Behold, the PSSR!
The PSSR Exists?
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Behold! The PSSR!
View: https://x.com/ZhugeEX/status/1833647819065893334
Immediately after the end of World War II, some time traveling socialist scalpers (do not ask how these words fit together into a coherent ideology) offer the leadership of the USSR a sweetheart deal:
They are now capable of purchasing any Sony Playstation, plus the dev tools, from the original PS1 to the PS5 Pro, as well as any accompanying hardware peripherals, at present-day commodity exchange rates. The entire Playstation game catalogue and their dev documentation is also provided to the USSR for free. They can do whatever they want with the purchased Playstations - crack them open for the hardware, attempt to reverse-engineer them, use them as paperweights, whatever.
How does granting the Soviet Union access to compute power decades ahead of their time change the course of history?
Yeah, there are genuinely some interesting primary benefits, not just second order ones, which might be possible.
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- She/Her
I feel like it'd be misused by Stalin but I bet the Chinese could make something good out of it.
- Location
- The Hague
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- He/Him
An ambitious apparatchik would be able to keep Stalin completely occupied by getting him hooked on Red Dead Redemption 2
prometheus110
Join Cayman-Global & be part of the 1E-9 percent!
- Location
- La Ballena City Raft
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- He/Him
Pyotr Ufimtsev is able to better model the reflection of electromagnetic waves from surfaces and the Soviet Union builds the world's first radar stealth aircraft decades early (and without making a low poly plane) 
Pyotr Ufimtsev is able to better model the reflection of electromagnetic waves from surfaces and the Soviet Union builds the world's first radar stealth aircraft decades early (and without making a low poly plane)
I think the ability to use PlayStations as a cryptographic tool (because they're still computers) is going to be useful as well, although they would need to be careful to make sure that US agents don't manage to steal a PS5 or whatever.
The counterespionage concern would probably be one of the factors that limits access to high end PS hardware, which might lead to the USSR not deploying cheap compute as optimally as possible.
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
Hmm.
Given when this happens, I imagine that whatever type of plug these PSSR's come with swiftly becomes the standard across the USSR and possibly the entire Warsaw pact.
Given when this happens, I imagine that whatever type of plug these PSSR's come with swiftly becomes the standard across the USSR and possibly the entire Warsaw pact.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
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- She/Her
Given the playstations are being made available "immediately after the end of World War II", it's entirely possible the USSR makes component* and/or hdmi** input the standard on their televisions.
*available on the ps1, 2, and 3
**available from the ps3 on
*available on the ps1, 2, and 3
**available from the ps3 on
It probably wouldn't be, which is why I think this was an interesting idea for a thread. There's a lot of stuff that would have to be kludged to make their toys work, and the kludging itself would be interesting in terms of how they would inform development.
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
I think modern monitors would probably count as "accompanying hardware peripherals".
I mentioned that hardware peripherals are also available, and it just so happens that Sony sold some display peripherals, such as the Playstation 3D display:
So there are stopgaps available although the USSR probably would end up standardizing hard on modern hardware standards for obvious reasons.
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The planquest for this would be legendary
Honestly it would probably stunt development a lot. There'd be a huge incentive to do everything using repurposed PlayStation parts instead of reverse-engineered locally produced computers, even if the exact implementation was massively computationally inefficient. The same way modern game devs do stupid tricks like uncompressed textures or wildly unoptimised engines because the hassle and cost of optimising is just not worth it when you can throw modern hardware at the problem.
They'd skip straight to modern code architectures but have trouble improving on it or figuring out fundamentals behind it, and efforts to make hardware would always be bottlenecked by the simple question: "Why don't we just put a PlayStation in here instead?".
And the actual code itself would probably be a nightmare.
They'd skip straight to modern code architectures but have trouble improving on it or figuring out fundamentals behind it, and efforts to make hardware would always be bottlenecked by the simple question: "Why don't we just put a PlayStation in here instead?".
And the actual code itself would probably be a nightmare.