By replacing bad capacitors and making a slew of other adjustments and fixes to the unit, Heckendorn has restored its ability to run audio CDs and, most importantly, CD-ROM games. While many games were in development for this system in the early 1990s, none have ever surfaced publicly. But once the system’s specifications became known last year, homebrew game developers created a couple of small games that, in theory, would run.

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As it turns out, while the homebrew games didn’t run perfectly on the actual hardware, they did indeed run.

“So now, what it’s really down to is the homebrew programmers figuring out the difference between their estimated emulator and what the real hardware can do,” Heckendorn said in the video. He noted that he sent some video of the homebrew game Magic Floor, shown above, to the game’s developer, who figured out at a glance what he needed to change about the program to get it to run correctly on the machine. He sent back a modified version that Heckendorn said runs perfectly.

Understanding how the “Nintendo PlayStation” actually works will be very helpful if and when any software that was developed during its lifetime ever does surface. Most notoriously, the Square RPG Secret of Mana began its life as a project for this device. So it’s possible that some day down the line, we’ll have some real prototypes from this era to play, and we’ll have The Ben Heck Show to thank if we can actually see them played on a real machine.