The National Videogame Museum Acquires the Mythical Nintendo Playstation (engadget.com) 21
The National Videogame Museum has acquired an extremely rare MSF-1 development kit, believed to be the oldest surviving prototype of the canceled Nintendo PlayStation. Engadget reports: Nicknamed the Nintendo PlayStation, the idea was that a new CD-ROM format backed by Sony would be added to the cartridge-based Super NES, resulting in a hybrid console that could play both. The partnership didn't last long, though, with Nintendo backing out before it ever really got off the ground, announcing that it would instead be working with Philips. Sony decided to make the PlayStation on its own instead, in an act of revenge that you have to say paid off in the long run, and we never did get to see Crash Bandicoot running around the Mushroom Kingdom. Still, the short-lived Nintendo PlayStation remains a fascinating what-if scenario in video game history, and the USA's National Video Museum has acquired the original development kit.
Revenge? I doubt it. (Score:1)
More likely Sony just brought forward making a console that it was planning on doing anyway. Whether it was a SuperNES compatible or not is all that changed.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
More likely Sony just brought forward making a console that it was planning on doing anyway. Whether it was a SuperNES compatible or not is all that changed.
man the world is busted when people make comments like this without doing any research whatsoever
this story is famous at this point that nintendo put the screwjob on sony. its in the fucking ps1 wikipedia article. literal books have been written about this
and yet with supreme confidence, like an upper middle class white kid with parents, they say "nah, i dont think its true." oh my source? my gut. did i look into any of this at all? no, of course not.
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And all anonymously of course. I guess I wouldn't want my name on something so embarrassing either.
Re: Revenge? I doubt it. (Score:2)
You put your name on stupid shit consistently.
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Sony's real genius was making the Playstation a 3D first console, with an architecture that was reasonably easy to develop for, and then marketing it to adults.
There were 3D consoles before, like the 3DO, and they were competitive with the Playstation in terms of performance. But they were too soon, the tools developers needed were not ready, and they were still toys.
Sega made the Saturn, but thought it was too early to go full 3D and so put a lot of effort into making it a powerful 2D system. Their decisio
Re: Revenge? I doubt it. (Score:2)
3DO was killed by price.
Re:Revenge? I doubt it. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're absolutley correct that the PSX's ease for developers to write for was a major factor, especially compared to something like the Saturn.
But Sony's real *business* genius was not doing what Nintendo did, which was to artificially limit developer access to the console.
At the time, Nintendo was still whole-hog on the 'Nintendo Seal of Quality' and treated developers like serfs. You had to get Nintendo's approval to publish, you had to go *through* Nintendo for cartridge production, and Nintendo would limit how many games a year you could publish.
They did this because they didn't want a second Great Video Game Crash of 1982.
Because cartridges take a loooong time to manufacture, developers had two choices: go big and hope your game actually sells and you're not left holding a massive inventory of unsold carts, or go little and risk having the game be a hit, and sold out for months while you wait your turn for the next cartridge run.
PSX, on the other hand, ran on CDs, and Sony couldn't care less about what you published. You could get your CDs made at any factor that could press CDs, and you could stamp out an entire run in a weekend at pennies per, compared to tens of dollars per cart in manufacturing and license fees.
Nintendo was acting like it was an inevitable force of nature, rather than a big fish in a sea of competition.
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Was there no licensing fee or quality control for the copy protection on the PS1? The special wobble that they had to have?
I wonder what the deal with black discs and the standardized cases was too. I remember you could get black CDRs...
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Sure, you still had to buy the license, dev kits, and so on. But at the time, Nintendo was taking something like a third of the cost per unit, right off the top, if I remember correctly.
I'm going to go reread Game Over.
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Playstation a 3D first console
I think that is a bit of an overstatement, and probably part of their marketing ploy. From a hardware perspective, the PS1 did have a coprocessor that could do matrix calculations, which were useful for the 3D projections and transformations (scaling and rotating) 3D coordinates. IE converting vertices in an object to rotate / scale it in world space, then project it to camera space, etc.
That is helpful, but really, processing the vertices is not the majority of the work required in 3D rendering. It's the r
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I should have mentioned, the N64 DOES have perspective correction at the hardware level, so you can say the N64 was a 3D-first architecture.
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I think you are mistaken about that. The Geometry Transformation Engine, despite its name, did do rasterization as well. The CPU would hand it off a list of triangles to render.
Maybe you are thinking of the N64. It had a hardware rasterizer as well, but the game had to load microcode for it. Nintendo were not very open about how to program it, so 99% of games used Nintendo's library code for that. Rare was one of the few developers that had their own.
NVM + VCF + Time Rift Arcade was awesome!!! (Score:1)
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If you've never been to these amazing places, highly recommend a trip to Dallas!
That same event and party is happening again this May. Time Rift and NVM are again both sponsoring VCF Southwest.
VCF Southwest tickets are here [vcfsw.org].
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Get your pocket protectors ready! Ya'll can bond over late night games of D&D too!
Dude. Time Rift has a bar and was full of hot gamer girls when I was there. These places are not what they were when we were kids... they're way better!
Re: NVM + VCF + Time Rift Arcade was awesome!!! (Score:1)
I had the luck to play with a pre-release Sony PSX (Score:2)
I also remember hating the name when it first appeared as well - PSX was the pre-launch name, and it seems to have stuck around in people's consciousness since as well.