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PlayStation Portable
King Kool writes: "Apparently, some guy decided it would be cool to try to take apart his PSX and make it portable - and it worked. It has about 2 hours of batterylife (with screen and everything) and runs on a Sony Lithium battery. Pictures and documentation are included. Cool."
that is some awesome craftsmanship... i can't believe that the cd spinning in the open like that is stable enough to keep the game going!
Actually, I already have a 32-bit gaming system in the palm of my hand: the Game Boy Advance. :) Has no 3-D chip, but the majority of the rest of the hardware is equal or better than the original Playstation.
... have everybody besides me been born without 10 thumbs? Every time I take something apart, I end up with just that: Parts. This guy not only took a PSOne apart, he turned it into lego and built something new with it! What a wonderfull way of saying: "I've got the skills, money and time to something totally cool, but utterly cool". Me too, gime powers :)
Thomas S. Iversen
I'm not sure why you'd ask that question on Slashdot. Most of us run an OS that we like to tinker with for practical reasons, or, yes, just for the hell of it.
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...this is a geek with waaaay too much time on his hands. Then again, I'm posting at slashdot, so I guess we've both got the same problems. ;)
Still trying to find a use for it though, playing PSX games on a screen that small. If he wanted to do something portable and cool, he could have tried rigging up a GBA with a back-lit screen. Now THAT would have been something useful.
The idea is all fine and dandy, but it's not very practical and I kindof wonder how long the system will last after being taken apart like that. For that matter you can make the system into a portable without taking it apart. Sony and some other third party vendors make a LCD screen that can be hooked up to the back of the PSOne (the two can be hooked up as well) and it also has speakers on it. Plus Sony is releasing, or has released, a rechargeable NiMH (could be Lithium Ion, not sure) battery that hooks up to the back of the PSOne as well. So if you wanted a cleaner looking PSOne portable that didn't void your warranty it would be the way to go.
Iirc the PSOne was designed to be portable, you can get an LCD screen for it which attaches to the back, and there probably is an external battery available.
I'd build a battery pack out of NiMH cells, myself, as they're light, withstand heavy current draws without a problem, and are CHEEP! I've got two sets of AA's that I rotate for digital camera (which kills alkalines just on the severe current draw alone) I've got a Sony VAIO laptop (typing on now) which has a pretty dead battery and the replacement is about $200. Screw them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When you're a parent taking your kids on a trip across the country to meet their grandparents or whatever you need to something to keep them occupied. Sure you have a car adapter, but car adapters
1) get in the way (especially when the kids are in the back of a minivan)
2) what happens when you've got two (or more) kids with discmans, portable game machines, or whatever...most cars don't have that many ciggarette lighter sockets, and additionally do you want that many wires around the car.
Sure there's the Gameboy. But using that logic, you could say why would anyone make a new console machine since there's already a number of them.
The parent could just buy a PSp (Playstation Portable) and use the same games for both the PS and PSp or possible even just hook the PSp up to the TV and use it as a normal gaming system. One thing I'm -really- wondering about is if Sony is willing to license the PSp to sell as an official item. Would be VERY cool if they did.
The GBA is supposedly equal to SNES power.
No. Super NES had a 2.8/3.6 MHz 65816 processor (essentially a 65c02 with 16-bit registers, 8-bit data bus, little pipelining) connected to the graphics chip and a 2 MHz SPC700 processor (incompatible variant of 6502 core with some instructions able to treat registers X and Y as a single 16-bit integer) connected to the sound chip. The two CPUs were connected through four slow 8-bit ports; most of the "loading" on Super NES games was actually copying 64 KB worth of sound data from the 65C816 side (which could see the cart) to the SPC700 (which could see only its 64 KB of RAM and its 64-byte BIOS).
GBA, on the other hand, has a 16.8 MHz ARM processor (32-bit registers, 32-bit bus to internal RAM, 16-bit external data bus, no hardware divide, lots of pipelining, C-friendly) connected to both the sound and graphics chips, making it much easier to code for. Its graphics chip also features hardware matrix transformation of sprite coordinates (allowing for 2D scaling and rotation of sprites) as well as four layers of straight background (vs. Super NES's 3) or two layers of "mode 7" 2 1/2-D transformation (vs. Super NES's 1), and a linear bitmap mode (allowing for easier porting of Wolf3d or Doom engines).
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Yes it is expensive, but they have head-mounted screens that either are two individual small screens(one for each eye) or project directly on to the retna in the eye. Either way, they can successfully simulate a 52 inch projection TV. If you hooked one of those up to the PSp, you could forget about the LCD(and the power it takes) and have a decent screen size to boot. I would love to be able to play Chrono Cross, Resident Evil, and others from the PS's vast library(1000s of games) on plane flights, car rides, other countries etc. The PS is a very mature platform with many great games. I hope Sony takes this into consideration, as they could suddenly have something that is a serious threat to the Gameboy Advance!
