The Farce of Getting a PlayStation 3

 Behind the practice

I have for a long time had this practice of not going for the first wave of whatever trendy new stuff there is. Instead, if it’s worth it, I’ll go for it after a while (like ten years or so) when it’s already kind of passé in general opinion, and can be obtained for a fraction of price of a new. This is also how my interest to retrocomputing originally grew up – it was 1990’s when I got Commodore 64 (many years after my brother had sold his unit), even while at the time the concept of retrocomputing did not really exist.

This has also been a way to filter out some futile work, since after all most of everything is more or less repeating other contemporary stuff that exists, whether it’s games or computers or books and movies. If something is still up and remembered after several years, it’s more likely something genuinely good and not something that caused attention just because of at the time some novel superficial idea that managed to gain marketing winds to the sail (something like Matrix sequels can be mostly just forgotten).

Downsides of this practice are on the other hand that obviously by the time this whatever reaches me, it’s no longer a hot topic that many people are too fond of talking about. Not that most people would matter anyway, though. Also if missing something as a new, might miss that something in a good condition. This can be especially true with devices, and like deemed so many times before, going for actual vintage computers there is almost always need for some maintenance, since decades old electronics tend to deteriorate in time. On the other hand I didn’t think this would be as needed with something only around ten years old, but oh well, getting a functional PlayStation 3 was not quite as trivial as I had expected by now.

Spoiler alert: the writer will get his PlayStation 3

Let us find the 3rd Station and Play!

PlayStation 2 was actually the first video game console I’ve ever owned myself, since I’ve always felt more attracted to computers – I’m not only into games. Nevertheless, PS2 was a positive surprise, and yes, it was already around ten years old device when I got it. I still got it and play with it every now and then – it has been a device of pleasure, so I’m not really surprised it’s been the best selling game console of all time. It has several well made and exclusive games, and there are also quite a few games in genres that are suitable for my taste, role-playing games predominantly. In addition I got to try some action genres I’ve never really been into – and I still think 3rd person games often have the most horrible controls with their rolling cameras. Grand Theft Auto 3 and first three Silent Hill games for instance are worthwhile experiences – even while actually the SH series I’ve played more on PC and that I could’ve done with GTA3 as well.

Despite this I was uncertain if I should ever get PlayStation 3. By then it seemed that there is only so little to see that I could not see on PC (or on some other console), and actually majority of the games would still be in genres I’m not that fond of – similarly as on PS2, but I’d seen that stuff on PS2 enough already. By time of PS3 the markets had changed so that it wouldn’t really matter as much which device to get, except that on PC everything could run more smoothly. More importantly internet playing was coming up, and already on PS3 it started to seem games are like PC games – play online and update the game before you play.

After thinking a while, I decided it’s not yet really like that. It’s the PS4 I could just skip as it would have nothing to give (especially as the next generation should have backwards compatibility, since the architecture was changed largely for the reason that porting games between consoles and PC would be more easy if the system’s aren’t that unique – money talks). Therefore I decided that I’ll get a PS3 before it starts to become a collectible as itself (PS4 with its network requirements might be deemed less of a collectible later on), even if I’m already lacking time to play with many other devices I have.

India was supposed to be just few thousand leagues to the West

Then I just went to online auction sites and looked after a PS3. But I become picky. There were too many packages available, and it was difficult to choose from. I decided to skip the first fat model, since I had read that unlike with PS2 with which the slim models were cut down on some features and also reported as less reliable, on PS3 the older models had nothing extra to give really (apart from the earliest PS2 backward compatible models that were never sold in EU region anyway and would therefore be really difficult to find) and that they’d be significantly less reliable than later models (overheating leading to YLOD – Yellow Light of Death). So PS3 slim or ultra slim would be the one to go for.

On the other hand some of the latest ultraslim models seemed to have extra small hard drives and maybe in not even rational fashion I felt like ultraslim models might have other cost reduction measures that I’d be best off with an intermediate slim model (unless if a good ultraslim package would come along).

