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

Wrestling With Gaming · documentary · Watch on YouTube

Game history & retro gamingDocumentaries & storytelling

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2019, last 2020

What HN commenters said

  1. “Well worth watching.”

    One-hour documentary on XBAND's development

    icelancer, 2019-06 · Strong recommendation · in “Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems”

  2. “You can see a demo of it in the excellent Wrestling With Gaming documentary on XBAND”

    Documentary shows a working XBAND implementation demo

    markchristian, 2019-06 · Recommendation · in “Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems”

  3. “I recommend this (1) documentary on XBAND”

    Fascinating engineering story of SNES online service

    Kaze404, 2020-04 · Recommendation · in “How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection”

  4. “There's an excellent retrospective on YouTube about the xband and how it was built.”

    XBAND retrospective, including runtime patching of games for lag

    dimator, 2020-07 · Recommendation · in “A Closer Look at the Super NES Doom Source Code Release [video]”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: xband, snes, sega genesis, retro gaming, online multiplayer

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