Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Hands-On With the Nintendo PlayStation (engadget.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the still-waiting-on-the-xbox-dreamcast dept.

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."

2 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Don't get it by ArchieBunker · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    1. Re:Don't get it by ledow · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.