Nintendo SNES PlayStation finally uncovered! [READ THE FIRST POST BEFORE POSTING!]

We're talking about a collab between Nintendo and Sony, there probably would have been copy protection on the retail unit lol. Nintendo had fought pirates before, Sony were going to go onto fight them with the PS1 (and later, other Sony divisions would also go to extremes to stop copying - including Sony Music Group installing rootkits on the computers of legitimate customers).

While home copying would have been prohibitively expensive, pressing from a glass master in some factory in China still would have been cheap en mass - the reason they chose optical discs on the first place!

We can't know for sure, as it never reached retail... I think it's a pretty safe bet though!

 

Possibly the production unit would have - but I can't see any sign on it on that prototype. The data from the CD is going through that CXD2500, which is the same chip that Sony used in their audio CD players and also supplied to a lot of other companies. What it basically does is take the EFM stream from the CD and output a I2S/PCM data stream (I.E. the raw sector data), an emphasis flag, Q and R subcode and possibly a C2 error flag if it was set up to use the SENS output for that. That's it. There is nothing that chip could decode that you wouldn't have complete control over using a CD recorder (Incidentally, the CXD2516 used in the original PlayStation is exactly the same in this respect). Sure, they could program the syscon MCU to expect something like a specific format in the TOC, but at the lowest level that's all still just data - the only thing that's magic about it is the location at the start of the disc.

So if there is any copy protection it has to be implemented at a lower level than anything that the CD DSP cares about - which is exactly the approach that Sony took on the "Sony PlayStation" - the copy protection data in that is encoded into the physical track position on the disc in the lead-in area. It's basically a high-frequency wobble on the track position, but gated on and off to encode the copy protection symbols. Since it's a high frequency (10s of kHz), the tracking servo just filters it out - there is no point in trying to deal with it since it's outside the bandwidth of the tracking actuator anyway. The lens hence just sits in the average position of the track center and reads the EFM as normal. As far as the rest of the system is concerned, the wobble can be ignored - there is enough margin that the position error doesn't interfere with the ability to extract the data, and the rest of the read chain operates as normal.

The actual copy protection is handled by taking the same tracking error signal that's being fed into the tracking servo, feeding it into a bandpass filter with a reasonably wide passband then feeding it into an rectifier and integrator and finally into a comparator. Since the wobble is gated, the net effect of this is that the output of the comparator will switch when the wobble gates on and off. In fact, the data that was encoded was simply ASCII sent it a serial format with the data corresponding to the license region (I.E. "SCEI", "SCEA" or "SCEE"). This was then fed into a pin of the mechacon MCU that examined it and decided if the machine would boot this disc or not.

The reason for this rather long digression into how the (Sony) PlayStation copy protection worked is because, as you can see from the description, it involves some additional hardware - in the original SCPH-1000 implementation this consisted of 3 small (8 pin SOIC) chips and a significant number of discrete components. There doesn't appear to be any corresponding hardware on the (Nintendo) PlayStation, so I have to assume that, at least at this point, it didn't implement any similar copy protection.

 

Thanks for the info on how the PS1s copy protection worked, good post I wouldn't think this super early unit would have protections anyway as it'd just make things harder to test. Later on maybe when proper dev units were in production but this seems pretty early before that!

 

Any updates yet? Did the guy with the show find the part he was looking for? Did they set up another meet?

 

They've been taking it to conventions to show it off and even let people play it, fortunately they don't let the general public put their grubby hands on the prototype controller, they use some common ones. The plan is for Ben Heck to do a live repair/drive replacement at Portland Retro http://www.retrogamingexpo.com. So I believe we have to wait until October 22-23, 2016, they haven't announced which day Ben is speaking.

It was at Game On Expo in Mesa, AZ. After the expo, Fanta got to play it on the prototype controller and make a video. At 3:14 in the video, they confirm the plan about the live repair.


It also makes a short appearance in this Game On video at 2:47

 

Good, I look forward to that date then. Did they find the right laser for it?

 

They identified what they need and made some orders: https://twitter.com/benheck/status/758675009480953858

I don't know if they have received the parts but I assume they will have what they need before October. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more problems to solve other than the laser diode but they'll find that out when they try replacing it.

 

Knowing our luck there will be something else, but hopefully not... there's not much else to go wrong before the whole board is replaced!

 

I got to see it at the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo this past Saturday. I met Terry (the guy who found it), he seems really down to earth, nice guy. I asked him about getting the drive working, he did confirm on October 22nd that Ben Heck is going to replace the laser diode. He also had a plaque with Olaf Olafsson's name on it (some award he won, haha) that came in the box he won at auction. I asked him if Olaf ever tried contacting him to get his award, and he laughed. He told me he keeps going to all these expos, the past 3 weekends he's been booked. I was wondering if they were paying him to come and display it, but he said all they do is cover the total cost of the trip (I'm not sure if he could tell me otherwise). Kind of felt bad for the guy. I asked him if he would ever think of selling it, that was a definitive NO.

I'm glad I got to see it in person. It was pretty cool, yet simple looking. My friend and I played some Mario Kart on it. The prototype controller was on display, but you couldn't use it. I went to shut off the power and swap the cartridge out like I've done a million times, and got the "You can't touch that" speech. He swapped the game out, and guess what, it plays just like a regular Super Famicom (not surprising). Still it was pretty cool, I can say I played a game on one of the rarest pieces of console hardware. They were using a pretty crappy monitor though.

 

"He also had a plaque with Olaf Olafsson's name on it (some award he won, haha) that came in the box he won at auction"
Did you happen to take a picture of the plaque?

 

Are they using some crappy clone controller with it? You would figure they would spring for legit hardware anyway.

 

Ugh, I thought I did, but I didn't It had a big "50" or "50th" on it, it might have had to do with something when he worked at Advanta.


Yeah, you'd think they would get real controllers for it.

He sounded pretty confident that Ben Heck found the right laser assembly. We'll see in a few months.

 

I just found out he paid 75$ for it, oh well, nice find!

(That newspaper on the left in the picture, is from a Hong Kong newspaper, must be from when he showed the console in Hong Kong, late 2015.)

 

So, any updates on this? Anyone know when the final repair is taking place?

 

Patience, it's not October 22 yet.

 

@GoodTofuFriday bought a boombox from me that supposedly has compatible CD parts, it's going to Ben Heck at some point.

 

Snip

 

wave to us when they point the cam at you.

 

A live repair...and then ? There was CDs to test, right ? Or not ?

ofc you cant !!!1111

 

Maybe someone should send ben heck some retro bright for him to use while he's got the snes cd again.