The actual Nintendo PlayStation is the stuff of legends, but if you want your own, there's a new video that'll give you a reasonable facsimile. Just prepare to take a whole lot of psychic damage along the way.
This Nintendo PlayStation is the project of James Channel, a YouTuber who specializes in utterly chaotic retro console builds. The video below starts simply enough with a disused set of PlayStation guts and a yellowing Japanese Super Famicom case. Why not put one inside the other? To that end, James grabs a saw, a soldering iron, and a hot glue gun and gets to work.
You might mistake this for a normal build video in the first few minutes, but things eventually start to unravel. Repurposing an old electrical switch, James muses that "in its past life, this switch never had to switch any more than 9 volts and I'm putting 240 volts through it. I'm… I'm sure it'll be fine." A bit later, he proceeds to bust some RCA jacks out of an old TV board by hand. Then comes the hot glue. So, so much hot glue.
The best part is the optical drive glued to the surface of the console, which spins discs right out in the open as it threatens to cause a Mortal Kombat fatality at any moment. Stunningly, this all seems to actually work. It's a viable way to play PS1 games, if not a particularly pretty one.
Most console mod videos on YouTube will suggest 'best practices' to ensure your mods are 'safe' and 'attractive.' I don't know if you've had the same experience, but every single time I've cracked into an old console for even a simple repair or part replacement, nothing but chaos and despair has awaited. I'm delighted to see a video like this embrace the gremlin mentality.
This build was inspired by the actual Nintendo PlayStation, a project developed in partnership between Sony and Nintendo in the early '90s. The two companies eventually fell out - leading to Sony's creation of the PlayStation we all know a few years later - but not before a few prototype consoles were developed. The one Nintendo PlayStation known to still exist sold for $360,000 back in 2020.
This is surely the best-worst way to play the best PS1 games of all time.
