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Remember the BrickBoy? It was an unofficial kit which turned the Lego Game Boy into a playable console, raising a whopping €1 million to date on Kickstarter – and the team behind it has its sights set on the recently-released Lego PlayStation next.
“When we saw the Lego PlayStation, we wanted to press power and hear it start up,” Thomas Bertani, inventor and technical lead at BrickBoy, tells Time Extension. “With BrickBoy, more than 5,600 backers showed us how much people want their Lego builds to really play. BrickStation brings that to the living room."
With BrickStation installed, the Lego PlayStation can be connected to your TV using an HDMI cable; it runs PS1 under emulation and can be controlled with wireless Bluetooth or USB controllers. Games are loaded via a MicroSD card, and original PS1 memory cards are supported.
The BrickStation replaces the set's left-hand Ape Escape side tray, but the rest of the kit remains the same; there's no need to modify or alter any element of the set. “Not changing the set is a principle we’ve followed since BrickBoy,” says Bertani. “Whatever we add, you can always go back to the original build. With BrickStation, that meant fitting a whole console, with a speaker and a vibration motor, into the space of one side tray, while the set still looks exactly as Lego designed it.”
The functional power button turns the whole thing on, while a tiny speaker and a vibration motor imitate the sound of a CD drive spinning up. “We wanted the set’s own Lego button to switch the console on, not a hidden switch somewhere else,” says Bertani.
“So we put a magnet in the button, and a magnetometer senses when it’s pressed. We didn’t want a box that simply runs games, but the moment of switching on a PS1, with the drive whirring into life. With no real drive inside, sound and vibration had to recreate it.” The team really has thought of everything here.
The BrickStation solves a major shortcoming of the original Lego kit; you can now display your favourite PS1 game under the lid. The module doesn't read discs, but you can still make use of your original PlayStation games by plugging in an external USB CD-ROM reader and caching the game to the MicroSD card. This is a pretty cool way for ethically minded fans to use this kit without resorting to downloading games online.
Amazingly, the team behind this mod started work before the Lego PlayStation was released. "To be ready as soon as possible, we started from the unofficial leaks of the Lego PlayStation, before the set came out,” Bertani tells us. “When the real set arrived, adapting BrickStation to the actual build took relatively little time, thanks to the work we had already done.”
BrickStation is currently in the prototype phase, but the experience of creating the BrickBoy has helped to speed things up considerably. “BrickBoy taught us a lot,” says Bertani, “and it showed us how much these small details matter to people who grew up with the original.” BrickStation's pre-launch page is live on Kickstarter, and, as was the case with BrickBoy, there are plans to release a low-price tier for early adopters – so you'll want to make sure you subscribe to the campaign to be told the moment it launches.
One final detail we really love about this set shows the attention to detail Bertani and his team have: BrickStation adds exactly 83 LEGO pieces, including a display memory card, bringing the total pieces in the build to 1,994, the launch year of the first PlayStation.
Thanks to Ludovico Bianco for making this feature possible.