In addition to that, I wanted to get Move controller(s), as even while I felt they’re probably not very fancy (or more likely, too few good games would exist for them), I’d want to try them. This stuff should be cheap by now, right? Well, not dirt cheap for sure. Maybe other people had figured out as well that PS4 and newer might no longer be that collectable, or then time just had not passed sufficiently. Many PS3 packages with Move controllers were set on prices of even hundreds of euros, which might be affected by that I got this impression that PS3 Move controllers would still work in PS4. Not sure about that, but nevertheless.

This led to the situation that it was difficult to find a PS3 package with a decent price and content of something that interest me (Move controllers plus at least some games I’d want – something like Red Dead Redemption, Dark Souls or Uncharted included could make my purchase decision). I also found out that I was not quite the only one interested about PS3, even while it was supposed to be so popular that everyone else was already bored with it. Maybe this is also emphasized by lockups of 2020.

Whenever I found a seemingly good package, I’d send a message that I’ll buy it and can fetch it too. Then the next day I might get a reply that someone else already bought it. In these certain Finnish online sales sites (Tori.fi) you can’t close a sale but you’ll need to contact the seller who then does whatever he/she wants about it, so can’t just call it a purchase that will tie both the buyer and seller like in Huuto.net (similar to Ebay.com for instance). Therefore there came up cases where I’d send a message I’ll buy it and get a reply the next day sounds good when can you fetch. I’m at work by the time I’ve gotten the message, so I’ll be only able to answer in the afternoon, by which time the seller replies it was already sold to someone else as I didn’t reply immediately. Sellers always complain about buyers, and buyers have always reason to complain about the sellers – might be my personal distortion, but it still feels like that an old mainstream product like PS3 has higher chances of impatient and unpleasant sellers (that is, more ordinary people) than with actual retrocomputing material.

Finally there, right?

Story goes long, but finally I’ll catch a package which pleases me: PS3 with a Move controller and a bunch of games with Dark Souls included. It’s in a neighbouring town and we agree for a delivery by mail. This would appear for my birthday in December 2020. I was somewhat concerned with the seller though, as it seemed kind of too easy going now, replies kind of died after the trade was agreed upon and somewhat weirdly the seller nickname suggested a female person yet the account to which I paid was with a male name. Did I slip into a fraud after an exhausting search for the device?

All seemed fine first, and the parcel appeared soon enough. However, the parcel could have had a bit more padding; the package is somewhat damaged and sadly I’ll also find some pieces of plastic inside as well from the jewel cases of BluRay disc games. Clearly the delivery has included some rough handling, but that’s how the Post office can just do. The device starts no problem though at first – what a relief. Unfortunately, that’s where it stops – I can’t even insert a disc properly.

A piece of a broken
PS3 game case

It seems that the the device had gotten sufficiently hits that optical disc mechanics had flipped off their stance and hence when I push a disc inside, it just gets stuck there. I wasn’t familiar with the device beforehand, so I didn’t know exactly how early it should suck the disc in – and by the time I realized it’s broken, it was too late. Now all I got was that the PS3 boots normally but drive only gives desperate whines and nudges, and obviously without a disc drive I could not start anything.

Time to break the “no warranty” seal stickers and peek in the device then. For additional fun fun I realize that Sony has been nicely far more anti-consumer with PS3 than they were with PS2 more ways than I knew (I already knew that they’d locked the devices further so that similar hacks to play copied discs would not work as easily as on PS2, and I’d gotten the impression they’d used lower quality components on PS3 to make more profits, for which reason many of the old models broke down after few years). That is, the PS3 case screws are not only security screws of star shape but also some special security screws where the normal star shaped screwdriver would not fit because there is also a peg in the middle to block the normal star head… Fortunately and ironically this meant though that one can actually just use a normal flat head screwdriver on those, although it took me a moment to figure it out and I did damn Sony for their hostile behaviour in design.

After I finally got the case open, I could realign the mechanical parts and get them moving again, so the discs should go in and out. This did happen, I got the drive working – mechanically. I also did some cleaning to the lense and lubrication on the rails at the same time. Time to close the case again.

Unfortunately this didn’t help. The discs will now go in and out, but they’ll just keep quite much of noise for a while until it’ll give up without going anywhere. It may be that I managed to spill some of the lubricating grease on the lens so that it might read better again if I’d clean it up. I didn’t notice this happening though, and might be nothing like that happened. Might well be that the laser was also broken during the impacts that the package got.

