For a system that was never officially released, the SNES PlayStation has certainly eaten up plenty of column inches over the past few years – and understandably so.
This union between Nintendo and Sony could have revolutionised the 16-bit market, but ultimately, the deal was broken off when Nintendo became fearful that Sony would gain too much from software sales. The fallout was that Sony turned its attention to the stand-alone PlayStation, and the rest is history.
Despite the fact that it was never released and, therefore, didn't get any games, there's an endless fascination with recreating this system – and the modder who gave us the custom Sega Neptune motherboard appears to be working on making it a reality.
Cosam the Great has shared an image of a new Super Famicom motherboard which is shown booting up the Super Disc BIOS – Sony's custom BIOS that would have powered the SNES PlayStation, had it been released.
"Don't get too excited," says the modder. "At the moment, this is just the world's most overcomplicated yet incomplete Super Famicom."
It's clearly very early days for this particular project, but if it goes the distance then we'd imagine people will be willing to pay a lot of money to own one. Wesk Mods has already made available 3D modelling files for the casing, so the externals are sorted, at least.
We'd also imagine that homebrew SNES CD software would become very popular, too.
[source x.com]
Comments 18
With new games developed for the system?
Hrmm… if this happens, I’m looking forward to an intrepid developer giving us a Secret of Mana mod, creating the version intended for the CD add-on.
@Fanboy_Destroyer I imagine (if this does happen) we'll see a combination of new games and hacked ports which add in CD-quality music and the like.
Well that would be a very cool development.
It would be even more cool if they could add in some of the other functionality that was in the works for later iterations of the "SNES CD" too, of which there's actually quite a lot of stuff there (32-bit CPU running at 21.477 MHz, FX chip incorporated, 16.7 million colours, etc), but I expect that will never ever happen:
https://emu.gbxemu.com/previews/nintendo_snes_cd_rom.html
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/11/the_snes_playstation_was_going_to_have_a_super_fx_chip_built-in
Also, I would kinda really like the shell to look like this:
https://images.timeextension.com/f2cddc509add0/play-station-concept-edited.900x.jpg
@Damo That depends on the price and availability. If it's not stupidly overpriced and there's a big enough community and enough units sold, maybe.
The most impressive looking console of all time. Especially with that LCD display and pure early 90s Sony design language coursing through it.
Of the 200 or so that were produced, this has been incorrectly reported to be the only one ever sold or potentially still in existence.
There was a unit sold on Yahoo Auctions Japan in the early 2000's for £8000 or $13000 at the time in better condition than the one found a decade ago. I also saw one in a display cabinet of a games distributor in Shibuya when I was securing stock of launch Dreamcasts from them. It wasn't for sale and they wouldn't let me touch it. I offered what I thought was a good price but my Japanese translator told me continuing to ask was insulting them so I abruptly dropped my interest.
No doubt it would be the absolute centrepiece of any games collection no matter how big or small, so this replica should sell well enough with those who can afford what will be the nearest thing we'll ever get to owning one again.
@Damo the sizeable msu-1 library could definitely be utilised and converted into iso images to run off the cd rom drive (providing they would add one)
@Fanboy_Destroyer As soon as the BIOS was dumped online and reverse-engineered (by an emulator developer calling himself nocash who has made his emulator development his primary job somehow), there was one homebrew game quickly developed for the format.
Sadly, higan/bsnes dev Near/byuu never worked on it, insisting he'd need at least one licensed developer game leaked before he'd have started work on it.
@KingMike 200 dev units must have resulted in some form of software being developed. I remember reading a trade magazine in the early 90s which had seen a game running on the system at CES. Maybe it was Jerry Boy with redbook audio 😃
@KingMike It's a real shame Near/byuu isn't around to continue the great work he did on SNES. I'm not fully in the loop, but it seems like he did more than pretty much anyone else to help the modern SNES scene get to where it's at today. It could do with a lot more people as talented and dedicated as him imo.
Good that it didn't end up being a thing back then. The PSX was amazing and we owe its existence to Nintendo being dumb.
That said, I like the look of this unit and a custom shell in its image would be neat.
I know I could probably just google it, but what technical benefit would it bring to develop homebrew for a SNES Playstation emulator rather than just regular SNES emulation, given that storage space is functionally infinite either way? I mean other than just street cred.
@N64-ROX Probably not much, if you're going by what the SuperDisc prototype was. In a lot of ways, you'd actually be better off with a large cartridge. The SuperDisc cart had 256k of RAM to load your assets to from the disc, putting it in line with the PC-Engine's System Card 3. That's it, that's all it does besides pass CD audio along. That can still be pretty good, the Super CD-ROM games are fantastic, but a big cart is easier to plan for, has no load times, and allows access to any game asset at any time. Releasing on a cart means anyone with an SNES can play on real hardware, too.
Just like the PCE, though, the plan may have been to launch more advanced cartridges to boost the CD games further, things like more RAM or co-processors. That's what I think the SA-1 was actually designed for.
So, if you're staying authentic to what we know actually existed, it's probably nothing to write home about. If you were to create a homebrew SuperDisc² for FPGAs that has an SA-1 or Super FX with 2MB, like the Arcade Card on PCE, well, then it's pretty nifty. Something at least similar likely would have happened has this thing released and not bombed, too. Depends on if the dev is a stickler for authenticity, really.
@axelhander Nintendo was only dumb in signing the contract without reading the fine print, though it was arguably to get Ken Kutaragi to stop pestering them.
Sony would have pulled a Daniel Plainview on Nintendo.
https://kotaku.com/the-weird-history-of-the-super-nes-cd-rom-nintendos-mo-1828860861
@CocktailCabinet In these days maybe, but had it actually released, CDs would have had a cheaper physical manufacturing cost to the publisher. That's about the extent of the benefit.
I mean, I do remember one reader asking a game magazine why CD games (I'd guess referring to Sega CD and/or TurboCD) retail prices didn't differ drastically from cartridge games, and their response was something like the higher cost of creating the content stored on the CD offset the cheaper cost of the CD itself. Though I know gamers would love to debate that in practice. I guess that depends on what exactly the extra content made possible by the CD was. FMVs, probably. Cartridge game ports with a new level and CD soundtrack? Maybe not as much.
@Damo Well, we already have ways to add CD-quality audio to SNES games; MSU-1 and flashcarts.
I already own 2 SNESs. I wish they'd, in addition to the combined unit, sell a addon version like how Sony & Nintendo were originally gonna do it back in the day.
@mganai77 I avoid Kotaku like the plague so I'll pass on reading that.
But Sony's just another evil corpo, so it don't take much to convince me that Nintendo accepting the deal might've been bad for both companies.
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