When you have a broken console, do you try to fix it or just accept its fate and throw it out? Just think about the memories you've made with that original PS1 you bought back in the 90s, the machine that no longer has the will to carry on reading your Crash Bandicoot disc or fire up Muppets Race Mania one final time. Wouldn't it be great if you could give it a new lease of life with a parts transplant?
That's exactly what engineer Lornetio Brodesco has done with his nsOne, a custom motherboard for the PS1, which sits in the original grey casing and accepts original PlayStation 1 chips.
Brodesco has been keen to make it clear that this isn't the same FPGA that the Analogue 3D will use (if we ever receive it). It's groundbreaking reverse engineering, a circuit board that marries with all the components of the original PS1. We're talking everything from the GPU to the oscillators.
nsOne stands for 'Not Sony's One', just to clarify Brodesco's dedication in fixing a problem that Sony isn't focusing on. They've moved on to bigger things since the PS1 dropped in 1994, but I'm glad that we have a dedicated community of fans that do keep retro media alive.
Brodesco has spent months discovering the makeup of the original motherboard after finding out that the original documentation was incomplete or, for the. most part, unavailable. The project has raised just under €6,000 on Kickstarter and production is currently underway, with Brodesco posting regular updates to his backers about how his progress is going!