The seller told that it functioned fine before sending (I have no means of confirming this), but she also offered a partial refund. I accepted that offer. Original price of the package was something over 100 € and now it fell below. Unfortunately I’m no longer a poor student who has time but no money, and now I just had no console to play with.

For once when I was not looking for
a retro repair project...

Try Again

I could have yet tried to try to clean it up once, but I didn’t buy PS3 as a retro repair project, and I felt tired. There are companies who repair PS3 devices, but I figured I could just buy another device for less price than the repair would cost – individual PS3 devices seemed relatively plenty on markets for quite low price, it’d be the accessories and games that would make the price. Quite soon I found another seller who didn’t bail out and we agreed for a price of maybe 50 € and fetch from the railway station.

Or more accurately he suggested that we’d meet at the “upper parking lot” of the railway station. There are more than one one parking lots out there, and I referred to this in my reply message and asked if it meant the one next to the rails and station… Yes, that it would be! Except that it wasn’t: I went to snowing freezing day to wait at the place I thought that was meant, and sent a message that I’ll be waiting. He called and explained he’d be in another place. I can move to other side, no problem. I never found out what was the place he actually was, as I went to the other side of the station and there was nobody. Eventually we found and did the trade, all seemed good and the not finding event seemed just like a small amusement for both in the end.

This time I’ll have no problems – PS3 works fine straight out from the bag. Finally I can play Dark Souls for the first time in my life, and quite soon I’ll die and have to start again from quite far away. This is said to be the spirit of the game. All’s well that ends well, right?

Prologue

Some weeks later I had again time to play Dark Souls and gradually got further ahead in the game. It’s not maybe the best game so far I’ve played, but it is worth trying at least. The drive makes some silent erk erk sounds every now and then while I’m playing, but I’m not paying much attention to that. I’m playing my new record in distance reached, but eventually I’ll die again. Nevertheless, this time I won’t get resurrected as usual. This time it all goes black. Nothing happens anymore. My game has died. Or rather, my PS3’s optical drive has died all the sudden. All it says is erk erk, and reads discs no more. Oh Globbit! I wonder if the game managed to save my status before it crashed.

If you will, The Computer Chronicles

Technology spearheaded by computers are providing many new innovations, practical applications and features that have revolutionary flavours resembling the industrial revolution of 19th century. To name a few, Artificial Intelligence, robotics replacing traditional labour, speech synthesis and recognition making phone call talks possible with a machine, 3D graphics competing with real life visions, virtually anything being designed by computer graphics applications, simulations substituting practical training, networking superseding individual offline computers, reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is beating CISC of x86 architecture CPUs, magnetic mass media being replaced by solid state drives, computers in education getting ubiquitous, and finally devices becoming so small that you can lose them like keys.

Does that all sound like state-of-art hi-tech in 2021? Well it shouldn't, since I'm talking about 1980's, and more specifically the topics and conversations gone through in The Computer Chronicles - a current affairs television series about computer related matters started in 1983. The series ran for almost 20 years till 2002, but since I'm watching it systematically from the beginning (or at least as systematically as I can get from YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT - according to Wikipedia there is "only" almost all episodes, and sometimes the comments in episodes themselves seem to refer on episodes broadcast before that are still on the queue to come), I'm not be even close to 1990's yet.

I'll summarize the nature of the show. Essentially it's a documentary talk show, where in around 20+ minutes of real program time the hosts interview various visiting computer specialists, who also often have something to demo with on a computer brought to the studio. Sometimes there also are excursions to an external site (or at least some delivered remote footage shown in between), such as a computer factory or Xerox office showing laser printer functionality on a Xerox Alto computer with mouse and graphical user interface (yes, this is from where Steve Jobs and a few steps later Bill Gates stole their ideas for their Macintosh and Windows, correspondingly). Most of the stuff in the program is pretty much top tech of the time, much of it being still on prototype level and all of if is being rapidly developed at the time and in the years to come.

Skynet's time travel scheme is interfering the picture.

