Nintendo-PlayStation prototype teardown

[tjstogy]

https://youtu.be/ug-CyGXMabg

pretty sweet! Whadya guys think?

(I wonder how much this would fetch on eBay.. )

[FinalBaton]

Just saw it this morning.

I'm a fan of the Ben Heck Show (for the most part) so I'm happy that he's the one doing the teardown.
It's super interesting to discover the specs of this add-on/combo

[Blair]

I wish somebody had found some prototype game CDs to test on this thing, some development team had to have some rudimentary software and game prototypes in development.

I really wonder what this thing would've been capable of and what the games would've looked like.

also when he pointed out something that said SFX, it made me wonder if there was something like a super FX chip built into the system.

[AndehX]

I really wonder what this thing would've been capable of and what the games would've looked like.

also when he pointed out something that said SFX, it made me wonder if there was something like a super FX chip built into the system.

Thats most likely the case. It would have had built in SuperFX support for all games that were made for it. I would imagine the games would be like SNES games for the most part, but with much longer and with alot more sprites etc

[Guspaz]

It doesn't, the SF in SFX was apparently meant to be Super Famicom. There are no extra processor chips in either the SNES PlayStation or the driver cart.

That said, just because the prototype cart doesn't have much more than a ROM and a bunch of RAM doesn't mean that that couldn't have been taken farther. They could have produced one or more carts in the future with extra processing power on board to be used with CD games, and those carts could have been used for multiple games. It would have drastically reduced the cost of the add-on chips, since instead of having to put that hardware in each and every game, you'd just put it in one cart that multiple games used.

In any event, even if the SNES PlayStation hadn't been killed by corporate politics, it would have been a flop: the 16-bit era wasn't really able to take advantage of the extra storage afforded by CDs, so the SNES PlayStation would likely have suffered the same fate as other CD add-ons of the era.

[kamiboy]

The PC Engine took full advantage of the CD medium just fine. It was just SEGA that was pretty shit at it, and people in the west tend to have a western centric perspective on the past.

[Guspaz]

Did it? I've not looked at a ton of PC-Engine CD games, but the ones that I've seen (like Rondo of Blood) don't do anything important that couldn't be done with a cartridge. It seems to me that their use of CDs had more to do with HuCards having very limited storage, officially an 8 megabit limit*, while SNES games topped out at 48 megabit. That sounds more like they needed CDs to overcome limitations that weren't nearly as severe in other consoles.

*: A small number of games exceeded this limit, but used oversized HuCards that bulged out.

[kamiboy]

CD games on the PC Engine, specially Rondo of blood, used the CD medium for its intended purpose. Redbook audio, and vastly more storage for level data and sprite assets. Just compare Rondo of Blood with Dracula X on the SNES and you'll understand. Graphically the SNES was superior to the PC Engine but its cartridge space limitations held it back from having the superior port. Another factor was cost of course, since ordering larger ROM carts for your intended game increased manufacturing costs, and profit margins significantly, so developers had to be very mindful of how many assets they were going to cram into their game when developing a cartridge based game, but were free to go all out on CD's.

Plus, PC Engine games had beautiful animated cutscenes, complete with spoken audio, which really improved their presentation. Not like those ugly ass full motion garbage that plagued the SEGA CD.

[Lord of Pirates]

CD audio doesn't do much for the low quality synths of the time.

[mvsfan]

sega killed the sega cd in the US because of shitty FMV games. they actually had some decent releases on the mega cd.

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

CD audio doesn't do much for the low quality synths of the time.

What?

[kamiboy]

I think he means that many of the CD music soundtracks for games from that era were composed using synths, rather than real instruments. Never mind that these "low quality" synths and various Yamaha FM modules in Japanese 8/16bit systems from that era sound like the heavenly singing of the angels themselves to my ears.

Gaming music died when it switched to boring movie-soundtrack orchestrated music. Sure the fidelity is higher, but what is the point when it all sounds like farts to my ear.

[FinalBaton]

What?

yeah that was my reaction as well

[Lord of Pirates]

I was saying that I don't think fidelity suddenly makes a massive jump (beyond the technical) by using RB audio considering the equipment of the time. If you like such soundtracks, more power to you, it doesn't matter to me and that's not what I was getting at.

