The Linus Tech Tips channel has presented something that is already awaiting legal threats from Sony…

An early PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita developer kit is shown in the video below, giving an excellent insight into what game development studios used to make their games. Understandably, the hardware is not the same as a street PS3 or PS Vita, as debugging is not an insignificant factor for developers: they need to test what can be implemented in their games and what they’re better off skipping (e.g. tweaking the graphics a bit to make the frame rate more stable).

Linus takes apart a device called the DECR-1000 PS3 Reference Tool, and we get a brief taste of the PlayStation Vita prototype development kit. These were used for early games, as smaller machines much more similar to the retail hardware later took their place. The DECR-1000A wasn’t the first or the largest PS3 reference tool, as two years before the launch of the PlayStation 3, towards the end of 2004, Sony released the CEB-1000, a prototype development kit for critical studios. In May 2005 came the second-generation CEB-2000, which, although smaller, was still quite hefty. These were followed by the DEH-R1000, which evolved into the DECR-1000A (the “retail” development kit released in June 2006 was the one that many third-party studios got their hands on).

The DECR-1000s are not that rare, but we see more of them than the PS3 Debugging Station. The DECR-1400s had the same look as the basic, first-generation fat PlayStation 3, but the word TOOL was added under the PlayStation 3 lettering to distinguish it from a retail machine.

The games running on the devkit are not new and unique: most of them can be played on any PS3 by installing custom firmware (the Life is Strange prototype is one of the games). The Vita prototype development kit is much rarer. On this one, there’s a daughterboard that developers could put in the DECR-1000, and the external case with the display and prototype touch controllers isn’t flimsy either. Not sure if there are many of them left, as the cables don’t seem as durable. The later Vita development kits were almost identical to the store handheld but had a few add-ons on them (like an HDMI output).

Nice to see these.

Source: PSL