Ben Heck dissects and tries to fix the SNES Playstation prototype

[theMot]

I'd say this is true of most hardware, which is always several steps ahead of software. It seems like there's a year or so at the end of each console's life when the devs really seem to take nearly full advantage of the hardware and the games start to look like what consumers were promised in the first place. It's a cliche example, but Ninja Gaiden looked and played so damn good on the Xbox. Same with Resident Evil 4. If that generation had another few years, we would have gotten stuff on-par with early 360 games.

Yep, the Neo is a good example of this. The games produced towards the end are unrecognisable from what was produced early on.

 

[Tech&Music]

I really love how this Play Station saga went down. I remember being really excited when it first showed up, as I've always found the Sony Nintendo collaboration story very fascinating. To not only see someone save it from being trashed and coming out with it, but to see it working, the boot ROM released, a functional emulator released, homebrew being made, and Ben Heck tearing it down, documenting it and repairing it, is really making this the gift that keeps giving, even if the hardware in and of itself isn't even that groundbreaking compared to the stock SNES. It just proves not all mysteries will go unexplained!

 

[Tanooki]

Ripping on the N64 aside they did the right and the wrong thing most likely looking at that prototypes specs. It would have been much like the SegaCD adding little value over the goober factor in love with FMV in that era and CD audio, storage too. But drives then were god awful slow, not much storage for what loads so you get lots of long annoying load screens everywhere for not much benefit. The problem is the pinheads at Nintendo were so black or white on shit they were not just like Fuck Sony and Philips they were fuck CDs too. Had N64 come out as it with the cartridge removed and a 2X CD on the level of order the PSX had inside that ballgame would have been notably different. It would have been a very competitive race and Nintendo wouldn't have floundered into a nearly irrelevant laughing stock with the over teenage and up game playing population (outside of dorm rats with their 4P mario kart, smash, and party shenanigans and 4p tv share sports and rare FPS's) which is a shame. It just took one dumb decision coupled with another to wreck them for future generations.

 

[smokehouse]

Ripping on the N64 aside they did the right and the wrong thing most likely looking at that prototypes specs. It would have been much like the SegaCD adding little value over the goober factor in love with FMV in that era and CD audio, storage too. But drives then were god awful slow, not much storage for what loads so you get lots of long annoying load screens everywhere for not much benefit. The problem is the pinheads at Nintendo were so black or white on shit they were not just like Fuck Sony and Philips they were fuck CDs too. Had N64 come out as it with the cartridge removed and a 2X CD on the level of order the PSX had inside that ballgame would have been notably different. It would have been a very competitive race and Nintendo wouldn't have floundered into a nearly irrelevant laughing stock with the over teenage and up game playing population (outside of dorm rats with their 4P mario kart, smash, and party shenanigans and 4p tv share sports and rare FPS's) which is a shame. It just took one dumb decision coupled with another to wreck them for future generations.

All joking/bitching aside...Nintendo making the N64 cart based and the GameCube without DVD playback were HORRIBLE ideas..

 

[madman]

All joking/bitching aside...Nintendo making the N64 cart based and the GameCube without DVD playback were HORRIBLE ideas..

That must be why Nintendo failed and is now out of business.

 

[smokehouse]

That must be why Nintendo failed and is now out of business.

You're not that dumb...so don't act like it...

 

[Jon]

That must be why Nintendo failed and is now out of business.

Had it not been for the Game Boy and GBA, they would be.

Jon

 

[Tanooki]

^Bingo. Actually technically not even Gameboy as it was floundering. Kiss the ass of Gamefreak/Nintendo/Creatures. The system was going down harder than a Clinton intern in the 90s (and likely soon enough again) in the white house, but Pokemon, the digital crack it is pulled their asses out of the fire and still does 20 years later. Look a their stock valuation in Japan days into Pokemon Go going live. They were dropping off and teetering, then it shoots up like one of those comedy business charts damn near vertically. Nintendo if anything has one thing they've traditionally never fucked up, handheld gaming on their own systems, but it's so hard to peddle that now against all those android and ios devices as can be seen by declining hardware sales which finally pitched them into Android and iOS too.

Had they not put a cart in the N64 and used a full size DVD (even if it didn't run movies) within the Gamecube it would be a radically different gamescape the last 20 years. They would not be irrelevant and not the punching bag of the dude bro 'serious' gamer types out there not that they didn't feed into it with all that junk and the Wii marketing shenanigans too going into the gimmick racket. That worked once with motion, then backfired horribly worse than any console they've ever released.

 

[-SD-]

I've never been able to fathom the rationale of Nintendo using mini-DVDs for the Cube, even though they are pretty cool. Was it a case of Matsushita pushing the tech onto Nintendo, or Nintendo requesting something obscure?

 

[Niko]

While carts where more expensive to produce but I dont think thats where Nintendo fucked up. Nintendo fucked up by trying to jump on the "3D" and number of "bits" hype train. N64 games looked like complete shit, even for their time.

They also mentioned before the reason they stuck with carts, and then went to mini discs for the gamecube, was to combat piracy.

