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The Untold Story of Online Gaming on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis | XBAND

Wrestling With Gaming · 618.6K views · 2019-05-04 · 1:04:15

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Overview

A one-hour documentary on XBAND, the 1994 modem network for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It covers matchmaking, chat, email, leaderboards and how games were patched at runtime to cope with lag.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a fascinating engineering story of early console online play, including a working demo.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2019–2020

Topics

Game history & retro gamingDocumentaries & storytelling
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xbandsnessega genesisretro gamingonline multiplayer

What people said

icelancer · 2019-06 · Strong recommendation

It 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. [VIDEO]

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dimator · 2020-07 · Recommendation

There's an excellent retrospective on YouTube about the xband and how it was built. It was a product ahead of its time. For example, the way they got games that weren't built for laggy multiplayer to work was unbelievable: they recognized the cartridge and patched the code. Yes, that means every game that worked was a result of a custom built patching of that game's code at run time! [VIDEO]

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Kaze404 · 2020-04 · Recommendation

If this is interesting to you, I recommend this (1) documentary on XBAND, a peripheral used to access an Xbox Live-like service for the Super Nintendo. It's a fascinating piece of engineering for the time. (1) - [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Wrestling With Gaming, played through YouTube.

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