A Shell of a Good Time

Have you ever wondered what a PlayStation would look like if it showed up in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants? Yeah, me neither. But sometimes ideas pop into the heads of artists seemingly out of nowhere, and they just have to create something to get it out of their thoughts. This happened to an artist named Anh Dang, who imagined a cross between a PlayStation One and a crab, of all things. The result was a drawing appropriately titled “Playstacean.”

Strange as it may be, it is also pretty cool in its own way. And when YouTuber GingerOfOz saw the Playstacean, it got him feeling a bit crabby. As someone who loves to hack on gaming consoles, his canvas is neither digital nor paper, but electronics. With those skills, GingerOfOz made it his mission to turn the imagined hybrid PlayStation One/crab into a reality.

To kick things off, GingerOfOz first picked up a beat-up Playstation One on the second-hand market. Then came the work of taking measurements from this extremely curvy console and designing a 3D model to turn it into a playable crustacean with a 3D printer. Some compromises had to be made, of course, because digital artists do not have to be concerned with pesky things like reality when they create their artwork.

GingerOfOz found that it was necessary to make the crab’s pincers, for example, a bit thicker to accommodate the bulk of the analog thumbsticks. The whole shell had to be a bit thicker, for that matter, to account for the angled ports on the front of the Playstacean. A bit of the outer edge of the ground plane of the PlayStation’s main board also had to be trimmed off so that it could fit in the curved case.

Once all of the pieces of the case had been designed, they were printed on a Bambu Lab X1-Carbon 3D printer. Before fitting the console into the printed case, the controller and memory card ports had to be removed from the mainboard and reattached with wires to give them the ability to be installed at an angle. Finally, a PlayStation controller had to be disassembled, with the components being stuffed into the claws and hardwired to the mainboard. This wiring was done through a multiplexer such that external controllers could still be switched to.

That proved to be an important feature to include, because the claw controllers were predictably terrible to use. At least they looked really cool!

So that the Playstacean would be useful as more than just a decoration, GingerOfOz modded the console to bypass DRM, so that games could be played from standard CD-R discs. This was, of course, only so that backup discs could be played. Wink, wink. With the addition of a PicoMemcard to emulate a memory card, the system was ready to go.

There was a lot of work involved in this build, and it is almost certainly something that you will not want to repeat. But the video is well worth a watch so that you can live vicariously through GingerOfOz as he brings the Playstacean into reality.