Nintendo Playstation Dissected

[scotland]

Ben Heck disassembled a Nintendo SNES Sony Playstation prototype on Nintendolife at http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/07/video_check_out_the_innards_of_the_snes_playstation_in_this_hardware_teardown

Its a long video, but some interesting things are that the prototype looks pretty finished, that the system needed a cartridge to make the CD-ROM work (reminds me of the disc that the Gamecube needs to make the Gameboy attachment work), and that the cartridge has 256k of RAM in it. So, the CD-ROM read to the RAM in the cartridge.

At the end of the video, Heck compares this prototype to the Sega CD. Its interesting to compare, and like the main Genesis and the SNES, each seems to have the a slight edge in different categories and probably would have led to some more fuel for the console wars.

[Shapur]

Very interesting. One would assume the SNES CD would be much better than the Sega CD for FMV with its wider color palette but without the extra CPU I wonder how good its playback would actually have been.

[scotland]

I think he is trying to get it working, but without a game for the CD we might not really know how well it did. Also, it is still a prototype, even if it looks pretty complete. A final production model could have been better or worse. I think the old 5800 controller prototypes actually worked fine, but they reduced specs for production.

I am glad you liked this too. I am not that knowledgeable on hardware, but I find tbis interesting as I think of those PS1 years were a crucial moment in gaming.