Edit: I'd guess that more game soundtracks are still done with synths and software rather than recording live instruments/orchestration because of cost.

[Ed Oscuro]

Synth soundtrack quality (both in terms of instruments, and compositions) really varies wildly up until the mid-2000s. Some PC-Engine stuff is awesome - I think Dracula X is as good an example as any - but then there's a lot of stuff that's badly composed or doesn't work to the strengths of the hardware. This isn't really unique to synths, though; there's a lot of quite bad SNES and MD soundtracks.

When I last looked at the Dracula X CD, I thought the binary data section was around 5MB. I don't know how well optimized this is compared to a cartridge development, but that would be pretty sizeable for a SNES cartridge. On the other hand, that's not that much for the PlayStation or N64.

The success of required or optional expansions is hard to gauge, since most of the other attempts to roll out expansions aren't really comparable: The modern concerns about upgradeable / replacement PS4.5 or Xbox One systems are in a totally different and mostly mature market (note that most people still are OK with playing at 30fps); some expansions were for also-ran brands (CD-i and its FMV RAM cart); some were simply too late (Sega CD), or premature and too expensive (Sega CD, Sega 32X), or the brand was unsuccessful from the start and the expansion enabled products were in a niche (the Saturn and its relatively few RAM cart games).

The closest comparison is probably the N64 and the optional/required expansion cart games. I think that shows that it could possibly have worked, as there were a lot of players who would just buy whatever was necessary for the best experience, but with required expansions you run the risk of making less in profit (due to development, manufacture, marketing, and lost sales) than if one had made an expansion optional or just had ignored that opportunity.

Of course, another couple factors stand out: A system that's totally committed to the CD-ROM is going to be attractive to developers at the start due to lower costs. Maybe Nintendo didn't want to go this route due to some ownership stake in ROM production, or at least was trying to sell overpriced development media as had been the case going back to the FDS? However, that should have been a factor for Sony as well as they definitely had semiconductor manufacture. I'm also not sure how high Nintendo was keeping its licensing costs after competition from the Sega Genesis gave developers another successful market entry. If it was still high, that would have been a big factor against the Nintendo-Sony PlayStation which would not be a direct result of the cartridge format choice.

[Guspaz]

When I last looked at the Dracula X CD, I thought the binary data section was around 5MB. I don't know how well optimized this is compared to a cartridge development, but that would be pretty sizeable for a SNES cartridge. On the other hand, that's not that much for the PlayStation or N64.

That's 40 megabit. Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean were both 48 megabit, and I believe there were a bunch of 40 megabit games, so that's still perfectly practical.

I think that the storage pressures on the N64 and Playstation were where storage actually started mattering. Before then, extra space would have been a "nice to have", but not a necessity. Your example is telling: Dracula X shipped on a CD with 5,624 megabits of capacity, but only used 5 megabits of it. The limited read speeds and limited RAM of these early products was also likely a factor, and the SNES PlayStation didn't add much RAM to the party. These limitations made it more difficult to really take advantage of the large amounts of extra storage, since with the SNES PlayStation you could only use 256 KiB of CD data at a time without having to stop to load more data off the disc...

By the N64 and Playstation era, however, you started to have hardware video decoding onboard making proper FMVs more practical, and model and texture data took up a large amount of space. And fully-voiced audio started to make a lot more sense, since 3D meant you could set up an in-engine scene like you would with a real camera.

Of course, nothing would have stopped Nintendo from producing a CD expansion cartridge with a large amount of RAM and an actual GPU onboard (unlike the SuperFX, which was a processor, not a video chip). Would the N64 have come out when it did if Nintendo had produced such a cartridge? Who knows.

I still think it would have been a tough sell, though.

[NJRoadfan]

FWIW, I happen to own a 65816 based system with a CD-ROM drive, an Apple IIgs. With a faster CPU (accelerated to 12Mhz) and 6MB of RAM, it really couldn't do much without help from co-processors. Most CD-ROM titles for it were encyclopedias and such... with JPEG images the machine couldn't even easily view! (decoding them was CPU intensive on a '816) Even the Megadrive/Genesis with its somewhat more powerful 68k needed co-processors to do things like FMV. Granted its a prototype unit, it likely would have had to ship with some sort of extra silicon to make it attractive to game developers.

[tjstogy]

Part 2 is up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh91IO9cV48