this is a playstation 3. well at least it
sort of is it does function as a ps3 but it would
be better described as the decr 1000a
reference tool it's two feet long weighs a whopping 40
pounds and it makes even sony's largest
finished playstations look like fisher-price toys
but where did this thing come from it was spring of 2005 and sony was
producing the tools that developers would need to build games for their
upcoming platform the earlier silver colored models were used by internal
sony game devs while the later black models
ours included were destined for third-party studios closer to the launch
of the console that is as long as those studios had deep pockets
the exact cost of each reference tool in
those early days isn't known for sure but we've seen accounts that suggest
they could have run up to 50 000 dollars per unit and that is on top
of alleged early adoption fees the truly wild part though is that any decent
sized studio would need a lot more than just one of them and then you can
imagine the pain of dropping that kind of cash only to see the price for these
plummet first to twenty thousand dollars each then to ten when they were released
more broadly in 2007 by 2009 a dev kit with a much more
traditional playstation 3 look could be had for as little as 2 000
it's almost like sony was having a heck of a time attracting developers
in the early days so how did they use these hulking behemoths to craft games
on the playstation 3 and what secrets lie beneath its thin steel chassis we're
going to find out and we're also going to find out about today's sponsor build
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dot com Linus to start your new build today to start with this is not our
hardware and out of respect for dev jeff the one who sent it to us we have agreed
to obey a few ground rules first of all
we cannot show you these two binders of documents only this one
we cannot disassemble the ps vita we must shout out obscure gamers for
providing us some software and we are not to touch buttons or switches on the
ps vita's bare board ps vita you ask
ah yes the ps3 dev dedicate is only part of the story today but we will get to
that later first let's take a closer look at this thing because it is
absolutely wild the ps3 went through
several hardware revisions but even aside from the sheer size and girth
there are a number of things that set the reference tool apart from all of
them first up is io like the original
playstation 3 fat you know the one that had four usb ports as well as an onboard
playstation 2 it's got an sd card reader memory stick pro reader compact flash
all that good stuff four usb ports a hard drive and a blu-ray disc drive but
unlike that one it's got two more usb
ports an entire additional freaking hard drive whatever the foot switch is
actually that's really cool we're going to explain that later and oh flipping it
around to the back excuse me not one but two network ports
one for developer use one for regular use four analog audio outputs apparently
this is for sound mixing a monitor port
for your vga crt monitor and we look
really carefully under this definitely super secure tape we can find two more
Ethernet ports these are apparently for low level debugging only for sony's use
oh sorry sorry sony and it's got a lot more going on under
the hood 512 megs of RAM compared to the standard
256 in the playstation 3 extensive debug
menus this was a lot less exciting that i was hoping do you know where
everything goes if i just start tearing it apart are you able to put it back together
cool that sounds like something for dev jeff to figure out this totally explains
why it weighs so flipping much oh my
god this is all just air ducting and daughter boards sorry i got distracted i
was supposed to be telling you other cool stuff it's got extensive debug
menus and get this no copy protection
the firmware can be upgraded or downgraded at will and those drives in
the front they're not 30 or 60 gigs they
are 400 gigs so you can load this baby up
also it should be noted that they feature no redundancy whatsoever oh i
guess i can't open them right now while it's powered off so we'll have to show you that later
if one of them dies you lose everything look at this power supply
this whole freaking thing wait what hold on a second is this a
thousand watt power supply is that right am i misunderstanding here or is this a
thousand watt power supply why does it need a thousand watt power
supply
copper bases four heat pipes giant aluminum fin
stacks and each the cell CPU and the
NVIDIA 6 7000 series based GPU get one of these
but what's the purpose of this daughter board here then because i see some older
standard memory i see some kind of
central processor of some sort a firmware chip and then what appears to
be an fpga
shut up it's a web server oh my god that makes sense it's right
next to the dev lan port right here so that you can connect to
and control and monitor all the elements
of the rest of the system without actually relying on the system itself so
if you suffer some kind of catastrophic crash you're still going to be able to
log those errors and well hopefully fix them i've been informed that under this
daughter board is another daughter board would you call that a granddaughter
board a second daughter board
sunboard another fpga though so it's
clear that they're doing some very custom shiz in here if you don't know
fpgas or field programmable gate arrays are essentially chips that are a blank
slate so instead of designing them fabing them
and then them serving one fixed function you can program them in the field as the
name would imply to serve any number of different functions they are much more
expensive per unit so they only make sense in very small volumes but they're
super cool and are actually how retro enthusiasts have managed to resurrect
outdated hardware designs for the next generation of gamers i have to imagine
that this is the original thermal paste and it's never been pulled oh it's
really stuck
that is definitely original thermal paste hey dev jeff i'm gonna do you a
favor i'm gonna put some new thermal group on here for you all right one fun
fact while we pull off the last panel here is that compared to the first
generation fat ps3 the reference tool is actually missing a crucial feature it
does not contain the dedicated playstation 2 hardware that enabled
sony's up until now never before seen multiple
generations of backwards compatibility this was only for developing playstation
3 games not for validating your old ps2
games on ps3 hardware because you didn't need to that hardware would be in the
