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[Link1110]

Yeah his answer really surprised me, because I had always heard the story that way. It makes me doubt the whole thing now.

And makes the programming seem even more incompetent than it already was cause if there was no cd version then there's no excuse for the sound engine being as bad as it was, taking the melody out of the song every time someone swings a sword.

 

[GCX]

Each source seems to describe the terms of the Nintendo/Sony deal as having been unfavorable for Nintendo, so is there any indication of why Nintendo had agreed to those unfavorable terms in the first place? Did they simply have bad/inadequate negotiation/legal teams?[

https://web.archive.org/web/20120831...ng-playstation
Edge Magazine – April 2009
...But the very day after Sony's announcement, Nintendo declared that it would be breaking its deal with Sony by partnering with Philips instead... This humiliating turnabout enraged Sony president Norio Ohga, but though it seemed sudden from the outside, problems had been boiling between the two companies for some time. The main issue was an agreement over how revenue would be collected – Sony had proposed to take care of money made from CD sales while Nintendo would collect from cartridge sales, and suggested that royalties would be figured out later. "Nintendo went bananas, frankly, and said that we were stepping on its toll booth and that it was totally unacceptable," explains Chris Deering, who at the time worked at Sony-owned Columbia Pictures but would go on to head the PlayStation business in Europe. "They just couldn't agree and it all fell apart." But Ohga was dead set on remaining in the game. At the end of a July meeting to plan litigation against Nintendo, he declared defiantly: "We will never withdraw from this business. Keep going." And so Kutaragi went to work with strong support from the very top of Sony...

The last bit in the Edge quote is a bit weird considering (at least according to Console Wars by Blake J. Harris) Kutaragi worked on PlayStation in secret because he had literally no support from Sony's top executives. They were busy trying to strike a deal with Sega which eventually fell through just like the Nintendo deal before it. This time it was Sony that broke the negotiations though.

 

[MrCunningham]

Would it be possible to mod games in CD versions with higher audio quality, I.E. FF arrangements played as CD tracks? That'd be neat to see.

There already is a homebrew chip called the MSU1 which can hold 4GB's of storage and stream video as well as CD quality audio. There are mods for games like Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger that add animated cutscenes and .wav file like audio. Here's a video of Super Road Blaster homebrew running on the SNES: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YuWwoeAxCk

Really cool that Ben Heck got this to work. I don't think it will really add anything to SNES homebrew, but it is an interesting deconstruction of old prototype game hardware. Though, to be honest, this version of the Playstation-SNES seems pretty simple. Yeah, Ben Heck is still mapping out the chips, but it doesn't seem to add much in additional processing or graphical capabilities.

 

[Danchi]

They actually claim that the offers they've been getting haven't been very big.

If he was really offered $200,000 for this, I feel like he should've snapped the guy's hand off. Has anything videogame related ever sold for that kind of money?

Stadium Events sells for, what, $10k and wasn't there some prototype SEGA hardware once sold?

edit: the console that I was thinking of was the SEGA Pluto. Apparently, it reached $15,500 on eBay, but failed to meet the seller's reserve.

Granted, the Nintendo PlayStation is way more significant than what was essentially an online enabled Saturn console. I just don't think there are enough rich people interested in videogames to drive the price into six figures.

 

[Schopenhauerian]

The last bit in the Edge quote is a bit weird considering (at least according to Console Wars by Blake J. Harris) Kutaragi worked on PlayStation in secret because he had literally no support from Sony's top executives...

Within the Edge narrative, Ohga's statement of support for Kutaragi occurs during a meeting that supposedly took place in July 1991, after Sony had already publicly announced (on 6/1/91) their agreement with Nintendo, and Nintendo had already publicly announced (on 6/2/91) their agreement with Philips. As Cheerilee mentioned, though, the Sony/Nintendo deal (and Kutaragi's work) apparently went back at least to 1988:

...The SNES CD contract was signed (according to Game Over) in 1988, two years before the Japanese launch of the SNES (probably around the time Nintendo bought Sony's sound chip, maybe even in the same contract). According to Wikipedia, CD had just overtaken vinyl as a second-place audio storage medium in 1988 (with cassette tapes holding the lead). I can't see Yamauchi realizing CD's potential...

