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

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."

Comments

Windows CE for Dreamcast

[tepples]

from the still-waiting-on-the-xbox-dreamcast dept.

That exists. Xbox was contracted from "DirectX box". A few dozen Dreamcast games were made with Windows CE, which included DirectX.

Don't get it

[ArchieBunker]

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?

Re:Don't get it

[ledow]

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.

Re:Don't get it

[tlhIngan]

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?

You also forgot one major factor - this was the product of Japanese engineers, too, who aren't well known for their openness. The Japanese gaming industry is one of secrecy - rarely do you get the openness that's present in the western gaming industry.

So all the big people "in the know" are restricted from talking about it, and given it's been nearly 25 years, memories have long faded among the smaller people.

It always surprised me

[rsilvergun]

That Nintendo didn't manage to kill Sony as a competitor with legal wrangling. They were always really good at that sorta thing (ask Namco about their Sega Genesis games :P ). Apart from that this is one of those pivotal moments in the game industry I always love to hear about. Like when EA bluffed Sega into giving them a sweetheart deal on Sega Genesis licensing in exchange for not sharing their tech to get around the Genesis lockout chip (turned out the chip didn't work, though to be fair EA didn't know that, but Nintendo woulda told EA to go pound sand).

They should've asked someone who was alive then?

[guruevi]

I knew there were rumors of a Nintendo-Sony hybrid back then in the early 90's. It was going to be announced at a big con but never came to be.

Here's a 2012 article on the subject: http://kotaku.com/5876374/the-...

Re:X-Rayed a computer??

[wonkey_monkey]

Have you been through an aiport with a laptop any time in the last, oh, forever?

Re:It's a Playstation world.

[Bing Tsher E]

You are so right. There is nothing out there called Pokemon. Harvest Moon is just an almost lost prototype that was never produced. Animal Crossing is just vaporware.

I will admit that Nintendo doesn't typically produce dickthrust combat games.

technical details

[Gravis Zero]

someone did a rundown of the internals.

The trouble with early CD Systems

[rsilvergun]

was RAM. You just didn't have enough RAM to do complex games. So you got a lot of games that were just like their cartridge ports but with some FMV and CD audio thrown in. The only exceptions were RPGs, but those hadn't really caught on yet. There were some indications of success with games like Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD, but the load times were terrible and the game wasn't enough better than MK on the SNES/Genesis to justify the $200 price tag for the CD. Not when MKII for SNES was on it's way. If you want to see a starker contrast look at the two launch titles for the Turbografx-CD: Street Fighter and Monster's Lair. The former was a good port of a mediocre game and the latter was bested by the Cartridge Genesis Version. That experience would have set you back $750+ tax in 1990 dollars.

What CDs did well in the 90s was anime style graphics, but it would be at least 5-10 years before that stuff had enough of an audience to support expensive peripherals. It makes me wonder what would have happened in NEC had poured the money they wasted on the US CD launch into advertising and a bigger launch.