The PS1 prototype bios video doesn't look fake...
by Anne Macedo
A few years ago, I came across this interesting video that showed a possible “beta” version of the PS1 startup – you know, the iconic one from the dusty old console.
Seeing pre-release versions of things was always something that enticed my curiosity, so I went out to search a bit.
The original, high quality, video that featured this startup is available at [1] and it’s part of a video showcasing the new games that the new console would feature.
One thing that caught many people’s attention on this “startup” of sorts was that you couldn’t hear the reverb on the SCE opening, and the startup sound doesn’t seem as polished (it’s pretty known now that these sounds were pretty much orchestrated during startup - these videos explain it a bit [2] [3] [3]).
What is also interesting is that after the SCE logo, we do see this still where the 3D model of the PlayStation gameboot logo should’ve been.
From this video only, it’s a bit hard to tell which part comes from a real console. The PlayStation logo still could’ve definitely been a TIM file, for example.
But then, another video showed up on my recs.
At first I thought I was looking to some fake cheap analog horror kind of video. However, a few things led me to believe that this could be real.
First of all, the uploader’s rant. They have uploaded it and then deactivated the comments. There’s a rant on the description where they swear this is real.
On the video, there’s a lot of interesting things. There’s the SCE logo with a different sounding tune, especially the chimes. According to Nitrocosm, the chimes on the opening (these three notes we hear when the SCE logo show up) are these really quick chimes being played at a low rate.
I don’t know much about what’s going on with the sound, but it’s really interesting!
Now, what is also quite interesting is that the logo that follows the SCE logo is similar to the one that showed up on the demo. However, this one has a copyright byline.
“But that could be easily faked” you might say, but I couldn’t really find this specific image with this specific font on the internet. After that, the VHS glitches to hell, but for a split second we see a glitch that, if you had a CRT TV back then and a PS1, you know that it only happens on real hardware.
I don’t know exactly what happens here, but when I was a kid I remember that, when I put some PAL game on my NTSC console, after that screen the game would often turn black and white or start flickering like hell. That’s probably because the console does some resolution switching when it’s about to load the game.
There’s even this weird issue on my PS2 – I can’t use an HDMI adapter on it when I want to play PS1 games. The PlayStation logo (a.k.a.) gameboot shows up fine, but after that there’s simply no video.
After that, a red X with some message in japanese shows up.
ゲームを読むことができませんでした。 システムが終了しましたコンソールを再起動してください。
It says – I couldn’t read the game. The system has been closed. Please restart the console.
This one doesn’t look like something on the BIOS itself, but rather on the game disc. This screen looks a lot like the anti-piracy ones that would actually show up on a few games if they detected that the console was modded.
Then, the person restarts the console without any CD, and the menu shows up.
I tried doing reverse image search again, but I found nothing. SCPH-0009 yields nothing relevant, nor does PSX build.v0.0.87 (and one thing interesting here – there are some people who claim that the console was internally called PSX, and it wasn’t just something that came up after the PS2 or that the internet made up [6]).
Last but not least, the memory card screen.
I find this whole thing pretty crazy and interesting. If it’s fake, then it was really well done, and the person paid a lot of attention to details. But I definitely don’t believe it’s fake!
[2] Playstation Startup Sound Explained
[3] The Mysterious Origins of The PlayStation Startup Sounds
[4] Interview with Takafumi Fujisawa
tags: lost-media