Teardown shows off Sony-Nintendo PlayStation prototype hardware

The prototype of the Sony and Nintendo-made CD-ROM expansion for the SNES has been subjected to a teardown. An analysis of the guts shows that the ‘PlayStation’ could not have made games for the Nintendo console more beautiful.

Ben Heckendorn takes apart the Nintendo-Sony console in an episode of his Ben Heck Show. It concerns the prototype that appeared a year ago. The existence of that prototype confirmed rumors at the time that Nintendo and Sony had collaborated on a CD-ROM expansion for the SNES. The device, known as SFX-100, is a combination of both: the console contains a CD-ROM drive but also all the hardware of a regular Super Nintendo console.

According to Ben Heck, the SFX-100’s hardware isn’t capable of making SNES games look better. The SFX-100 prototype is a regular Super Nintendo in terms of components, with a CD-ROM drive, a microprocessor to control it and a number of extra memory chips. The CD section, which could also have been released as a standalone add-on for the SNES, couldn’t have provided games with better graphics. That may be one of the reasons the add-on was never released. Competitor Sega released a CD-ROM expansion for the Mega Drive console in the same era, which did have hardware to make games look better.

The purpose of the teardown is to get the device’s CD-ROM drive working again. The first episode focuses on hardware analysis, but Heckendorn hopes to get the device up and running and will report on that in a new video. No games have ever been released on CD-ROM for the system, so playing games on the unique Sony-Nintendo console in that way will not be possible. Ben Heck does hope that it will be possible to run an audio CD. Incidentally, the prototype already works in combination with regular SNES cartridges.

The actual teardown starts around 8:25 am