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Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems
- Maxious 7y agoThe video documentary on XBAND mentions that players started forming clans with clan tags using the player chat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_5M-z_RUKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_5M-z_RUKA
- eclipxe 7y agoYep! I used to do that on Xband
- jchw 7y agoThey also offer a glimpse into the future, with regards to preservation, as much of the content appears to be completely lost to time. It’s especially sad with Xband; I hope it gets reverse engineered and emulated to some degree at some point, but there’s probably a lot of data completely lost to time. At least someone was wise enough to make a bunch of video recordings before it shuttered.
- pinewurst 7y agoSomeone would’ve had to have captured the patches that were downloaded and mapped over the cartridge code. Unless some of the game hackers kept copies and made them available, emulation won’t work.
- jchw 7y agoYes, that's a problem. My guess is that folks will just have to create new patches from scratch to make it work. The old patches, or probably the most of them, might be lost forever unless some entity or former Xband engineer happens to have them. Guess you never know when a backup disk could turn up. The other reply to me points out that a service called retro.live is successfully getting Xband all the way into games. Not sure what they are doing, but I am guessing they must be creating new patches, since they look a bit buggy right now. (Video is linked above.)
- markchristian 7y agoAmazingly enough, http://www.retro.live http://www.retro.live has a working implementation of XBAND. You can see a demo of it in the excellent Wrestling With Gaming documentary on XBAND: https://youtu.be/k_5M-z_RUKA?t=3448 https://youtu.be/k_5M-z_RUKA?t=3448
- jchw 7y agoHoly Shit! That's incredible. Thanks for the link. Even cooler that it works on Analogue Super NT. That's two layers of video game history preservation right there :) After all, eventually, some day, the last working SNES unit will fail... I don't see very much information on retro.live's page, but I hope they heed the lesson of Xband's demise and open source the important bits of their work in some time.
- icelancer 7y agoI'm sad that they didn't get anything meaningful on the retro.live website before the documentary launched. Seems like a massive wasted opportunity. Why not document the project? There's nothing on the site.
- chime 7y ago> Tune in next month when we’ll be taking a look at the forgotten art of the tech concept video. Looking forward to this! Will it include stuff similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos or is 'tech concept video' a whole another thing?
- markchristian 7y agoThe Mother of All Demos is amazing, but I’ll be talking about some cheesy corporate junk. :)
- winrid 7y agoWould be super cool to see the source code and protocol implementations.
- pinewurst 7y agoThe transport protocol was a close relative of AppleTalk (ADSP I think).
- markchristian 7y agoDang, I had never pondered this question. Where can I learn more?
- winrid 7y agoThanks!
- spilk 7y agoSimilar, but not solely contained in a cartridge: Nintendo Family Computer Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System and the Nintendo Satellaview which did things similar to the SEGA Channel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview
- fnord77 7y agoXBAND looks like it was really awesome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBAND#Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBAND#Service After the matchmaking part on the service, the system would switch into a P2P mode: "When the network matched two players up, the newly-connected player's XBAND modem would disconnect from the server and dial the other player, whose own XBAND modem would answer when the phone rang. At that point the players would see the XBAND logo slide together, followed by the matchup screen, which displayed each player's codenames, avatars, locations, and a pre-typed "taunt"."
- icelancer 7y agoIt was. Very much so. I have a lot of fond memories of playing Kirby's Avalanche and Killer Instinct on the SNES over the phone lines. I could not fathom why more people didn't flock to the XBAND. It represented everything I ever wanted as a kid gamer. They had the right idea. Way before its time unfortunately, and shockingly. I still don't really understand why it didn't take off. Luckily, just last month (May 2019) there was a one hour documentary on it that covered a lot of the development of the unit. Well worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_5M-z_RUKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_5M-z_RUKA
- therein 7y agoYup, I am so glad you posted this. I remember watching this video a month ago and enjoyed being reminded of it. The part about how they live-patched the game to simulate input was very cool to hear, because that's exactly how I would have approached it and it was with the drawbacks/challenges I knew would come with.
- nr152522 7y agoPerhaps it was related to cost of landline calls back then?
- gonesilent 7y agoYup, I had many a bad bill from bbs days just calling the state over. Back in the days also of local dial in numbers for good old ix.netcom.com...
