Are there many instances where official production tooling from a console manufacturer has surfaced? The only instance I know of was when that dental company sold off the Jaguar molds they bought from Atari:
Other than that I cant say anything outside of maybe the ps3 slim reproduction shells but that's just easier to copy than get the molds of. Same for the Dreamcast. I'd probably guess the Jaguar molds are the only publicly known one.
https://assemblergames.com/threads/found-the-m2-moulds.32558/ Assembler (RIP) found the M2 moulds a few years back. I don't think anything came of it.
At the end end of the scale, you have something like the original PlayStation where they made 100 million of them. A top quality mold might be good for something like 3-5 million shots, so over the years there must have been something like 20 to 30 different case molds.
I've heard a lot of molds tend to get scrapped after a while of sitting around. After all, after a console's run there's not much use for them anymore. Funny story - if that console were to have come out as planned (and inevitably flopped), one of my sounds would have been the startup sound for it. I'm sorta happy it flopped so I don't have my name tied to that POS, but I was on the team as the "sound artist". Never really talked too much to Mike, nor did I really take part in many of their actual discussions. But even then, I could smell the BS from a mile away. Was just trying to get my foot in the door..
Could be even more factoring in different production sites, redesigns, etc Outside of dev hardware, Sony moved most PlayStation manufacturing from Japan to China between 2001 and 2007. PSOne was likely first to be outsourced. PS2 transitioned in late 2002-2003 during production of the SCPH-3900x models. I believe the last PS2s made in Japan were the colored Spring 2003 models commemorating 50 million units sold. From there, it appears the Japanese PS production side was retooled to make PSX and did so into 2005 while the Chinese production side handled PS2 and PSP manufacturing. Japanese and Chinese PSOne cases have a few slightly different features: https://www.hit-japan.com/console/A1357985003.jpg https://hit930.sakura.ne.jp/hitjapan/console6/A6786205003.jpg The rests are the most notable difference. One set looks more like cork, the other more like rubber. The screws appear to be slightly more recessed (less plastic and metal). In the instance of SCPH-3900x PS2s, production time codes overlap. There were some made in Japan (2D) after they started being made in China (2C). The same can be said for CECHA and (what appears to be) CECHB PS3s. The reason I bring all this up is to find out where multinational production of the same product was happening the most. Molds are frequently modified and shipped overseas. If they were producing in (multiple factories in) 2 countries at the same time, they must have made a few at a time. If that is the case, it makes me wonder how often they modified the original PS1 molds between making the SCPH-100x and the 900x and how often they made new ones. I would think a company as big as Sony would preserve some production assets where Foxconn would be more likely to recycle the material in-house. They're not exactly the easiest thing to pick up and run off with.
I've always considered that to be related to PM41 / PM41(2) rather than production location. There is going to be some correlation there simply because the time the PM41(2) was being made most of the production was in China, but I'm sure I've seen made in China units with the old board and the old style of feet. For example, a quick search turned up this photo - a "Made in China" SCPH-102 with the old foot style: http://www.loombard.pl/files/item/EJGRSXOV/full.jpg Yeah, but even under perfect conditions there is a definite limit to the number of times you can use a mold before it becomes simply worn out and the PlayStation was well over that point. I'm sure they did modify molds during the production run (for example, some of the early SCPH-5500s have a noticeable step on the inside of the rear panel area where the cutout for the RCA jacks used to be which suggests that someone put an insert into it and then retextured the outer surface to make it seamless. Some of the earlier plastics also have the vendor names on them, and from the look of it that wasn't on an insert but was machined into the mold, which strongly suggests that the molds were expected to stay with that vendor.
Good point. It could easily be referring specifically to motherboard production and even then there are likely several imported components. Which toolroom is most likely to have made the molds? The synopsis appears to be that they were made in batches for multiple PIM vendors as ordered to keep up with sales forecasts and wear in addition to revisions and redesigns. As to whether Sony did in-house moldmaking at the time or they contracted their designs out, I don't know.
I think at the point the original Playstation came out Sony were still quite vertically integrated and it's likely they were doing all this in-house.
The case molds for the Commodore 64 were discovered by someone who then ran a Kickstarter offering new cases (including in colors other than the official Commodore color) so those are clearly out there somewhere.
