The Nintendo PlayStation is fully working at last
For those of you who have been following the story of the Nintendo PlayStation prototype since it first surfaced in 2015, you now finally have something of an end to the whole saga -- after a long period of tinkering, hammering, sodduh-ing and lord knows what else, popular YouTube console modder and electronics bod Ben Heck (of The Ben Heck Show) has finally managed to get the machine fully working to the point where it can run games from the “Super CD ROM” portion of the system.
The prototype, the only one that is known to exist, was originally found by Terry Diebold when his employers, Advanta Corporation, went bust in 2009. A man named Olaf Olafsson was the president of the company -- previously he was CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment back when Nintendo and Sony formed a short-lived partnership, during which time Sony announced the SNES/PSX system and Nintendo announced they were working with Philips on the hybrid console at the very same CES show in 1991, the ultimate fruit of which was those godawful Mario and Zelda games on the CD-i. It appears as though Olaf took the prototype to Advanta as a personal belonging but never got around to picking it up as the company closed down, meaning that the system itself was part of a boxed lot that Terry won in an auction at the close of Advanta for a mere $75, only finding out what was inside after the fact. It wasn’t until 2015 when his son Daniel made an innocuous Reddit post about a Nintendo PlayStation sitting up in his father’s attic that people -- obviously disbelieving at first -- slowly realised what the Diebolds had once pictures of the machine were released.
The system itself has always been able to play Super Nintendo games just fine, but trying to load up a CD has always resulted in nought but a BIOS screen. Ben Heck, a man who can also be found making portable Xbox Ones, N64’s and ZX Spectrums on the Internet, met up with the Diebolds at the Midwest Gaming Classic Expo in 2016, and he’s been working on the prototype ever since -- documenting the labours of himself and his team over the course of several videos and livestreams until finally, a few days ago, the news that everyone’s been waiting for was announced in video form; that the Nintendo PlayStation prototype is now able to successfully run CD-ROM’s filled with game data. While no games were ever actually programmed for the system -- it is somewhat different from the Sony PlayStation we eventually got meaning you can’t just run Gran Turismo on it, and the game that Heck shows off in the video was created using an emulator -- it is now, at last, fully functional.
Of course, it is not for me to spoil the processes that Mr. Heck undertook on the system in order to get it working -- he is a very capable person when it comes to presenting electronics on the Internet and he's clearly done a great job on this project, whereas whenever I turn an old system on part of me unreasonably worries that it will blow up; which is coincidentally the reason why the Diebolds never once turned the prototype on in all the time that they had it sitting in the house, fearing that they would go down in infamy as the people who somehow managed to fry this one-of-a-kind historically significant item. But if you’re interested in the workings of consoles, modifications and a unique piece of video game history finally strutting its stuff after 26 years? Ben Heck’s video is more than worth a watch -- even for those of us whose understanding of how to fix a computer problem boils down to little more than “turn it off and on again”.
