Gadgetory

everyone Greg here with science studio below me right here is a Sony PlayStation there is no number after this model because well this was the first model that Sony ever released of the PlayStation series this has been owned by my family for about 15 or 16 years I might be completely wrong about that but I remember having this thing when I was very very young and I used to play games on this all the time this was the first console I ever played that I can remember and it served my childhood very well so what we're going to do now that it's basically been sitting in a box for a long time is tear it down and we're going to see what was inside of this very old but very cool first gen Sony Playstation there's something in here that like rattles I have no idea what that is so maybe we'll find out when we actually start tearing it down so the outside first off is where we'll start with the teardown process obviously there's nothing on the top here that we can unscrew but I do want to give you a quick rundown of what it was like to own one of these things and basically the versatility of such a I don't know I guess rather slim form factor I mean think about it for the time even though the games that this console would run we're not very intensive you know in today's standards they actually were back then and so to have a console so slim and so small it was quite impressive for its time you can see here we have an open button all this does here is pop open the CD tray this kind of reminds me of those old-school CD players you know you lift the little flap and then insert your little cd-rom and yeah that's basically what that is so you can see it's just mechanical it's really all it happens there so this lid kind of pops up just plastic this is the power button you would push this and it would turn on and then I push it again it would turn off it does seem to have like a little spring loader in there and then a reset button which I don't ever remember using but I guess this would be this would be a useful tool if you ever had games freeze up on you which the ps1 was notorious for so that's it for the top really pretty cool there on the front here you've got to memory card slots these memory cards we're not very big at all leave the the largest that we ever owned was a 512 kilobyte memory card and really that's all you need I think it's all it's going to do is just load a save point from the game so the city would do much of the loading the memory card would just tell the CD where to start from and then you have these very ancient controller inputs so original controllers did not have the joysticks a little analogues on either side you could play with but these did support those and we're offered later on after the console was released besides here nothing entertaining both sides were kind of the same see nothing special dude really yeah you're welcome on the back here see we have a parallel power out nobody really used that same with a serial power out nobody use that that I knew of the main one here that you would use for display well it's really only one you can use with the AV multi-out so this is what you would plug from here into a TV a cable would feed from this side to and then like this so you would have your video which was yellow and then you would have your left and right audio inputs which would be like its outputs the red and white wow that's like really dirty that's really nasty anyway these are very old the whole thing's very old so I'm not sure how disgusting this thing will look when we actually start tearing it down but that's what we're about to do so this is all fresh I've never actually done this before for some reason one of the screws is like very lifted I don't know why I never tried to take this thing apart earlier but as far as I know of this one is - that's really weird I don't know we're going to tear it down anyway it's the first things first we're going to pop off these screws here on the bottom of the console like I said I don't know why these look like they've been removed already they weren't screwed in properly if they were removed I don't know why why that's the case give these nice little handy arrows here that are yes pointing to the rather obvious screw I don't know why why they were to even bother doing that okay maybe I should've done this from the other side one second okay so this is basically just the entire top of the frame of the console just comes right off you can see the levers here how they work kind of kind of cool just spring-loaded their power button was literally just a piece of plastic that pushed a button actually on the board up here and then same with the reset button just another plastic piece I would push a button literally on the board itself this is an important piece to the console obviously this is what would rotate the CD and this laser right here is what would read the CD so I believe the maximum amount of data allowed on a Playstation CD was 660 megabytes so this laser was in charge of moving up and down as this disc rotated and as all that occurred the laser was basically reading the data on the disk and sending it through this cable right here I believe that this cable is just for the motor so this is what's going to rotate the disc there are four cables here so two of them are going to be for power one's going to be for ground regulation and the other one's probably going to be kind of like a PWM controller on like a standard computer it would tell the motor how fast to turn so that's what I'm assuming those four cables of for we're going to go ahead and pull these apart cool things about these cables here they just pop right off the board so this is the entire reading unit of the original PlayStation nothing special really now but for its time it was state of the art I'm going to put that to the side so just as a safety precaution I know this thing has like literally not been turned on for I would say ten years I'm going to hold the power button down I advise doing this with anything that you take apart that involves a power supply and/or transformer so I hold this down for about five or ten seconds this will let all of the power drain out of any of the large capacitors it might be on the circuit board that you'll be working with so essentially this entire board right here it's completely independent of the issue you'd call it motherboard which is where the CPU and GPU house this entire board was in charge of power