CD game for the game console though they've never showed it to the public nor did anyone get ahold of it.
 

gamesquest1

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honestly I think the homebrew examples like super boss gaiden is probably all the system would have achieved, and stuff like the mega cd/CDi games so maybe basic FMV support and CD audio, obviously people fantasise about it too much and think stuff like "it would have been on par with the official playstation", while in all honesty it was the playstation in name only, from what has been revealed from this prototype, I think its clear that it would have been just another basic CD 16bit era addon, no doubt it was the "humiliation" from Nintendo that drove Sony to want to produce something more than just another crappy CD addon
 
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Saiyan Lusitano

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i know someone who got to play with this. this is gaming history and i am so glad to have read about it and find out that someone is enjoying it!

-another world

What did he/she play on it?

honestly I think the homebrew examples like super boss gaiden is probably all the system would have achieved, and stuff like the mega cd/CDi games so maybe basic FMV support and CD audio, obviously people fantasise about it too much and think stuff like "it would have been on par with the official playstation", while in all honesty it was the playstation in name only, from what has been revealed from this prototype, I think its clear that it would have been just another basic CD 16bit era addon, no doubt it was the "humiliation" from Nintendo that drove Sony to want to produce something more than just another crappy CD addon

You're likely on point but even at the very least there would be improvements like CD audio quality over cartridge audio quality.

I wouldn't expect to be at the level of PS1 but seeing games running on its capabilities would be nice.
 

Captain_N

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This is so cool all we need is a clone of this system.
There kinda is a way to load roms off a cd on a snes. I have a Super Wild Card DX2 and if i had the disc dual add on i could be loading roms off a cd rom. Instead i use a Parallel port Iomega Zip 100MB drive. The wildcard and other copiers like it are sorta doing what the RAM cart is doing but a lot more. Copiers emulate a cartridge

it be even cooler if someone figured out how to connect a cd rom drive to the expansion port on the snes. make a device with a slimline cd rom drive that loads roms from a cd drive to on-board ram and then streams it though the bottom io port. My guess is the Bottom IO port is to slow for streaming rom data.
 

SSG Vegeta

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There kinda is a way to load roms off a cd on a snes. I have a Super Wild Card DX2 and if i had the disc dual add on i could be loading roms off a cd rom. Instead i use a Parallel port Iomega Zip 100MB drive. The wildcard and other copiers like it are sorta doing what the RAM cart is doing but a lot more. Copiers emulate a cartridge

it be even cooler if someone figured out how to connect a cd rom drive to the expansion port on the snes. make a device with a slimline cd rom drive that loads roms from a cd drive to on-board ram and then streams it though the bottom io port. My guess is the Bottom IO port is to slow for streaming rom data.

I meant it'd be cool if clone manufacturers cloned this device so that we could have our own Nintendo PlayStations. It's a shame that Nintendo & Sony split because now we're looking at what could've been.
 
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