It's a fun day for classic gaming nerds like myself, as the recently-discovered prototype of the "Nintendo PlayStation" has not only been proven beyond a smidgen of doubt to be the real thing, but it actually functions—well, sort of, anyway, and not quite in the way we'd hoped.

Before Sony struck out on its own and created what we know today as the PlayStation, it was going to use that branding for a Super Nintendo system with a CD-ROM drive that it was co-creating with Nintendo. That deal fell apart, but a few prototypes were made, one of which was found recently. Engadget followed the device to Hong Kong, where it's going to be shown off at an upcoming retro gaming expo, and was there to see it switched on. They popped a few standard Super Famicom games into its cartridge port, and it plays them just fine.

That's all well and good. But what doesn't function is the unit's CD-ROM drive. And that's the bummer. The fact that this rare prototype even exists outside of a secret Nintendo black site, where normal people might get to look at it, is pretty cool. But if it could actually run discs, that would mean that if any prototype games were ever found, we'd be able to play unreleased Nintendo software. (But not, regardless of what Engadget says in the feature, games from the eventually-released Sony PlayStation.)

Most famously, Squaresoft was actually deep into development on the classic Super Nintendo game Secret of Mana as a CD-ROM game, and much of it had to be cut down to get it onto a cartridge after the "Nintendo PlayStation" got killed off.

Certainly this gets us closer to being able to play any such games, if they were ever dug up—perhaps the prototype's CD issues can be fixed somehow.