Make Your Own Play Station (The Space Is Important) [Hackaday]

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The early history of the Sony Playstation lies in a stillborn collaboration between Nintendo and Sony to produce an SNES with a CD-ROM drive. So the story goes, Nintendo’s Philips deal angered Sony, who decided to make their own console line, and the rest is history. A very small number of prototypes were made, badged as “Play Station,” and should you find one that escaped today, you’re sitting on a fortune. [James] doesn’t have one, but he did have half a Playstation and an SNES shell, so he could make an ungodly child of the two consoles that you can see in the video below the break.

Those Playstation CD-ROM drives were notorious for melting back in the day, so it’s no surprise they’re still for sale today. Thus, he was able to bring the Sony back to life. What follows is an episode of console cutting worthy of a slasher horror movie, as instead of a bit of fine Dremmeling, he brings out an angle grinder and slices away with abandon. We don’t like the Nintendo switch carrying mains voltage, but we’re fine with the PlayStation expansion connector going away. The Nintendo eject button needs a hack to operate the Playstation door open button when pressed. It’s cool to see the board has a mod chip. We used to fit those as a sideline in a previous life.

Everything goes together with a lot of hot glue and more of that angle grinder, leaving only the drive to fix. A far too large drill comes out, and more hot glue and the drive sits vertically on top of the unit. We like this console, and we like the humour with which a pile of essentially scrap parts have been made into a one-of-a-kind. Remembering Sony’s sensitivity about the use of that space from our days in the industry, though, it wouldn’t surprise us if it attracted the attention of one or another set of notoriously litigious lawyers.