final units what is a cxd2973
agb-1 it's the southbridge oh okay
uh-oh i think it had a back plate on it and i
think it shifted no i got it i got it it's back in place
okay i'm gonna screw that back on right now
ah remember how i said i'd explain the foot
switch this is super cool it was so that developers with their foot in case they
were doing other things with their hands could stop code from executing like
immediately we'll be using a wired ps3 controller by the way we don't have any
ps3 controllers that still have working batteries
which is why i always say
double a's microsoft good job just get rechargeable double
a's oh no i want to play with this hard drive mount first
okay that's kind of cool actually
okay pc case manufacturers i want to see that mechanism
whoa it's not that loud which makes sense
given that this would have to sit at a developer's workstation right so you
don't want to have it be like freaking 85 decibels sound like a jet ticket wow
that that was really fast to boot up was that supposed to be so fast wait this is
running the latest playstation 3 firmware so like you could just run any
modern game with this thing what
all right uh debugger game output resolution oh okay you just set all
kinds of different game output resolutions sure why not
game output sound maximum number of channels
fake other region
i mean sure hdcp just see you later
this is amazing and unlike the other
developer kit that we looked at recently this one existed before the days of just
you know remote kill switches sony apparently hasn't even locked out the
ability of this thing to connect to playstation network it should still
function as a full-on playstation 3. fake free space what is this
sure let's fake some free spin
fake system storage access speed oh cool
slow mode 20 gig hard drive so you can just turn this thing into whatever
you want it to be format blu-ray disc emulator hard drive
that is awesome so you can just load isos on it you can do up to four games
with that imagine if they just shipped hardware that was this good and this
convenient to end users how much better of a world would we live in whoa
transfer rate pacing for blu-ray disc emulator
you can lock the blu-ray disc emulator to the equivalent of a blu-ray drive or
you can run it at hard drive native for like presumably way faster loading times
what if what's what if hold on a second
is this a development build of what if
oh shut up so you actually walk around
wow we teleported a little bit there they have a level selector that clearly
was not intended to make its way into the game like what is over this wall i
want to know can i oh oh oh denounce nathan protect
nathan um we'll obviously protect nathan oh cool i haven't played this game sorry
but i can see what's happening here this game has a choice system so what it's
doing is it's taking us through the previous one so we can play that version
of the level okay well we did take a picture of victoria she's hot i i don't
know i'm just making this up is victoria a love interest i come out and blame
chloe okay now i now i play the level that is
wicked town
bus oh
goodbye floor reload last checkpoint
trip up
oh no i'm in the bus oh bye buzz
if you ever find yourself complaining that a game is super bug yet released
let's all just remember this okay it could have been a lot worse
oh no way little big planet deploy build that one
hello this one's not even doing a thing forget it forget it i'm out fine we'll
try we'll try the less broken little big planet
okay so how do i go to the dev menu
settings oh debug settings oh my god that is awesome
disable tutorials just don't bother with that
see you later music if i don't care about that streamer friendly okay this
is a long menu oh wireframe
i want to play on wireframe yup oh that's hilarious
grab yourself a keyboard a keyboard okay
keyboard's plugged in now what do we do go to your unreal
tournament looking one unreal tournament wait unreal tournament that says gears
of war 3. oh no way so i have to hacksaw the
mainframe to play this wait a minute gears of war
3. why did it take me so long to register that are we about to play gears
of war 3 on a playstation is this like games industry drama that's well known
that i just was not aware of was it was it going to be multiple platform and
then because it still has the xbox button what push the tilde button
that start gear game underscore p
question mark chapter equals
zero okay
what it's only running at 17 18 19 FPS but it's gears of war 3
running on a playstation honestly though
it's impressive that this runs at all given how different the playstation 3
was compared to the xbox 360 which this game was designed to run on 12 FPS
yeah this is a very brown flashback 10 game oh okay how many of these guys do
you have to kill geez and they blow up i mean that makes perfect sense
and we saved the best part for last remember how i alluded to that
definitely actually a ps vita thing at the beginning well believe it or not
this ps3 dev kit was instrumental in
developing for the ps vita and i'll show
you how the early vita prototype dev kit
units hooked up to it we've got the whole thing hooked up and here's how it
works you've got a psp power adapter
that powers this little breakout board then you've got a dvi input because
this actually drives this guy right here which is going to be
the display that we're using as a game developer there are actually some
cameras as well we've got two cameras they sort of work and this back here
that's a touch surface apparently developers would actually
take this and like duct tape it to the back of a controller for development so
that they could try out their control schemes pretty wild right
then the way the ps3 dead kit figures into all of this is that dvi input over there
that's actually coming from the HDMI output of the ps3 dev kit so we're
essentially emulating the ps vita hardware
here on the ps3 as for a controller we
just plug that in via usb to our dev kit and we should be good to go
unfortunately this is as far as we can get with this guy you need a special
firmware in order to enable the back touch as well as the front touch screen
and we weren't able to find any working ps vita roms that were able to fire up
with our system here but it's still cool to see how developers
had to had to build for this thing
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Linus if you guys enjoyed this video you might also enjoy the one where we
checked out an xbox series x development kit it did end up being a bit more
locked down but the hardware itself was very cool