To me the series also works even as a sitcom; every now and then people are having predictions about computer future that go so badly wrong. Things like not seeing wide usage for optical media alongside floppy disks or anticipating that IBM PC compatibles will have no point in a long run. Since the series is over 35 years old, people debating about what role will some things have later on will naturally have brances that are nowhere close to what came to happen sometimes in just few years after. Retrospectively those "wrong" bets can be quite amusing in a good way, yet there are lots of people who have very acute perceptions about the states of fact.

One of the recurring co-hosts, Gary Kildall, is actually one person in the series who has several sharp insights on the way. I think this is to be expected too though, considering he was a person who in 1970's as one of the first people saw true potential of microprocessors as independent computers. He is best known for developing essentially the first non-device tied microcomputer operating system, CP/M, which also later on become the precursor of MS-DOS. I guess most computer users today don't remember even DOS, so I guess we're swimming quite deep here already. Killdall himself sadly died relatively young (52) in 1994, after various tragic events.

Obviously though it'd be unfair to judge people from failing to see the future, since they're simply making logical conclusions from the knowledge available at the time. There are always infinite amount of possible outcomes of tomorrow, so if someone in 1985 fails to foresee that there will be no more Soviet Union after ten years or that IBM has lost to PC clones, those people would not be to blame. In fact, had just some decisions been made differently at certain critical historical junctions, everything could be different also for today. That is why speculative fiction and scifi with time paradoxes have so much narrative potential, but now I'm digressing, as I willingly so often do.

For a contemporary viewer one might assume it has not so much to give - even if the actual topics could be made sound contemporary matters, everything in the show is of course de facto obsolete by today's standards. So is its value today just, if you will, retrocomputer enthusiast material? Not quite, not only that in my opinion. Of course it's history, but it is also some history which gives perspective for today.

History in general provides multiple points of views and I could talk of many, but we have just about a minute, let us just take one. Kids (including young adults) today sometimes joke that people in 1980's or before would be so badly dumbfounded by today's gadgets such as everyman's smartphones that they'd call for witch trials if a person from the future would bring such device to them. Again, not quite, I think, even with the hyberbole and intentional anachronism aside.

After all, for instance Dick Tracy had his call capable wrist watch already in 1940's and space exploration was a thing already in 1920's - ideas live for decades, sometimes even centuries before practical applications, so when someone actually gets some device functional, it practically always is already an old concept. Things like these are also always already considered about at the time when a science fiction representation is released. As an example I can remember an article from my childhood in MikroBitti (a Finnish computer magazine started in 1984) about Knight Rider. It was all about its scifi super car KITT and whether the technology used in it is anyhow plausible. Conclusion was that essentially everything in the series could theoretically be implemented - but that the car would be more like a truck than a sports car if all the features would have been genuinely implemented at the time.

This being said, much of the technology demonstrated in The Computer Chronicles is something which would not really be available for the general public at the time. Military helicopter simulators of early 1980's could run on a computer which has processing power comparable to a mid 1990's home computer (or, a personal computer - home computers usually refer to 8 and 16-bit hobbyist machines, while the term personal computers was typically referring to a more serious business capable computer). Artificial Intelligence as a concept was clear already back then, but only with today's seemingly infinite maximum memory and drastically grown processing speed it is becoming truely a capable tool. Similarly accurate speech recognition could be limited to one person's voice only at a set tone due to lack of processing power of the devices, even while as a concept it can be already made fully functional at least with expensive system. This pretty much goes with everything in the series - in comparison to 2020's much of the technology in 1980's is still either too primitive or even more often too expensive to be used in most imaginable situations. Yet I feel had this series been made today, they would have not put the emphasis similarly on actual facts and technical details - to me, this is emotionally rousing.

All this gathered, despite people decades ago would surely have been impressed by today's devices, I see no reason why essentially anything available today would be unimaginable for any reasonable being having lived during the past eighty years or so. They'd be more surprised to hear that people of same sex can get married, or that despite all the available knowledge so many people would rather believe in narcissist bigots than science. Ladies and gentlemen, we're out of time. Thank you for joining us with this episode of the Zacharian Computer Diary.

(Then in a moment I'm told that someone's parent would still see smartphones unimaginable today, that there are lots of people for whom the Earth is flat, trips to space let alone Moon were fake news, and someone living close to equator would take it as a lie to claim that elsewhere there are white winters during which it's possible to walk on water, oh well...)