3D printing an old console?

I started thinking about how exact 3D printing can be and it got me thinking, "Is it possible to recreate an old console exactly?".

What about the Saturn, Dreamcast, PC Engine or PC Duo?  Especially the Jaguar and 3DO given those ridiculous prices now.

I mean I would think Sega has the exact specs. of the motherboard, down to the chemical composition.  The other companies probably still have the data on file and if you input that data into a 3D printer, wola, CPU and the other things could be printed.  I mean if it can print the intricacies of veins et al for human organs how is it impossible to do the same for a circuit board with all the bells and whistles attached.

Additionally, the PC Engine and Saturn don't suffer from the new nm. manufacturing intricacies if there are possible unforeseen circumstances from that.

Any thoughts here?  My main concern would be the exact specs. wouldn't be available so the printer could do it's job properly.

It is entirely possible. Unfortunately, the general state of 3D printing makes it a little less feasible for the time being. For starters, you aren't going to be able to replicate the chemical composition of the plastic through 3D printing. All of the different methods of 3D printing have their own different types of plastic, but none of them are going to be identical to what older consoles were made of. You could conceivably find one that is close, but not identical. The type of plastic being used depends on the method of printing, and not all methods have different options for plastic types. If you're using the thread-based 3D printing, than you would be extremely limited in what type of plastic you use.

Moreover, most standard 3D printing techniques don't have the kind of resolution necessary to replicate the smooth, hard planes normally found on many classic systems. In theory, you could print out a shell and then sand it down as necessary, but that's the closest you would get. Some printing methods would be able to get close, but most of those more finer-detail printers are prohibitively expensive.

This is all changing, of course. The growing popularity of 3D printing for different applications is driving the technology forward, and will eventually increase quality while lowering costs. So eventually, the kind of project you are talking about will be feasible. (and even affordable) But I would still question the wisdom of simply printing replacement shells. While useful for damaged systems, I can think of far better things to do with such technology.

I would far prefer to print custom 3D-sculpted console shells. This would take console modding to a whole new level. With a base 3D model to serve as the "template" and define where the original PCB would be placed, you could use 3D modeling to create your own custom-designed and themed versions of classic systems, and then simply put the original guts of the system inside. I've been eyeballing 3D printing for a while because I want to use it to create custom cartridge shells. It will get their eventually, but it will likely be a few more years yet.