Birth of the Playstation Portable

September 6th, 2001...

It was a dark and stormy night, ok so it was only slightly rainy. But it was evening. I was sitting at my desk working on something. I looked around at items, thinking about how many of them I'd taken apart. Hm, there's the Atari 800, had that sucker apart about 5 million times...

My gaze fell on the Playstation. Never had that thing apart...

5 minutes later I was looking at the guts of a second-revision Playstation. (circa 1999). The motherboard was much smaller than I had thought. There was an additional board that takes the 120 volt wall input and lowers it, hm, seems to lower it to around 8 volts. The CD assembly was quite compact, the whole thing was a lot simply that I would have imagined.

I then thought, "I bet those new mini PSOne's are even simpler"

45 minutes later I had purchased a PSOne and gutted it. Sure enough, it seemed pretty simple. And the best part was, it has an external power adapter, similar to the older game systems. Therefore, the PSOne has a simple 7.5 volt input jack for power.

   Someday I'll build a house using junked system cases

7.5 volts, the same as a Sony Info lithium rechargeable camcorder battery, just like my current VCSp's use. HM....

I grabbed a Casio EV-550 pocket TV I had laying around. I hooked it and the PSOne up to the battery. Sure enough, it ran. But the power consumption was high, about 1.2 amps (with both screen & PSOne). The solution was to remove the bulb from the TV and replace it with 2 white LED's, similar to my VCSp Gold. Upon doing that, the TV's power consumption went from 500mA to 250, right clean in half.

September 7th, 2001...

Here is the thing all wired together, running Strider 2. You can see the battery at the bottom of the shot. The spinning disc can be used to hypnotize wild animals and slice tofu.

Initial tests showed this setup consumes an average of 840mA, which is about the same as a VCSp! Despite the spinning disc & motors, the Playstation circuitry, this is going to come as a shock, is much more advanced than an Atari, thereby resulting in better power efficiency. Running non-stop on a fully charged NP-550 battery, the unit will operate for about 1.45 hours, or long enough to perform 3 spells in Final Fantasy VII.

NEXT- Chapter 2: The Case of the PSp