12 ms·
Nintendo Play Station Super NES CD-ROM Prototype
- branon 7y agoThis is pretty insane. Ostensibly this is even rarer than other Sony oddities such as as the Net Yaroze[0] or the Japanese PSX[1]. I wonder if it truly is the last Nintendo/Sony "PlayStation" in existence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Yaroze [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSX_(digital_video_recorder) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSX_(digital_video_recorder)
- djmips 7y agoNet Yaroze is not particularly rare.
- bsagdiyev 7y agoI have a PSX sitting next to my TV right now, hard drive surprisingly still works and everything. It's an interesting console, mine is a later model (DESR-7700) and can even write to a memory card to play later on the PSP while on the go. Funny enough while I was at SIE, I brought the console in and no one had seen it before. Sat on my desk and started a few conversations from people walking by checking it out.
- radicaldreamer 7y agoThe PS2 Linux Kit was amazing
- stuaxo 7y agoBefore the retro collectors market went crazy a friend got a net yaroze in a carboot sale for a five quid. That day he came back with about 10 playstations.
- scoutt 7y agoIt looks like something from a weird parallel universe.
- jjuel 7y agoTo be fair somewhere in the multiverse this did become the real Playstation.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoThis is like the holy grail of videogaming. Are there any other videogame legends and artifacts like this and the Atari cartridge dump[0] that could be lying around somewhere? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial
- vanadium 7y agoThe Halcyon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halcyon_(console) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halcyon_(console)
- Dirlewanger 7y agoI can't even fathom competing companies today ever working with each other like this. Then again, Sony wasn't a competitor yet in the early 90s.
- owaislone 7y agohttps://www.theverge.com/2019/5/20/18632374/microsoft-sony-cloud-gaming-partnership-amazon-google https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/20/18632374/microsoft-sony-c...
- seibelj 7y agoThis is one of those situations where $31k seems expensive now, and when it’s resold in 20 years you’ll see it move for $1mil. Rare things like this tend to increase in value enormously.
- eloisant 7y agoThe thing is, we don't know about that. Maybe it will. Maybe in 20 years less people will be collecting vintage video game consoles.
- theandrewbailey 7y agoAnother one of these could be lying around in someone's attic, just like this one was.
- gambiting 7y agoYeah, and I'm 100% sure that both Sony and Nintendo have at least some in their own storage units. I work at a games studio and we have some early devkits for old consoles(not this though) and they are just collecting dust in a warehouse somewhere, we're not exactly allowed to sell them but I'm sure they would have a huge collectible value.
- reaperducer 7y agoI think you're right. Video games aren't like furniture that gets handed down from generation to generation and increases in value. They only have value to the people who remember them. In 20, 30, 40 years the vast majority of people who cared about these machines will be dead. Those who still care will be such a minority that there won't be upward price pressure. It's the same way you don't see people going nuts for Sperry and Burroughs gear today.
- djmips 7y agoSperry and Burroughs gear is pretty hefty though and it is appreciated by computer museums who have the space and budget to house and maintain them.
- ryanmercer 7y agoThe teardown done by Ben Heck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg The repair done by Ben Heck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh91IO9cV48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh91IO9cV48 The finally working video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaIfPuziJ-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaIfPuziJ-0
- kalleboo 7y agoI came into the comments to say this. I'm surprised the auction description doesn't mention that it has been worked on.
- MarioMan 7y agoIf it didn't before, it certainly does now. "Though the CD-ROM drive was not currently working when it was found in 2009, it has since been repaired by Benjamin Heckendorn, a YouTube personality known for his console repair videos."
- colejohnson66 7y agoWorking in quote marks. He did an very impressive job, but it’s only half working. The cartridge port works, but he couldn’t get the drive to read. Shame. I hope someday, someone can get that working.
