Sony Nintendo Playstation Prototype has been found

[GSZX1337]

I dont know where, but I could have sworn I saw this console before in another image gallery a couple of years ago.

That image has been floating around the 'net for a long while now. A quick Google Search suggests that it originally came from a magazine article. Unfortunately, I cannot find out which magazine.

[Tanooki]

Nintendo originally had the CD unit on the bottom of the system through the extension jack as an addon. Sony decided to make their own Nintendo Playstation unit of their own which this guy has with their name branded on everything and Nintendo hiding on the back of the controller.

The rift primarily though was Sony trying to rip Nintendo off and play them for suckers. Their terms of the business venture would have had all the games licensed to play on the CD unit be licensed to Sony, not Nintendo, and Sony would also press the games (like they did in their own plants for PS1) and get all the profits from the pressing and packaging fees as well. Nintendo would have seen money for any proprietary parts inside either unit, but their attitude at Sony otherwise was Nintendo would get no money unless the game was release on a cart and jacked into their system or Nintendo's old console. That pissed Nintendo off and they started messing with Phillips, the deal that got us those 4 Mario/Zelda games with a 5th cancelled on the way, and since their hardware sucked compared to Sony they dropped the whole thing and we suffered through the N64 and them falling into the crapper against Playstation.

[Cronozilla]

That was part of the reason Nintendo dropped them, Sony wanted their name on every unit, Nintendo did not agree with this.

I've always thought Nintendo's reasoning was something like that and probably something with the licensing agreements. The age old story never made 100% sense, since we only heard it from Sony's side of the situation. Even so, the way Nintendo handled the situation was extremely unprofessional, even if Sony was attempting to bury the SNES alive at Nintendo's expense.

But who knows? Maybe the documents that show how everything went down are just gone now and the story we have is some idealization.

While a real life Nintendo Play Station is a cool thing ... this box is utterly useless. It's a prototype for something that never received software. Maybe Super Famicom games still work on it, though? The form factor is very Super Nintendo like, it even has a very similar external access connector in a very similar position.

Personally, I've always thought it'd be really neat to fabricate one of these up, mixing a SNES jr with a PSOne internally.

[arcadifvid]

i bet someone out there is already trying to develop a clone system of this. a system that plays snes carts and ps1 cds. that would be the ultimate retro system (but yeah probably would have a cease desist in no time)

[samsonlonghair]

i bet someone out there is already trying to develop a clone system of this. a system that plays snes carts and ps1 cds. that would be the ultimate retro system (but yeah probably would have a cease desist in no time)

There's already plenty of SNES-combo clones. The patents on the PS1 should start to expire this year and the Dual-shock patents should start to expire in 2017. The tricky part is the BIOS which is copyrighted (not patented). Copyrights last for a much longer time.

I think it's currently the author's life plus eighty years, but that number keeps going up. Also, the DMCA forbids anyone from reverse-engineering the BIOS. I'm going to try not to go off on a tangent about copyright law now.

In order to legally produce a functioning PS1 clone, one would have to write a brand-new BIOS for playstation that just happens to boot every single game (in a huge library) without reverse-engineering anything. Considering that one can buy a used PS1 for fifteen dollars any day of the week, there seems to be little financial incentive to tackle this herculean task.

[Cronozilla]

You can legally reverse engineer. You just can't re-use what you find, because it's copyrighted.

A safer (though more difficult) method is black box testing. That's completely legal, you can use what you find as well. You basically write down how the whatever reacts to your inputs and you can usually derive the inner workings as a result.

[Gunstar Green]

My first, obvious issue would be to get verification from an official source about its authenticity, then I'd wonder if it's an actual working prototype or just a mock-up like the Sega Neptunes.

If it's the real deal, it's a pretty cool relic.

The tricky part is the BIOS which is copyrighted (not patented).

Yeah, that's what stands in the way of CD system clones more than anything.