Here's a weird secret about the first Playstation that you never knew

[dnealy]

Originally published at: Here's a weird secret about the first Playstation that you never knew | Boing Boing

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[keithabramson]

There’s a French phrase for this: esprit de l’escalier (spirit of the staircase). I’ve always loved this image - after you’re walking down the stairs in shame, the perfect witty retort occurs to you.

[Bemopolis]

“Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?” – Dr. Strangelove

[euansmith]

I like the chunkiness of that old memory card; it looks nicely tactile. I recently got a new 3d printer, and this one uses a full-sized SD Card rather than the Micro SD I had to use with my previous machine. It feels so great to have a nice big chuck of plastic rather than the pinkie-fingernail sized one that I was always worried I would lose inside the machine.

[jerwin]

There might be some bugs in the implementation. If people are told about save recovery, it needs to work consistently and with all games.

[fergsboy]

This is a textbook example of the “you can safely skip the first two minutes of any instructional video” rule.

[wolfman_al2]

We call that “Treppenwitz” in German.

[MJones524]

I heard inhaling an entire bucket of shrimp is conducive to witty retorts.

[tyroney]

I wonder if it’s an undo like the recycle bin, or something more real/risky a la msdos undelete.

[spetrovits]

I would guess that any changes you make to the memory card don’t really take effect until you restart the console, and this is merely re-reading the memory card to see what’s there, and resetting any choices you’ve made regarding deletion.

[Jorpho]

I can’t say it’s something I never knew since this video has been circulating for two years already.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@dnealy

About a decade and a half ago, one of the most stressful situations I can remember dealing with was accidentally deleting saved files on my Playstation memory card. It was definitely a first-world problem, but deleting hours of progress in a video game was a disheartening prospect for a kid.

Seems to me that back in the day everyone was complaining about third-party memory cards which were substantially cheaper but also alarmingly unreliable.

[Aztec_Cardiologist]

You could probably make it even bigger and chunkier, with a 3d printer. Add a big retention lever in there, something that snaps into place with a satisfyingly hefty click…

[phuzz]

You guys had memory cards? It was at least six months before I could afford one, so any gaming involved either leaving the PS turned on, or just do without saves.

[trumpytheclown]

I remember the morning when, just before work, I realized my memory card (and I think it was one from Sony) had gone bad and wiped all of my Final Fantasy Tactics progress…it was very uncharacteristically rainy and foggy out and I was feeling depressed anyway, so I just called off work and went back to bed.

I often wondered if there was some kind of recovery tools out there that might try to recover things in that situation, but I somehow doubt the underlying FS (if there is one) was as resilient as say, something like ZFS.