News Nintendo-PlayStation Prototype Is Currently Auctioning for $350K

Nintendo and Sony allegedly produced 200 units, which Heritage Auctions claimed have all been destroyed except for the one on auction.
If by "destroyed" they mean "stored in a warehouse somewhere" then sure. : P If I had to guess, both Nintendo and Sony probably have some of these things floating around.

It's incredible that the Super NES CD-ROM prototype is still working after so many years.
Are Super Nintendos still working? I don't see why it would be surprising that a console from the early 90s that likely saw minimal use would still be functional. Though technically, the CD drive wasn't working when the device was acquired a decade ago, and did need some repairs, which is pointed out in the listing.
 
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😂. Man some moron is going waste a lot of money. I would buy a super car instead
 
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WildCard999

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"The auction page claims the console was discovered in 2009 and that the CD-ROM was non-functional at the time. However YouTuber Benjamin Heckendorn reportedly repaired it."

Original parts? I'd be hesitant to spend that kind of money (if I could) by having someone neither from Nintendo or Sony "repairing" it.

@cryoburner, it makes zero sense to me why they would destroy them and yea I could imagine someone holding onto the other ones for future auctions...at least for close to that kind of cash.
 

WildCard999

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😂. Man some moron is going waste a lot of money. I would buy a super car instead
Depends on priorities I guess. While I agree it's way too much it would be interesting to own and I think for the people bidding on it even the 370K is probably a drop in the bucket for them. For me though 370K is a Kawasaki H2, new house and a bit of partying/traveling for a few years.
 
Original parts? I'd be hesitant to spend that kind of money (if I could) by having someone neither from Nintendo or Sony "repairing" it.
He changed 3 capacitors,it's not brain surgery...
Capacitors have to be changed every decade or so if you want to keep using electronics, even collectors don't care about that.

@cryoburner, it makes zero sense to me why they would destroy them and yea I could imagine someone holding onto the other ones for future auctions...at least for close to that kind of cash.
Usually they only make that many prototypes if they are so far along that they are ready to send them out to developers and the media, if they end up not sending them away they are not going to keep them,storage space is expensive and they make a lot of prototypes all of the time, they would run out of space at some point.
It's also pointless for them to disassemble them for parts because they wouldn't use used parts for anything anyway.
Someone keeping one as a momentum is the only way something like this becomes possible.
You can check out the dig where they buried tons of ET cartridges because it was cheaper than doing anything else with them.
 
storage space is expensive and they make a lot of prototypes all of the time, they would run out of space at some point.
If it's only a couple-hundred of them, that could likely fit on a single pallet. Sure, it's possible that most of them could have been destroyed, but at the very least, I'm sure they would have held onto a handful of them.
 
Feb 16, 2020
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Lol 350k for a fake hardware xD. No one seem disturb that no one ever confirm that the true prototype, from all the people who has worked on this thing back in 9x's not one of them says : "Well done it's the real prototype xD"

People are stupid...
 

fireaza

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It's incredible that the Super NES CD-ROM prototype is still working after so many years. The auction page claims the console was discovered in 2009 and that the CD-ROM was non-functional at the time. However YouTuber Benjamin Heckendorn reportedly repaired it.

According to Ben's video, the console had been intentionally disabled at some point, so he was able to get it working mostly just by working out what had been done and un-doing it.
 
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Lol 350k for a fake hardware xD. No one seem disturb that no one ever confirm that the true prototype, from all the people who has worked on this thing back in 9x's not one of them says : "Well done it's the real prototype xD"

People are stupid...
If it were a fake, it would have likely taken a lot of effort to make. One would have needed to manufacture custom-molded parts, custom circuit boards, custom ROM software to make it all work together, and expose the completed device to UV light for a while to yellow the plastic. Judging by this teardown video, it certainly looks like a legitimate device manufactured by Sony, and was probably nearly a consumer-ready design, albeit with the circuit boards still requiring some revisions...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug-CyGXMabg
 
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Spaceghaze

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Oct 17, 2019
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They still bidding on this? I remember reading an article some time ago that some guy from Norway bid him something like 1 million for it, and he turned it down. So people have definitely money to "waste" on this kind of stuff"..

No i wonder did he turn it down because he thinks that the bids will go even higher?
 

bit_user

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350k is not a lot for a billionaire.
I didn't say it was a lot, I said it was not cheap. Meaning, it's an amount of money that you don't spend on a whim.

Rich people don't have all of their money just sitting in a checking or savings account. At most, probably just a couple % are liquid, at any given point in time. So, out of say $10M, then it's going to put a noticeable dent in that.

Anyway, it's not worth arguing. I'm just trying to explain what I meant.
 
He changed 3 capacitors,it's not brain surgery...
Capacitors have to be changed every decade or so if you want to keep using electronics, even collectors don't care about that.


Usually they only make that many prototypes if they are so far along that they are ready to send them out to developers and the media, if they end up not sending them away they are not going to keep them,storage space is expensive and they make a lot of prototypes all of the time, they would run out of space at some point.
It's also pointless for them to disassemble them for parts because they wouldn't use used parts for anything anyway.
Someone keeping one as a momentum is the only way something like this becomes possible.
You can check out the dig where they buried tons of ET cartridges because it was cheaper than doing anything else with them.

The AVGN movie was based all on the rumor of the buried ET carts.

If I remember they also discovered some actually got reused for other games.