Ha, that's super cool. I have a person on my team who has been in the games industry for 28 years now, and he's worked with most of these personally developing early PS1 games. I've only been in the industry 8 years, but working with console devkits has always been the most exciting thing for me, I love this kind of "secret" stuff and actually using it for work, I hope one day there will be a post like this detailing all the early PS5 prototypes as I think it would be cool for the public to know. MS/Sony/Nintendo still produce a lot of very custom, very specialized hardware just for devs, but very little of it is every publicly talked about, until years and years later.
Consoles these days are just glorified PC's though so they are totally boring IMO.
for me at least the fun in consoles was that they were so different from your average x86 PC. it was fun to learn about the internals of the PS1, PS2 or SEGA Saturn back in the day precisely because of their arcane and custom built hardware.
People keep saying this, but I honestly don't think it's true, at least on PS5. Yes, the consoles are built upon x86 foundations but that's basically where similarities end with PC.
It's still like in the "old" days - if you want to get maximum performance out of the kit, you need to get right down to the metal and use all kinds of special APIs and features which either just don't exist on PC or are such niche hardware that no one codes for it. The way you allocate memory, the way you manage your rendering pipeline, the way you do IO, the hardware accelerated decompression, even the audio chip - it's nothing like on PC. Xbox S/X are far closer to PC since Microsoft is really trying to unify all the APIs, but Playstation isn't anywhere near that. I'm not saying if it's better, but it's definitely not a "glorified PC", at least not in my view, and I'm leading a PS5 development team specifically.
The Switch is 90% an Nvidia Shield Tablet. One of the best Android tablets ever and it barely sold. Get Nintendo to market it and it sells at a rate matching 50% of the global tablet market every year.
That's sort of Nintendo's console strategy in a nutshell. Why chase specs when you can just create the best $250 hardware you can and then make amazing games for it? Bonus, since you don't have to care much about being a port target for 3rd parties you can experiment with input methods and other innovations.
It's a good plan, I just wish the hardware were slightly nicer. Like, every smartphone on the planet has had scratch-proof glass for years and years, but the Switch's screen is this cheap plastic which is very easy to ruin.
