In the nearly 18 months since a CD-ROM-based "Nintendo PlayStation" prototype was first found in an estate sale, emulator makers and homebrew programmers have created a facsimile of what CD-based games would look like on an SNES. Efforts by hacker Ben Heck to get that kind of software actually working on the one-of-a-kind hardware, though, had been stymied by problems getting the CD-ROM drive to talk to the system.

Those problems are now a thing of the past.

In a newly posted video , Heck lays out how the system's CD-ROM drive suddenly started sending valid data to the system literally overnight. "I was working on this yesterday and the CD-ROM wasn't even detecting the disc," Heck says in the video. "I came in this morning and jiggled the cables around and got ready to work on it some more, and all of a sudden it works... did a magic elf come in overnight?"

After testing some audio CDs (and tweaking some internal potentiometers for "focus gain, tracking balance and tracking gain" on the drive to get a better data stream), Heck tries loading up burned versions of some of that emulator-tested homebrew mentioned above. While Super Boss Gaiden generated an error message, a simple puzzle game called Magic Floor loaded off the CD-ROM with nothing but small graphical glitches (these were later fixed when the homebrew programmer "changed something in vertical blank ," Heck says).

The refurbishment process shows just how important it is for emulators to be as faithful as possible to the actual hardware and how tiny differences can cause problems. Heck notes that "unexpected IRQs from the disc system" were causing unexpected behaviors for the homebrew software that didn't happen on the emulator. Specifically, vagaries in the method that the system's cartridge ROM uses to load data from the CD onto 256kb of cartridge RAM seemed to be causing some issues.

"I should really loan this to one of the emulator writers," Heck says in the video. "The bootstrap code to load games needs to be tweaked now that programmers know how actual hardware works... now it's down to the programmers learning what the hardware can actually do versus what they thought it could do."

As a practical matter, getting the Nintendo PlayStation "fully functional" isn't much more than a historical oddity. There's no known "official" software floating around for the system, and even homebrew games play pretty much identically to regular SNES cartridges (just with lots of additional storage space for music, levels, and the like).

That said, the careful refurbishment effort on this piece of video game history is a triumph of classic hardware hacking. Those who want to see the newly working system in person (and not just the half-working system we saw previously ) should check out the Midwest Gaming Classic, where Heck says he'll be returning the prototype to original owners Terry and Dan Diebold.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech