DISCOVERING THE HARDWARE AND HISTORY OF THE FIRST PLAYSTATION
At the end of the 80s, what would become the father of the PlayStation, Ken Kutaragi , who at the time worked as an engineer in Sony's Sound Lab, was passing by his daughter who was playing with his Famicom (NES in our part ). Kutaragi was struck by the enormous limitations of the Nintendo console in terms of quality and sonic capabilities and decided to secretly make an audio chip dedicated to gaming consoles (by the way, here we are talking about the PlayStation 5 audio chip ) in the Sony labs. healthnutritionhints
Sony and Nintendo at the time had entered into a
collaboration to produce the Family Computer Disk, a peripheral - released only
in Japan - which added support for proprietary floppy disks to the NES, more
capacious than the old cartridges and with important advantages in terms of
production costs. and audio output.
Thanks to close contacts with Nintendo, Kutaragi was able to
present his impressive sound chip, the SPC-700, even risking firing for working
secretly behind Sony, but was saved by Norio Ohga, at the time president of the
' Japanese company, which sensing its potential welcomed it under its wing.
The collaboration with Nintendo
After making the agreement for the supply of the audio chip,
Nintendo asked Sony to develop a CD-ROM-based add-on to be used alongside the
Super Nintendo, the project was codenamed "Play Station" or
"SNES CD" . (in this article you can find our review of Sony's latest
addition, the PlayStation 5 )
The agreement, signed in 1988, traveled on two levels: the
first was to provide an add-on CD-ROM for the SNES, the second was to produce a
complete Sony-branded entertainment system, capable of reading both SNES game
cartridges, and a new format, called "Super Disk", which could be
used to contain both audio and video tracks.
On balance, the contract signed at the time was really very
favorable for Sony, which would have kept all the sales rights on the products
that used the Super Disk as a support, cutting Nintendo out of a very important
slice of the market.
And in fact, the then president of Nintendo Hiroshi
Yamauchi, including the risks that would entail honoring the contract with
Sony, secretly interrupted all development concerning the SNES CD peripheral
and decided to send vice president Minoru Arakawa to Amsterdam behind Sony, to
tighten an advantageous agreement with Philips - Sony's number one rival at the
time - which allowed Nintendo to retain full licensing management.
Sony showed up at CES in 1991 full of expectations, sure to
fully enter the gaming market, announcing its partnership with Nintendo to
produce its " Nintendo PlayStation."But the twist that left everyone
blown away happened the following day: Nintendo announced the agreement with
Philips, which would effectively cut Sony out, publicly humiliating it and also
violating the mutual respect that Japanese companies used to have between them.
About 200 prototypes of the PlayStation / SNES hybrid were
produced, then the project was canceled permanently.
Sony also approached SEGA to try a partnership but the
project never went through as SEGA president Tom Kalinske considered Sony too
inexperienced in terms of gaming hardware.
The shame suffered convinced the president Ohga to create
Sony Computer Entertainment which, under the direction of Kutaragi, channeled
all the efforts and the "know how"accumulated in the past years
inproject codenamed "PlayStation X".
The heart of PlayStation
In the initial stages of the design, the Sony engineers
wondered if they should focus on the now well-established graphics based on 2D
sprites or on the polygonal 3D one, which at that time was not in the least
widespread in the home console market, but the success of Virtua Fighter in
Japan he convinced them to create a console that based its offer entirely on 3D
graphics.
The CPU was a 32-bit MIPS R3051 RISC type, clocked at
33.8688 MHz and manufactured by LSI Logic Corp. on a technology licensed by SGI
(the same that later produced the Nintendo 64 GPU) and was supported by two
co-processors. The first (COP 0) was in charge of memory and error management,
the second (COP 2) was called the Geometry Transformation Engine (GTE) and was
in charge of vector, lighting and geometry calculations. In addition to these
there was a small processor, the Motion Decoder (MDEC) that allowed to
decompress in the video memory and play the iconic FMV movies, which became one
of the flagships of gaming on PS1.
The graphics processor instead was produced directly by Sony
on a Toshiba project and allowed to render resolutions up to 640 × 480 in
24-bit interleaved mode (16,777,216 colors). The PlayStation GPU was in no way
capable of rendering sprite-based 2D graphics , as was the case on SEGA Saturn
thanks to a dedicated chip, yet over the years there have been a multitude of
2D games. This was possible thanks to the ingenious use of 3D graphics made by
the developers, every apparently 2D object on PlayStation was a 3D object of
which only one side could be viewed, so that the illusion of a totally flat
scenario could be created.
The GPU could also use various effects such as fog, which
was often used to limit the draw distance and consequently the computing power
required to render a scene (did someone say Silent Hill?), Transparencies
(which for example on SEGA Saturn, directed competitor of PlayStation, they had
to be created on the software side) and could render multiple overlapping
backgrounds so as to create a parallax effect.
