Why PlayStation Graphics Wobble, Flicker And Twitch

February 6, 2026 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Although often tossed together into a singular ‘retro game’ aesthetic, the first game consoles that focused on 3D graphics like the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation featured very distinct visuals that make these different systems easy to distinguish. Yet whereas the N64 mostly suffered from a small texture buffer, the PS’s weak graphics hardware necessitated compromises that led to the highly defining jittery and wobbly PlayStation graphics.

These weaknesses of the PlayStation and their results are explored by [LorD of Nerds] in a recent video. Make sure to toggle on subtitles if you do not speak German.

It could be argued that the PlayStation didn’t have a 3D graphics chip at all, just a video chip that could blit primitives and sprites to the framebuffer. This forced PS developers to draw 3D graphics without such niceties like a Z-buffer, putting a lot of extra work on the CPU.

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How Resident Evil 2 For The N64 Kept Its FMV Cutscenes

February 3, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1998, Resident Evil 2 came on two CDs and used 1.2 GB in total. Of this, full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes took up most of the space, as was rather common for PlayStation games. This posed a bit of a challenge when ported to the Nintendo 64 with its paltry 64 MB of cartridge-based storage. Somehow the developers managed to do the impossible and retain the FMVs, as detailed in a recent video by [LorD of Nerds]. Toggle the English subtitles if German isn’t among your installed natural language parsers.

Instead of dropping the FMVs and replacing them with static screens, a technological improvement was picked. Because of the N64’s rather beefy hardware, it was possible to apply video compression that massively reduced the storage requirements, but this required repurposing the hardware for tasks it was never designed for.

The people behind this feat were developers at Angel Studios, who had 12 months to make it work. Ultimately they achieved a compression ratio of 165:1, with software decoding handling the decompressing and the Reality Signal Processor (RSP) that’s normally part of the graphics pipeline used for both audio tasks and things like upscaling.

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A PSOne In The Palm Of Your Hand

January 16, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Sony’s original Playstation wasn’t huge, and they did shrink it for re-release later as the PSOne, but even that wasn’t small enough for [Secret Hobbyist]. You may have seen the teaser video a while back where his palm-size Playstation went viral, but now he’s begun a series of videos on how he redesigned the vintage console.

Luckily for [Secret Hobbyist], the late-revision PSOne he started with is only a two-layer PCB, which made reverse engineering the traces a lot easier. Between probing everything under the microscope and cleaning the board off to follow all the traces in copper, [Hobbyist] was able to reproduce the circuit in KiCAD. (Reverse engineering starts at about 1:18 in the vid.)

With a schematic in hand, drafting a smaller PCB than Sony built is made easier by the availability of multi-layer PCBs. In this case [Hobbyist] was able to get away with a four-layer board. He was also able to ditch one of the ICs from the donor mainboard, which he called a “sub-CPU” as its functionality was recreated on the “PSIO” board that’s replacing the original optical drive. The PSIO is a commercial product that has been around for years now, allowing Playstations to run from SD cards– but it’s not meant for the PSOne so just getting it working here is something of a hack. He’s also added on a new DAC for VGA output, but otherwise the silicon is all original SONY.

This is the first of a series about this build, so if you’re into retro consoles you might want to keep an eye on [Secret Hobbyist] on YouTube to learn all the details as they are released.

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A Non-Sony Playstation Motherboard Replacement

July 27, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

As hardware ages, it becomes harder and harder to keep it in service. Whether that’s because of physical aging or lack of support from the company who built it in the first place, time is not generally good for electronics, especially when it comes to our beloved retro gaming systems. The first Playstation, for example, is starting to see some of the deleterious effects of having originally been built in the 90s, and [LorentioB] has a new, third-party motherboard to bring to the table to keep these systems online as well as adding some features in that Sony removed.

The motherboard is known as the nsOne, meaning Not Sony’s One since this is the first motherboard built by a single person outside of Sony. It’s not based on any FPGAs or emulators and is completely compatible with all of the original hardware, chips, and other circuitry of the original Playstation. Based on the PU-23 series, it even revives the removed parallel port, which Sony removed after the first versions of the hardware because of region locking concerns and other pro-consumer issues. Every chip footprint and connector was reverse engineered manually, using optical sanding, scanning, and net-by-net tracing.

For such a complex piece of hardware this is quite the feat, and for anyone who wants to restore old hardware or add the parallel port back on to their system this could be a game changer. [LorentioB] is not quite finished yet but hopes to have a finished version shortly. As far as fully opening up the system goes, there are some software hacks to look at that allow more games to run on the system and some hardware hacks that open the system up as well.