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/01/business/sony-nintendo-s-partner-will-be-a-rival-too.html
June 1, 1991
...While Sony and Nintendo have collaborated on the machine, Sony will clearly become a competitor of Nintendo. Under the arrangement, Nintendo could introduce its own machines incorporating compact disk players... Sony confirmed yesterday that it had retained all licensing rights for any compact disk game developed for the new system. The deal was negotiated in 1988 but had not been publicly disclosed. Typically, Nintendo has received licensing fees for any games that can be played on its machines. "I heard they gave the store away," Mr. Kleiber said. Apparently, when the deal was signed in 1988, Nintendo underestimated the impact of compact disks on the market. "By that oversight, Sony ended up with a very important business advantage," said Lawrence F. Probst, president and chief executive of Electronic Arts, a video and computer game software publisher...

Also:

...no support from Sony's top executives. They were busy trying to strike a deal with Sega which eventually fell through just like the Nintendo deal before it. This time it was Sony that broke the negotiations though.

Interesting. That's from the Harris book? Tom Kalinske describes that episode differently, though it seems Kalinske might be mistaken about the timeline ("...I think ours preceded that..."): Kalinske began his tenure at Sega only in 1990, while Nintendo's agreement with Sony apparently went back to 1988. Though perhaps Kalinske simply means that the final rejection of the Sega/Sony deal 'preceded' the Nintendo/Philips announcement:

http://www.sega-16.com/2006/07/interview-tom-kalinske/
Tom Kalinske (Sega of America CEO, 1990-1996): ...at one point Olaf, Mickey Schulhoff (former Sony of America CEO), and I discussed that since we had such a great relationship from working on the Sega CD, why don't we take what we've learned from our software developers – their input – and use it as the criteria for what the next optical platform ought to be? ...I remember we had a document that Olaf and Mickey took to Sony that said they'd like to develop jointly the next hardware, the next game platform, with Sega, and here's what we think it ought to do. Sony apparently gave the green light to that. I took it to Sega of Japan and told them that this was what we thought an ideal platform would be, at least from an U.S. perspective, based on what we've learned from the Sega CD, and our involvement with Sony and our own people. Sega said not a chance. Why would it want to share a platform with Sony? Sega would be much better off just developing its own platform, and it's nice that we had some ideas on what that platform ought to be and they'd consider it, but the company would be developing its next platform itself... We all knew we were going to lose money on the hardware, so our proposal was that each of us would sell this joint Sega/Sony hardware platform; we'll share the loss on the hardware (whatever that is, we'll split it), combine our advertising and marketing, but we'll each be responsible for the software sales we'll generate. Now, at that particular point in time, Sega knew how to develop software a hell of a lot better than Sony did. They were just coming up the learning curve, so we would have benefited much more greatly, at least in my opinion, than Sony would have, at least initially, at least for a year or two. But Sega of Japan didn't want any of that. 

Sega-16: That sounds a lot like what happened with the Sony/Nintendo CD-ROM. Sony was willing to enter into a joint hardware platform but was ultimately rejected by Nintendo in favor of Phillips. 

Tom Kalinske: Yeah, but I think ours preceded that though. 

 

[DXB-KNIGHT]

Beware by operating the Nintendo Playstation you'll be creating a rift in time and space that may shatter our existence as we know it.

 

[Xenoblade]

I couldn't even begin to think about how much it's worth.

I offered US$40,000 back when he found it and he refused. I was serious btw.

 

[PdotMichael]

It's always interesting how Nintendo thought CD-disks would be something like the alternative floppy disk for NES which was a somehow shortlived and niche way of publishing games.

 

[Sparrowhawk]

This is like some Back to the Future alternate timeline shit.

 

[YaBish]

Watched this just now and was fascinated by it. The low ram count is unfortunate, but like others have said, this is just a prototype in the grand scheme of things.

 

[ResidentDante]

Glad they got it up and running. What happens now though is interesting.