- djmips 7y agoI picked up this intriguing GB cart with modem recently for cheap. I don't know when it was originally released. http://gameshark-mx.blogspot.com/ http://gameshark-mx.blogspot.com/
- adenylyl 7y agoSomeone recorded the SEGA Channel's menu interface on VHS back when it was in operation and has subsequently uploaded it to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMRLZcBiN-k&t=72s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMRLZcBiN-k&t=72s An interesting detail of the SEGA Channel is that it was a one-way modem. There was no way for the cartridge to communicate anything back to the headend. Instead, there was a constant broadcast of Game 1, Menu program, Game 2, Menu program, Game 3, ... looping forever. When you selected a game, it would just wait for it to come around on the loop and store it locally.
- rahimnathwani 7y agoThe looping you describe sounds similar to how teletext worked. You would enter a page number, and wait for the page to load. If it was a common page (e.g. the default page '100') it would be transmitted more frequently, so the average wait time would be lower.
- elsurudo 7y ago> how teletext worked How teletext works! In Europe, it is still used. There is weather, classifieds, LOTS of "seeking partner" ads usually for the older generation, etc... Really neat technology/"hack" when you think about it
- rahimnathwani 7y ago"In Europe, it is still used." Wow. Your comment prompted me to ask my dad whether he still uses teletext. I assumed the answer would be 'no', because he can read and watch news on his iPad. But apparently he still uses teletext for quick access to news headlines and share prices.
- danieldk 7y agoI have also seen people who use the online version/simulation of teletext. Probably because it is so brief and has very few distractions. E.g.: https://nos.nl/teletekst https://nos.nl/teletekst
- joshu 7y agoa recent documentary about XBAND: https://youtu.be/k_5M-z_RUKA https://youtu.be/k_5M-z_RUKA
- Sniffnoy 7y agoHey, markchristian, the footnote numbering in this article is off/inconsistent. (The links seem correct, but the numbers are wrong.) Would you mind fixing this? Thank you! Edit: Whoops, sorry, I got mixed up. This comment actually applies to your "sensors in cartridges" article (https://writing.markchristian.org/2019/05/11/sensors-in-cartridges/ https://writing.markchristian.org/2019/05/11/sensors-in-cart...), not the one I'm actually commenting on. Oops.
- markchristian 7y agoThanks for the heads up!
- madengr 7y agoAnother challenge for the MAME developers.
- shorts_theory 7y agoI love articles like these. To markchristian, I was wondering if you have any informatinon about the SNES Satellaview unit and how the experience of playing Satellaview games was different from playing cartridge games back in the day? Satellaview always seemed much ahead of its time and I feel like it hasn't gotten the recognition it deserves, though that's probably because it was Japan only.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoRemember that Satellaview could download data but not upload it. That limitation led to some creative use cases for sure, but on the whole I think it was quite limiting.
- markchristian 7y agoI’ve always wanted to write about it, but it’s never really fit into one of my monthly themes. Many of the games on the service are available online as ordinary ROMs, often with “BS” in the title (for Broadcast Satellite). I’m sure the experience of using the system and playing along to synchronized audio was pretty wonderful, but the games themselves just played like ordinary cartridges once they’d be downloaded. Unlike the Sega Channel, Satellaview games could be downloaded into special cartridges and kept around indefinitely.
- jccalhoun 7y agoOne of the more interesting examples of cartridges with built-in modems was the GameLine for the atari 2600 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameLine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameLine It would fail but they created a new company called Quantum Computer Services which would come to be known as America Online. http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-gameline-master-module_20315.html http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-gameline-maste...
- duxup 7y agoSuch a wonderful crossroads of technology there. Sometimes looking at these things make me think "Wait do I really need to be doing things the way I have been?"
- dnos 7y agoGreat article that brought back some fond memories of the Sega Channel. As a young teenager when we got it, I was in awe of the technology and wondered how it worked and why something like it didn’t exist for the computer. Not having to tie up a phone line AND it was even faster! Loading it up for the first time really felt like it was magic and world-changing. Interestingly enough, later on when cable modems came out in my city, you still had to use a phone line for the up channel. The Sega Channel still seemed superior to what PCs had and always wondered how they pulled it off. So, it’s neat today learning how it worked! The Sega Channel was definitely too late though. The Genesis was old and I swear it seemed like the PlayStation came out a short few weeks after we got it. Of course, that was its own type of magic that felt world-changing when powering it on the first time. ;)
- xellisx 7y agohttps://hackaday.com/2015/05/01/tweeting-from-the-nes-expansion-port/ https://hackaday.com/2015/05/01/tweeting-from-the-nes-expans...