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.
The 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.
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.
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"."
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.
Yup, 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.
Services like XBAND were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive for a large swath of the population at the time. Like a lot of early technology, I guess.
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?!")
Great 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. ;)
They 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.
Holy 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.
I'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.
Someone 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.
Yes, 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.)
Hey, 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!
I 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.
I’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.
Remember 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.