The audio processor was 16-bit with a frequency of 44.1 kHz
and 24-channel ADPCM support, it is curious to know that the PlayStation at the
time was highly sought after among audiophiles , thanks to its ability to play
audio CDs with a quality equal to if not superior to much more expensive CD
players. Sony initially chose a pad with a layout very similar to what was seen
on Super Nintendo, the only difference, apart from the total change of
ergonomics, was the addition of a second row of back buttons that, given the
nature of the console, could favor better navigation in 3D environments.
Unlike what Nintendo did which used letters to identify the
keys of its pads,the front buttons of the PSX pad had four symbols, which in
the initial intentions of the designer Teiyu Goto, had to represent specific
functions : the triangle identified a control on the view, the square resembled
a sheet of paper and had to be used to call up the menus, circle and cross
instead symbolized the choices "Confirm" and "Cancel"
respectively, but in the western market they decided to reverse these
functions.
In the first version of the controller there was no analog
stick, but the totally 3D nature of the console prompted Sony to introduce
them, first in the Dual Analog controller, then in the Dualshock, which became
the standard PlayStation controller. The PSX used proprietary removable media
to save game progress, the Memory cards, officially available in the 128
Kilobyte size only.
Another aspect that sanctioned the success of PlayStation
was the use of CDs as a support, which led to a dizzying increase in available
space and lowered costs.
Obviously Sony was aware that using such a common support
would have exposed the console to piracy so, to try - on balance only partially
- to stem the problem, each original copy hid a series of errors inside, which
was impossible to reproduce during the but which were read and decoded by the
console player. Many mistakenly believed that the typical black color of PS1 discs
was part of the anti-piracy protection, but in reality it only helped the end
user to recognize an original disc.
The recipe for success
Sony initially secured the support of many Japanese software
houses, but there were critical issues: the total absence of proprietary
studios that could have developed exclusive software for Sony's newcomer and
the enormous cost of Sony NEWS workstation-based devkits, which discouraged the
arrival of new developers. The matter was completely resolved with the
acquisition of Psygnosis in 1993 for 48 million dollars.
The Liverpool software house had two great merits: the first
was to commission SN Systems to develop a devkit that could be easily installed
on any PC using only two expansion cards, making development on PlayStation
easier and cheaper; the second was to develop software and provide support to
any third party developer, a very inclusive approach and in total discontinuity
with what Nintendo and Sega have done in the past years.
At the time of the PlayStation release, which took place on
December 3, 1994 in Japan and September 29, 1995 in our country, Sony's main
competitor was the SEGA Saturn. In the design phase, the Saturn overturned its
initial concept after the announcement of the PlayStation specifications by
introducing a processor for 3D graphics. Although it was a very powerful
console on paper, perhaps even more than PlayStation, it was very difficult to
develop on Saturn, the introduction of a dual CPU at that time was a huge
misstep by SEGA as the developers were not yet able to better manage the two
processors.
On top of that, the Saturn came on the market with a price
tag of $ 399, $ 100 higher than Sony's newcomer. For SEGA it was a total
defeat.
In 1996 Nintendo presented its Nintendo 64 to the public,
which met with some success thanks to the excellent hardware and some
exclusives still considered milestones today, but the choice to remain glued to
proprietary supports, very expensive and with extremely limited capacity ( 64
MB instead of the 660 MB available on PSX CDs) convinced many software houses,
historically linked to the Nintendo brand - such as Squaresoft - to switch to
Sony's newcomer.
Furthermore, publishing on PlayStation ensured the software
houses greater profits: Sony asked only $ 10 for each copy sold, not to mention
the very low cost of the media, the offer was too greedy not to be accepted.
Even the marketing campaign chosen by was very aggressive and hit the mark, the
choice to associate the symbols of the pad - which immediately became iconic -
and slogans such as "Do Not Underestimate The Power Of PlayStation"
and "UR Not ( RED) E " attracted a growing and more adult audience.
An incredible library
During its long life cycle that lasted from 1994 to 2006,
the PlayStation has been able to boast a multitude of titles of absolute depth
, which have shone not only from a purely playful but also technical point of
view. Soul Reaver, with its load-free worlds, the Tekken series running at 60
fps (like many other fighting games on PSX), Spyro the Dragon with its
futuristic dynamic level of detail system that allowed exceptional draw
distances, Metal Gear Solid , Gran Turismo, the Resident Evil sagas ( here you
can find our preview of the eighth chapter of the saga), Final Fantasy, Crash
Bandicot and Tomb Raider are just some examples of a library consisting of
about 8000 titles that includes many milestones and numerous seminal titles
that still heavily influence the videogame landscape today .
That of Sony was a perfect recipe for success, it managed to
bring its PlayStation, the latest arrival in a market totally dominated by the
consoles of Nintendo and SEGA, to be the first console to sell over 100 million
units. The attention to the needs of the developers who until then were only
the last cog in the system, the perfect marketing choices, and the good fortune
of having been the most technically versatile console in a golden age of
videogames have made PlayStation a point of reference and synonym of videogame
all over the world.