The guy did a cool hack.
l .pl?spec=psone&pagenum=1
- hw-1.html
l e_Sony_PSone___Consoles___Screens_22.html
But if you dont want to hack, you can buy a PSOne LCD screen for it, there are few types.
http://www.sonyweb.com/news/0101/049.html
http://www.gaming-age.com/cgi-bin/specials/specia
http://www.happypuppy.com/psx/hardware/psonehardw
http://www.games-console.com/acatalog/Games_Conso
http://www.eclectic-vg.com/psoneeng.htm
Building stuff like this is fun, man. It's that simple. Also, a portable PSX is a great way to pick up women. "Hey baby, I'm a guy who can squeeze a PSX into a chassis that will turn you one. Want me to...solder anything for you?"
"Oh yes."
Love is in the air...everytime spare parts lie around...
I'm the stranger...posting to
Hmm... The Sony Info-lithium battery, which is what powers my camera, and *looked* like the battery he was using ran about $35 at BestBuy, the last time I checked, IIRC.
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Why? For the same reason that I bought a Sega Nomad back in the day. It's a portable system, but it plays all the old games that you already own. It has about the same utility as many portable systems out there. There's just something to be said for having an entire gaming system, screen and all, in the palm of your hand. This thing is just eminately(sp?) more portable then the PSOne and screen and controllers and...
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
I seem to be the only one with the immediate reaction of 'how long will it take Sony to sue this person?'
The Nomad! I forgot all about that one. I think still want one...
Why NOT?
sulli
RTFJ.
Well, provided that he built the whole thing from scratch (doubtful) and that doing so wouldn't violate any of Sony's patents or copyrights (very doubtful), he sure could sell and market the thing any way he pleases.
And even then, I don't think Sony would put up much of a hassle. I mean, it would prompt people to buy more games. IIRC, video game companies sell their consoles at a loss, because they depend on royalties from the games they've licensed for all their profits. Maybe Sony does things differently, but I know this was how Nintendo and Sega used to do their business. This was why Nintendo never put of much of a fight in the late 80's when about a half-dozen or so companies began producing clones of the Famicom.
Wonder what an XBox portable would be like.
Ah, I would wager it looks a lot like that IBM Thinkpad sitting over there at my other desk.
or halting every time the room shook even briefly
What the hell? For the record, I've never had my room shake, even briefly. We don't all live in California, buddy.
j/k, no terrible flames please.
BTW, my PSX takes shocks rather well. If you bump it while it's loading, sometimes it takes a few seconds to recover, but rarely does a PSX game read the disc continuously for something like this to cause a huge problem. Also remember that under most circumstances, you aren't jamming buttons while the disc is being read... you're waiting for the game to load.
The only time I can get a game to crash is to actually reach in and stop the disk from spinning. (No, not a good practice, I know. I've only done it twice.)
This portable PlayStation console is an attempt to break nintendo's portable monopoly.
Umm.. no it isn't. It's a guy who thought it would be cool to have a portable playstation. He has nothing to do with Sony. He's not going to produce the unit at all, mostly because he thinks Sony would sue him.
The average family car doesn't have enough juice to power both a TV and a PS1 console.
I ran a Dreamcast and a 19" TV off of a power inverter plugged into my car a few months ago. No problems at all, just had to start the car once in a while.
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i already have a portable playstation, and mine has better battery life. plus, it can play SNES, NES, gameboy, genesis, hundreds of arcade games, just about any PC game, and, oh yeah, any game they make for linux or Mac.
:) through the power of emulation, i have a completely portable machine that i can use to play more games than any other single platform.
it can emulate just about anything you throw at it, since it has a spiffy, wicked fast processor inside (not the fastest in the world, but it'll do in a pinch), and it has enough keys and buttons in the built-in controller to bind to even the most complicated of game controllers - plus USB to connect additional players if you like. the best part, though, apart from the ~5 hour battery life - and only a little less under heavy load, even spinning CDs, i've found - is the amazing thin, small, high-definition LCD screen. it's a thing of beauty. another perk is that it has the ability to play games over the internet, wirelessly, with 802.11 (though the manufacturer refers to it as "airport")
yep, it's an iBook.
a little heavier (but not much!), and more general-purpose than the portable PS1, but infinitely more useful
so take these stories about a portable this, a hacked up that, or a MAME the other, and stick them.. well, i don't care where you stick them.
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Wonder what an XBox portable would be like.
Heh, if you'd ever tried to lift an actual XBox you wouldn't be asking that question. Remember the original 'mobile' phones, the brick-sized ones you had to carry a suitcase-sized battery around with? That's the ballpark a portable XBox would be in.
BTW: "Innovation" has both a larger-than-Sony LCD screen for the PSone and a battery pack. I just can't find any links at the moment.
Heh. I actually sold mine about a year and a half ago. It was just collecting dust, so I sold it to this guy who collects video game systems. I figured that he would get more use out of it then I was getting out of it.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
What could sony sue him for
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
1 hour 45 minutes. Or, as the creator of the system puts it, long enough to cast two spells in Final Fantasy VII. :)
Footnote for the anal: Yes, I am aware that FFVII's spells had relatively short animations. I'm sure he meant GFs.
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go to best buy
Buy a PS-one
Buy the screen for it
Buy the battery pack for it
Voila. I have it with spending 15 minutes putting things together and using plastic money.
and the above combo is smaller and prettier.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.