Playstacean Evolves The PSOne Into The Crab It Was Always Meant To Be

April 3, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

Odd hardware designs crop up in art and renders far more frequently than in the flesh, but console modder [GingerOfOz] felt the need to bring [Anh Dang]’s image of the inevitable carcinization of our gaming consoles to life.

Starting with the image as inspiration, [GingerOfOz] got to work in CAD, creating an entirely new shell for the battered PSOne he adopted for the project. The final product is slightly less curvy than the picture, but some artistic license was necessary to go from the page to the real world.

The enclosure itself looks straightforward, if a bit tedious, but the articulating crab controller is a work of art itself. He could’ve made the arms static or non-functional, but they’re a fully-functional PlayStation controller that can move around just like on your favorite crustacean at the beach, minus the pinching. We love this whimsical take on the console mod which is a breath of salty air to the continuous race to get increasingly complex consoles into handheld form, although there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!

If you’re looking for some other console mods, how about this Apple M1 inside a Wii or getting your old Ouya up-and-running again?

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PlayStation Motherboard Sanded And Scanned, But There’s More To Do

December 9, 2024 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

If you want to reverse engineer the boards in a modern console, you’d better have a lab, a lot of fancy gear, and a good few months to dedicate to the task. The humble PlayStation, on the other hand, is more accessible in this regard. [Lawrence Brode] pulled one apart and started documenting it as part of a grander quest for console understanding.

[Lawrence’s] ultimate goal is to create a portable PlayStation using original hardware. That is, rather than cannibalizing an existing console, he wants to build an original portable from scratch. He needed to understand the PlayStation to recreate it, so he started by analyzing the original hardware.

The first part of [Lawrence’s] quest was to try and reverse engineer the PlayStation motherboard itself. The 1990s console has the benefit of only using a two-layer PCB, meaning it’s far easier to trace out than more modern multi-layer designs. [Lawrence] started with a damaged console, pulled out the motherboard, and stripped off all the components. He then cleaned the board, scanned it, and then sandblasted it to remove the solder mask.

He’s begun the work of tracing out signals, and next on the agenda is to create a new custom PCB that’s compatible with the original PlayStation hardware. You can grab his work via GitHub if you’re interested. [Lawrence] is also excited about the possibilities of grabbing the 24-bit RGB signal heading into the GPU and using it for an HDMI output conversion in the future.

It’s always an exciting time in the PlayStation community; we see lots of great hacks on the regular. If you’re cooking up your own, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

The Phantom PSP: Crafting The Handheld Sony Never Sold

November 2, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 7 Comments

In the world of retro gaming, some legends never die – especially the ‘phantom’ PSP, Sony’s mythical handheld that never saw the light of day. While that elusive device remains a dream, hacker and gaming wizard [Kyle Brinkerhoff] built his own – and Macho Nacho made a video about it. His creation, which also goes by the name ‘Playstation Zero’, isn’t just another handheld emulator; it’s a powerful, custom-built system that revives the classics and plays them on a portable device that feels like the future.

Driven by a hunger for the ultimate gaming experience, [Kyle] set out to blend modern tech with retro gaming magic. He started with the Raspberry Pi, loading it up with emulation software for all the iconic systems—from NES and SNES to the Sega Genesis and Game Boy. But [Kyle] didn’t just slap on an off-the-shelf emulator; he dived into the code himself, optimizing and tweaking for lightning-fast responsiveness, so each game plays like it’s running on the original hardware. That’s hacking in true form: pushing the limits of software and hardware until they work exactly the way you want them to. Best of all: he published it all open source for others to use.

In the spirit of the Geneboy—a handheld Sega Genesis built by [Downing] and featured on Hackaday back in 2012—[Kyle]’s device pairs handheld emulation with the consoles all nineties kids wanted for Christmas. To capture the tactile thrill of vintage gaming, [Kyle] went a step further by designing and 3D-printing a custom controller layout that mimics the feel of the original systems. If watching someone neatly soldering a pcb sounds relaxing to you, don’t skip the middle part of his video. Although this little beast is packed with all bells and whistles you’d expect to see on a Raspberry Pi, it does lack one serious thing: battery life. But, [Kyle] is open about that, and hopes to improve on that in a future version.

If you want to see the full build, check out the video below. Or, immediately dive into [Kyle]’s Github, order the cute Takara shell, and get started!

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