Sony PlayStation turns 20 years old

Exactly 20 years, December 3, 1994 in Japan, sales of the iconic gaming system from Sony started. The following year, the console appeared in the US and Europe. At the time, Nintendo and Sega solutions were popular among consoles.

Ken Kutaragi is the father of the PlayStation brand, which suggested Sony create their own gaming system, but some executives thought the development of this brand was risky, but Sony CEO Norio Oga supported his idea. The original console of the series, PlayStation, was the first ever game console to be sold in the amount of 100 million copies.

Specifications

• CPU: MIPS R3000A-compatible (R3051) 32-bit RISC microprocessor operating at 33.8688 MHz. Microprocessor manufactured by LSI Logic Corp. using technology licensed from SGI. The chip also includes the Geometry Transformation Engine and Data Decompression Engine.
• Performance - 30 MIPS.
• The bus throughput is 132 MB / s.
• The instruction cache is 4 KB.
• Cache: 1K SRAM.
• Geometry Transformation Engine - a controller for working with three-dimensional graphics, located on the same chip with the central processor.
• Performance - 66 MIPS.
• Announced performance: 1.5 million polygons per second, 500,000 textured and lighted polygons per second.
• Real productivity: 360,000 polygons per second, 180,000 textured and lighted polygons per second. This discrepancy is primarily due to the fact that official characteristics were obtained in laboratory conditions, close to ideal.
• Memory:
• Main RAM: 2 MB. (16 Megabits)
• Video RAM: 1 MB. (8 Megabits)
• Sound RAM: 512 KB.
• CD-ROM Read Buffer: 32 KB.
• BIOS: 512 KB
• Memory Cards: 128K per EEPROM.
• CD-ROM: Two-speed, 300 KB / s, XA-compatible.

A PocketStation could also be used as a memory card.

At the very start, the console received a good selection of games from a wide variety of genres.