Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems
writing.markchristian.org
writing.markchristian.org
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.
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
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.
The channel guide and semi-interactive text content (i.e. "modern" teletext) are special packets in the MPEG stream, and are cached by the receiver.
I believe the multiplayer adapter was piloted in a few select regions, but I cannot say for certain.
Anyway, I did have a friend with Sega Channel growing up. It was revolutionary. I would see nothing like it again until well over a decade later.
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"."
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.
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.
For XBAND, you had to buy the modem, you had to pay for the service, and you had to pay for the phone call. Where I lived when growing up, a "local call" was about a 2-mile radius, and that radius contained maybe 700 phone lines. I was one of a handful of people who even had a 16-bit video game console in the area and I was pretty fortunate that my parents were somewhat okay with spending hundreds of dollars (over the course of a few years) in mindless entertainment.
The Sega Channel would have been a complete non-starter since, even if I happened to live in one of the few service areas, you had to pay for a subscription to the Sega Channel which was a pricey add-on to your existing cable bill.
Even back then, I thought it would have been smarter for Sega to charge for the modem (as they did) but subsidize the cost of the channel delivery to customers. They could recoup the costs of delivery through more marketing of upcoming games or even showing ads. But I assume that if it was even feasible, the cable companies would have laughed it out of the room anyway. ("You want us to provide a channel for FREE?!")
Drooled constantly over the XBAND keyboard that they probably only made ten of. I can still "type" relatively fast with a game controller.
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. ;)
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.)
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.
Nintendo Family Computer Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System
and the Nintendo Satellaview which did things similar to the SEGA Channel.
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-cart...), not the one I'm actually commenting on. Oops.
Looking forward to this! Will it include stuff similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos or is 'tech concept video' a whole another thing?
Sometimes looking at these things make me think "Wait do I really need to be doing things the way I have been?"