- derefr 7y agoI feel like the “proper” thing to do, if the goal here is to figure out what the prototype is “supposed to work like” in order to develop emulators and so forth, is to watch the CD drive protocol on the line with an oscilloscope and then iterate on an FPGA that speaks that protocol but is just reading from e.g. blocks on an SD card. It’s not like there are any actual SNES-PSX CDs to read on it, so you don’t need the “CD drive” to read actual CDs, just to get the information of theoretical CDs into the console somehow.
- garaetjjte 7y agoI didn't watch the whole thing, but it looks that it can boot homebrew from CD.
- Brave-Steak 7y ago> We at Heritage can attest the prototype is working, as we've played a couple of rounds of Mortal Kombat on it using a Super Famicom cartridge. Lmao, I wonder how many rounds they did play. That must've been a great experience.
- runawaybottle 7y agoFor anyone interested, the history of the original PlayStation is pretty interesting (all the different collaborations Sony was attempting with Nintendo and Sega before going it alone - mostly getting rejected by Nintendo and Sega). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation
- agumonkey 7y agoOne can imagine how things would be if Sony didn't end up being a standalone player in this field. The gaming industry saw the birth of companies like nvidia, and now GPUs are tools.
- abhorrence 7y agoI believe they always intended to eventually be standalone. They wanted to use the collaborations to get the Sony name associated with games.
- gryson 7y agoFor more recently uncovered information about a possible deal between Sony and Sega, read: https://mdshock.com/2019/03/18/sega-and-sony-new-insight-into-the-partnership-that-never-came-to-be/ https://mdshock.com/2019/03/18/sega-and-sony-new-insight-int... That article also gives insight into why Kutaragi/Sony wanted to partner with Nintendo. A quote by Kutaragi: “I wanted to start up a business that would become a new major income source for the company in the future… [Sony executives] thought it would take too long to start a new business from scratch with venture capital. So the only way to initiate change was from the outside. We could join forces with the best-performing company in the field. We would sell them our technology, establish a track record, and use that as the springboard to future success. That was my reasoning.” Also, from historian Reiji Asakura: “Nintendo was concerned that its business would eventually be taken over by Sony if Sony continued to drive product development. Although Nintendo was dominant in the game-machine market, the company was fully aware that Sony had a superior research-and-development operation and thus had the potential to outstrip its competitors in the area of technological advancement.” References are in the linked article.
- maxbaines 7y agoA UK games journo and general publicist Ryan Brown tried to crowd source to put this in a museum https://twitter.com/Toadsanime/status/1227908339767574528 https://twitter.com/Toadsanime/status/1227908339767574528
- maxbaines 7y agoTurned down an offer for $1.2M and expected $3M minimum
- Gaelan 7y agoThe owner (who is now auctioning it) did, that is.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vanadium 7y agoI’ve held, examined, and played this prototype at a couple of conventions while talking to the seller a bit. He’s an interesting and controversial fellow.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y agoThis Nintendo Play Station is not worth anywhere near $3M, nor is it worth anywhere near $1.2M IMHO. Considering an original Apple I computer just sold for $375k at auction less than 2 years ago [0] People actually used the Apple I computer, saw it, touched it, it existed in the mind of the general public and still does to this day to some extent. This prototype is only valuable to perhaps the engineering team who worked on it, some extremely eccentric gaming enthusiasts, and perhaps a few others. I would have taken the offer of $1.2M if I were him. I imagine the bids in this auction will top out around $100k. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45647449 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45647449
- laumars 7y ago
- turdnagel 7y agoSony’s industrial design in the 90s and early 00s was superb.
- excalibur 7y agoWonder what's up with that "NEXT" port. It looks like a cross between USB and HDMI, but predates development of the former by 2 years and the latter by a decade. Would be interesting if it were an early implementation of concepts that were later standardized as USB.
- runawaybottle 7y agoMight be the memory card?
