 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 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 $20,000 each, then to 10 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 gonna find out, and we're also gonna find out about today's sponsor. Build Redux. Build Redux makes it easy to configure your new gaming PC build with support guides to help you along the way. There's no need to build it yourself when Build Redux offers pricing competitive to DIY. Head to buildredux.com slash 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 kit 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 I.O. 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 gonna 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 than 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. 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? Wait. Copper bases, four heat pipes, giant aluminum fin stacks, and each the cell CPU and the Nvidia six, 7,000 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? Second daughter board? Son board? 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, fabbing 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 out. Oh, it's really stuck. Ooh! That is definitely original thermal paste. Hey Dev Jeff, I'm gonna do you a favor. I'm gonna put some new thermal goop 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 CXD-2973AGB-1? It's the south bridge. 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. 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 wanna play with this hard drive now first. Woo, okay, that's kind of cool actually. Whoa. Okay, PC case manufacturers, I wanna 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 wanna have it be like freaking 85 decibels sound like a jet ticket. Wow, 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, debugger, game output resolution. Well, 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 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 space. 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? Shut up. So you actually walk around. To, whoa, 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 wanna know. Oh, oh, oh, denounce Nathan, protect Nathan. Well, obviously we'll 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 don't know, I'm just making this up. Is Victoria a love interest? I come out and blame Chloe. Okay, now I play the level. That is wicked. Town. Bus. Oh, goodbye floor. Reload last checkpoint, I, sure. Oh, oh, oh, I'm in the bus. Oh, bye bus. If you ever find yourself complaining that a game is super buggy at release, let's all just remember this. Okay, it could have been a lot worse. Oh, no way, LittleBigPlanet deploy build. That one is kind of the other LittleBigPlanet's pretty good though. I want the one. Hello? This one's not even doing a thing. Forget it, forget it, I'm out. Fine, we'll try the less broken LittleBigPlanet. Okay, so how do I go to the dev menu? Settings, ooh, 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 wanna 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. It does say Gears of War 3. Oh, no way. So I have to hack store 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 going to be multiple platform and then? Because it still has the Xbox button. What? Push the tilde button. 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. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. Yeah, this is a very browning 10 game. Oh, okay. How many of these guys do you have to kill? Jeez. 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 port. Then you've got a DVI input because this actually drives this guy right here, which is gonna 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 dev 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 touchscreen. 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 build for this thing. And it's cool to see our sponsor. FreshBooks. If you're a business owner, you know your time is valuable because you never seem to have enough of it. Spend less time worrying about your finances, more time focusing on what your business truly is about with the help of FreshBooks. Track every minute of those precious billable hours with the FreshBooks time tracker so you're never left wondering where your day went. Keep everyone on the same page with their projects feature which makes it easier for clients, team and contractors to collaborate, share files and comment. 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It did end up being a bit more locked down but the hardware itself was very cool.