A couple of days ago, Sony & LEGO announced the PlayStation set, featuring 1,911 bricks, releasing on October 4th and priced at £139.99/$179.99. It has gone down very well with most retro gamers (let's not talk about how it doesn't have 1,995 pieces), featuring two secret easter eggs on the inside which can be pulled out to display Ape Escape and Gran Turismo dioramas.
The LEGO set isn't out yet, but there's already something special in the works for this build: a mod kit from the makers of the BrickBoy. This kit will turn the LEGO PlayStation into a working games console thanks to an inserted Raspberry Pi Zero 2W offering PS1 Emulation, HDMI out and more.
The BrickBoy was an incredibly innovative piece of tech that transformed the GAME BOY into a working console that you built yourself; everything the team from Switzerland has learned from that first project is now going into developing a more advanced mod kit for the LEGO PlayStation, being named the BrickStation.
I spoke with the founder of BrickStation, Thomas Bertani, to get a better understanding of their upcoming product. It's clear that it's still in very early development; heck, they don't have the set yet, but they know exactly what they want to do, and how they're going to do it, so let me explain.
The components of the BrickStation will be assembled inside of an ABS, mould-injected "base"; this will contain the Raspberry Pi and all of the electronics, crammed into a build small enough to fit into the exact compartment that the Ape Escape diorama sits, allowing you to hopefully slide it into the console easily, perhaps not removing any bricks or pieces at all. Thomas said he wants this to be as close to "plug and play" as possible.
The Raspberry Pi internals will offer easy hook-up to an HDMI TV, offer wireless controller support, wired controller support via USB, the ability to use the Power On button on the LEGO PS1 and a "full-resolution, full-frame-rate" gaming experience. Thomas mentioned there will also be full compliance with regulations and certifications, which isn't something fan-made mod kits do, and can be dangerous, so it's clear Thomas and his team want this to be executed professionally and properly, which their BrickBoy did respectfully.
There's also a number of extra goodies and features that will be announced in the future that we cannot mention. You can follow BrickStation's journey at BrickStation.xyz, and you can likely expect the Kickstarter campaign to launch at the end of the month or around the official release of the LEGO set. As of now, we have no information regarding pricing or release date, but we're confident these guys will pull it off and no doubt they'll have a bunch of extra features and products to explore once the crowdfunding campaign goes live. We'll try our hardest to give you an early look at this, just like we did with the BrickBoy, so make sure to follow our free weekly newsletter to not miss out on that.