- ginko 7y agoLooks like something akin to the serial i/o port of the original playstation: https://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/iFixit-PlayStation-teardown-2.jpg https://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/iFixit-... Also if you think that looks like an USB port, check out the link cable for the original gameboy.
- simias 7y agoI think that's right, the fact that it's called "next" seems to imply some kind of chaining as well.
- monocasa 7y agoOr it means "Nintendo EXTension" or something similar. I wouldn't read too much into their naming schemes wrt what that means for feature set.
- monocasa 7y agoFun story, the original firewire port was openly designed with the Gameboy link cable as inspiration, and the USB port was derived from there.
- trevyn 7y agoAlso looks like it could be a shrunk version of multi-out
- simias 7y agoAre the specs of this device well known? I wish this could get into the hands of an emulator developer so that this thing could be preserved in code form. It'll probably end up in some hoarder's collection though unfortunately.
- runawaybottle 7y agoThere’s some specs here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM
- wk_end 7y agono$sns supports it - homebrew games have even been made for it!
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoFun Fact: Secret of Mana was originally designed on the Play Station. Much of the game's content had to be cut to get it to fit onto a standard Super Famicom cartridge after the add-on was killed.[0] [0]https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/pixels-and-bits/13744-Secret-of-Mana-Could-Have-Been-Great-With-Its-Missing-Content https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/co...
- jmkd 7y agoSuch a beautiful and accomplished soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGK3usiX31s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGK3usiX31s
- jtaft 7y agoNeoTokyo has an awesome soundtrack too. It's a free HL2 source engine mod. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=408tWOubRDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=408tWOubRDM
- throwaway77384 7y agoThis is ridiculous. I have never even heard of NeoTokyo, but this soundtrack just blows me away. Thanks, man. I love stumbling upon completely random recommendations like this.
- kevingadd 7y agoThe NeoTokyo composer also did the soundtrack for Deus Ex's Breach mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RET2PzWKzNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RET2PzWKzNw He also released an album recently called tgr fuel: https://edharrison.bandcamp.com/album/tgr-fuel https://edharrison.bandcamp.com/album/tgr-fuel
- m1gu3l 7y agooh man i remember loving that game when it was in beta. do people still play this?
- Waterluvian 7y agoCan someone teach me what a Buyers Premium is? There's just 20% added on top of the current price. Is that basically the fee that the auction house is taking?
- eof 7y agoThat’s exactly what it is.
- smush 7y agoSemi OT -> Sometimes I'm baffled at how people don't know about rare things like this, but I wonder how long that can last. Do you think the 'boxed up in a random lot, IDK what it is, some computer thing' behavior we've seen up to now with many rare electronics, games, computers, etc. will go away over time as more people grow up with internet access and web search? Let's take something that is equally 'dead' in terms of not being made any more: the Samsung Taylor, a dev windows phone. A few devs got some, but otherwise it is gone to the wind. Just to look at it, it looks like a slate smartphone, pretty innocuous. But if you were to search its model number, you'd immediately know you had something rare and valuable to a certain niche (which I admit to being in).
- behringer 7y agoWell that's the thing with making history. When you're making it, it is often boring, thankless and paved with dead ends. Does anybody want your shitty high school drawings? Only of you end up being the next Picasso. But who would have thought? Then there's artifacts that are worth a lot to the right dozen people, and literally nobody else would give you a dime.
- ginko 7y agoI'm a bit into hunting for old film cameras and you'd be surprized how many people barely do any checking before putting things on sale (or worse, just throw them away). I wonder how many old 'Nintendos' ended up on the landfill that way. For instance here's three old Agfa folding cameras: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Agfa_Super_Isolette.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Agfa_Sup... https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images2/1/0311/07/agfa-automatic-66_1_1f1b2193571631efb499b730198202d0.jpg https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images2/1/0311/07/agfa-au... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Agfa_Isolette_L.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Agfa_Iso... One's barely worth anything, one's worth quite a bit, one's extremely rare. Would you know which is which just from looking?
