Someone made the Nintendo PlayStation work, but you can’t do anything with it

Having been unearthed from the pages of history last year, the Nintendo PlayStation was little more than a curio that ran some SNES games while housing an obsolete CD-ROM drive.

Now though, thanks to serial tinkerer Ben Heckendorn (or Ben Heck as he’s better known), this strange prototype is now in full working order.

As Ben Heck is a constant console tinkerer and hacker, it took little to no time for him to get the CD drive working, although he’s not totally sure how he managed to do so. Explaining in his YouTube video, he fixed the Nintendo PlayStation by simply “jiggling some things around”.

Unfortunately, it may have all been for naught as there’s currently nothing you can play on the Nintendo PlayStation. Created as a prototype to follow on from the Nintendo SNES back in 1991, the project was put on hold due to differences between Nintendo and Sony. Eventually the project split into the Panasonic-made SNES-CD and the Sony PlayStation everyone knows and loves today. So, as the hardware was pulled before it even reached developers, there are zero official projects available – that we know of – for the hardware.

The only way anyone can test the capabilities of the Nintendo PlayStation are via the homebrew titles being developed on emulators designed on the hardware capabilities of the prototype. Chances are that we won’t even see many of those come to fruition either as there’s only one known Nintendo PlayStation in existence – developing anything for it would be rather fruitless.

So while Ben Heck has, ultimately, wasted his time getting a piece of long-forgotten hardware to work again. It’s great to see that this Nintendo/Sony hybrid can still work, especially from a gaming memorabilia preservation perspective, but in reality it doesn’t mean a whole lot anyone beyond die-hard game enthusiasts.