 

[Tech&Music]

I've never been able to fathom the rationale of Nintendo using mini-DVDs for the Cube, even though they are pretty cool. Was it a case of Matsushita pushing the tech onto Nintendo, or Nintendo requesting something obscure?

Nintendo requested it because they wanted to stop piracy, since now people couldn't just burn any DVD and stick it in after modding it, but at the end of the day that wasn't a big enough reason for them to shoot themselves in the foot like that. Developers loathed it, since big games either needed to be shrunk down or put on multiple discs which costed more money to produce. Matsushita wasn't behind it, since they made the Panasonic Q under license of Nintendo, which had a full-size DVD tray since it was a Gamecube/DVD Player hybrid.

 

[Jon]

Little known fact about the Panasonic Q: The best video signal it could do (for DVDs) was S-video. It wasn't able to output video via the expensive component cables, for some reason. That never made sense to me...although, I suppose you could mod it.

Anyway, we're getting off topic. I'm glad Ben Heck was able to get his hands on the PS prototype. I spoke with him, briefly, at Midwest Gaming Classic. When I brought up the system, he said he talked with the son of the owner of it about opening it up, documenting it, fixing it, etc. (This part will make you die laughing) The guy allegedly said: "I don't know...I'll have to ask my dad." LOL.

Jon

 

[jdotaku]

great video cool seeing the guts and how it works looking forward to the repair videos

 

[Niko]

Little known fact about the Panasonic Q: The best video signal it could do (for DVDs) was S-video. It wasn't able to output video via the expensive component cables, for some reason. That never made sense to me...although, I suppose you could mod it.

Anyway, we're getting off topic. I'm glad Ben Heck was able to get his hands on the PS prototype. I spoke with him, briefly, at Midwest Gaming Classic. When I brought up the system, he said he talked with the son of the owner of it about opening it up, documenting it, fixing it, etc. (This part will make you die laughing) The guy allegedly said: "I don't know...I'll have to ask my dad." LOL.

Jon

I mean technically it is his dad's right? The kid was just the one who brought it to light.

 

[Jon]

I mean technically it is his dad's right? The kid was just the one who brought it to light.

I guess. Either that or, it's an easy way to get two guest passes to any video game con in the country.

...you did notice that subtle annotation in the video with their email (if you want us to bring this to your con), didn't you?

Jon

 

[madman]

While carts where more expensive to produce but I dont think thats where Nintendo fucked up. Nintendo fucked up by trying to jump on the "3D" and number of "bits" hype train. N64 games looked like complete shit, even for their time.

Yeah, that 3D hype train turned out to be total bullshit. Nothing is 3D these days, it's all 2D sprite gaming.

 

[sylvie]

Yeah, that 3D hype train turned out to be total bullshit. Nothing is 3D these days, it's all 2D sprite gaming.

thats not what he meant and you know it

 

[Tech&Music]

Part 2's here:

 

[NeoSneth]

That's a lot more trial and error than I would have expected from Ben Heck. I'm guessing he only had so much time, so he had to look for more obvious issues.

 

[fenikso]

Pretty fucking awesome.

 

[uiengineer]

Glad to see it working. If anyone should have been messing around inside of that thing, Ben Heck is the obvious choice.

 

[smokehouse]

I know it's dumb to keep saying this...but I still cannot get over how milquetoast that thing is.

I fully admit that 99% of this is fabricated in my mind, but I really made that thing out to be some "masterpiece that never was". Given that that thing really has no new horsepower, it would have basically been standard SNES games with either a bit more FMV or "real" CD sound. It would have done a few nifty things, but in the end I think it would have been pretty domestic.

 

[Tech&Music]

I know it's dumb to keep saying this...but I still cannot get over how milquetoast that thing is.

I fully admit that 99% of this is fabricated in my mind, but I really made that thing out to be some "masterpiece that never was". Given that that thing really has no new horsepower, it would have basically been standard SNES games with either a bit more FMV or "real" CD sound. It would have done a few nifty things, but in the end I think it would have been pretty domestic.

That, and people could write long as hell SNES games. The biggest official cartridge, from what I've been told, was 48 Megabits/6 Megabytes. Just imagine how long they could make games utilising 650 Megabytes of storage. Sure, some would get used for CD Audio, but there'd still be a hell of a lot of space for the game left.

 

[BladeDancer314]

Those damn caps..... Every time!!!!!

 

[HeavyMachineGoob]

That, and people could write long as hell SNES games. The biggest official cartridge, from what I've been told, was 48 Megabits/6 Megabytes. Just imagine how long they could make games utilising 650 Megabytes of storage. Sure, some would get used for CD Audio, but there'd still be a hell of a lot of space for the game left.

If you count decompressed Star Ocean, the biggest size is 96Mbit / 12MB. Original copies of Star Ocean are still 48Mbit / 6MB though.

If we go by Sega CD games, most of the CD-ROM space would have gone towards FMV and/or CDDA music, those take up a lot of space. Most Sega CD games aren't any longer or bigger than plain cartridge games, probably due to development and RAM restrictions.