- w0m 7y agoHonestly; that it's hard to tell the difference is a non-trivial reason why they are valuable in the first place; increases rarity.
- busterarm 7y agoSeeing graded, sealed video games makes me angry. Some of the games in this auction are legit rare and haven't been played enough. I'm glad emulation is a thing.
- flippyhead 7y agoI found The Gaming Historian to an excellent source of history about this kind of thing. I don't doubt he's covered this very device at some point. https://www.youtube.com/user/mcfrosticles https://www.youtube.com/user/mcfrosticles
- Ragnarork 7y agoI feel this truly belongs to a museum.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vanadium 7y agoI'd like to think the National Videogaming Museum in TX would have put up an offer if they felt the seller was willing to work in good faith, but based on some comments I've seen from some of the Directors on Facebook about their intersections with the seller at conventions, the impression I get is that's pretty much a non-starter. And the NVM having probably the largest one-of-a-kind prototype system collections on Earth, it'd have been the natural home for the Nintendo PlayStation. That they want no part speaks volumes, and I'm sure there's a lot there left unsaid in the public eye. No idea who it'll go to now, but it's probably going to be someone with deep pockets or a collective (like another museum, perhaps) with a fairly wealthy network.
- whatitdobooboo 7y agoA great, great podcast on the whole Nintendo/Sony early saga is: Business Wars -> Nintendo vs Sony series Highly recommend. https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wondery/business-wars/e/54473555 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wondery/business-wars/e/544...
- byuu 7y agoThe Nintendo PlayStation contains an undumped 4-bit NEC MCU for its CD controller. Once that EEPROM bit-rots (it's already past its guaranteed lifetime), the SuperDisc BIOS cartridge will no longer boot as-is. The two fan-made games ported to the CD-drive will no longer function at that point, and we won't ever be able to directly fix this, only to hack around and approximate the original functionality. I imagine this won't be a significant loss to its new owner, but it's still unfortunate.
- sgrove 7y agoGiven your qualifications, what would you like to see happen?
- byuu 7y agoFind the most qualified engineer in the world to desolder the surface-mount MCU, read out its firmware using the documented debugging mode from the datasheet, and then resolder the MCU back to the system. It won't happen, but it would be nice for posterity.
- garaetjjte 7y agoWhat are the retention times for contemporary EPROMs? Datasheet for µPD75P308 doesn't seem to specify that. Modern EEPROMs specify retention time at over 100 years in room temperatures, shouldn't old chips be even safer due to older/larger process node?
- ndiddy 7y agoThe MCU variant on the motherboard https://i.imgur.com/ehNHPeY.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ehNHPeY.jpg is one-time programmable, as opposed to an EPROM. Because of this, I wouldn't worry about it losing its data, as OTP ROMs use blown fuses to store 1/0 state. It's true that it could just be an EPROM without a window, but the datasheet mentions two different programmers, one for the EPROM variant and one for the OTP variant so I doubt this is the case. More information: https://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/7077/NEC/UPD75P308GF-3B9.html https://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/7077/NEC/UP...
- starpilot 7y agoNice domain.
- jolmg 7y agoWhat's with those bids? People are bidding $525 for N64's Golden Eye? It's going for $10 at Ebay. Is having it in a sealed box in pristine condition really that valuable?
- rasz 7y agoHeritage Auctions is creating a new market for sucker^^^former comic book speculators.
- dbish 7y agoLooks like Palmer Luckey is one of the bidders. It's getting high up there: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1228115750381948928 https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/status/1228115750381948928
- alt-enter 7y agoWe at Heritage can attest the prototype is working, as we've played a couple of rounds of Mortal Kombat on it using a Super Famicom cartridge. That gave me a good laugh :). This collaboration reminds me of the Panasonic Q. Nintendo's collaboration with Panasonic that was a hybrid version of the GameCube with a DVD player: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panasonic_Q https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panasonic_Q