regulations you can see on the back here this is where powered run into your console from a wall and then this entire board would be in charge of basically downgrading the power to its specified amounts and then these five cables right here were in charge of delivering power from this board ultimately from the wall to the motherboard so the CPU and the GPU all of your controller units your memory cards your lasers and your CD motor would all be powered from just these five little wires right here that's pretty cool you don't see that nowadays this little cable I unplugged here is in charge of memory card power allocation memory card data reading and also your controller so any controller feedback that you wanted sent to the console would have to run through this little flat cable here and there are actually only it looks like ten pins so really for for what you're inputting here you know downgrading that down to just ten pins of the data streams actually quite impressive so we're going to go ahead and see if we can lift this entire panel off now I believe I've taken off all the screws so this is just a big I guess you could call it a heat shield it's just a piece of metal it's actually yeah it's it's it's kind of aluminum I'm assuming and it just protects the entire motherboard so what we have now are just pieces of copper just a thin copper paper and then over here it's a more reflective metal I'm also assuming that that is aluminum it looks like aluminum so maybe you guys know what that is but I think it's a little bit unsure does it look like aluminum and this plate is actually Wow it's actually soldered to the motherboard itself this plate will not come up without using a soldering kit okay so that just folds right up that's that's nice this aluminum plate like I said here this is not going to fold up this is soldered literally to the motherboard unfortunately that's going to hide the CPU and the GPU in this case so a lot of these fancy looking chips here are in charge of things like audio they did have an independent audio processor on here so similar to like a GP or a CPU they had something similar to like an SPU so a sound processing unit yeah but some of these chips are allocated specifically for so a couple of cool facts about the central processing unit of the original PlayStation this processing unit only had five kilobytes that's right this with a K not an M five kilobytes of l1 cache so most impede a utilize processors that have I don't know grades of l2 and l3 cache but they're always typically in 512 kilobytes to one or two or three or four megabytes of data allocation each the CPU here carried 32-bit architecture and was running at a frequency of 33 roughly 33 megahertz 33 yeah if you're running like a 95 90 right now by AMD you're probably up at around 5 gigahertz if you're running like a low-power z III let's say you're probably running at 2.6 or 2.3 gigahertz but most CPUs whether they demand a lot of power or little run at some gigahertz frequency and this one was only running at 33 megahertz so this thing only had two megabytes of RAM to access so that's basically the memory that the CPU would directly communicate with and it only had two megabytes of it so most computers nowadays would require at least two gigabytes of them I believe to run Windows 10 you need like 1.5 2 gigabytes of ddr2 or DDR whatever DDR you're running but in this case this low power low frequency CPU only required 2 megabytes of just regular old DRAM the GPU which Sony manufactured was also based on 32-bit architecture it only packed one megabyte of VRAM most graphics cards today require 2 gigabytes of vram that's gigabytes with a G it's a GB but in this case the GPU is only sporting 1 megabyte of VRAM a lot of power the GPU also had an adjustable frame buffer flat shading and texture mapping this or Z would still probably see in the specifications of graphics cards today now the video out over here was capable of displaying over 16 million colors on whatever screen decided to plug this thing into and also featured an interlaced 640 by 480 resolution I don't advise doing this by the way I do not advise doing this on any new circuit board because you're going to like blow and then you're gonna have some like spit fly out of your mouth and you're probably going to short-circuit something but in this case should be ok even if something does happen old it's very old so hey would you look at that it actually works I was not expecting it to to be completely honest but I still wanted to show show everyone what it would be like to have one not work the fact that it did is very impressive now I did make some sounds I don't know if you could hear I was just using my camera's built-in microphone so this sound is probably not the greatest but if you couldn't hear it it was making some odd sounds when the console first started up it would start spinning the disc and then it would make some loud almost like grinding noises I think that has to do with the motor that there aren't any other moving parts in the system there's no internal cooling fan or anything like that so the only thing that I think could make that noise is the motor and it might just be a bad motor in there and the audio was kind of a problem it would just be in and out but there wasn't any static or anything like that so I'd say that the sound issue was probably just a driver issue something they're not going to update obviously but the fact that the game actually ran and was playable was quite cool and it was it was nice to kind of jump back into the ring and play some old Frogger some old-school Frogger ain't nothing wrong with that so if you want to see more like this let me know I'll see what I can get my hands on and we'll do some more of these tear downs slash reviews slash spec overviews slash test runs see if we can get these systems to run like the visit this one here so that's about it everyone we appreciate you checking out our first ever console review slash teardown slash whatever thought the video was cool just um ZUP got videos crap give thumbs down should subscribe there's more than just this kind of stuff on our site be sure to check out our astronomy videos our geology videos especially our computer videos which are pretty hot right now we appreciate the support on all of those and we will continue to bring more quality entertainment from everyone here at science studio thanks for learning with us I'm gonna play some more Frogger