Did Anybody Here Use Xband when It Was New?

[Magmavision2000]

If so. How fast was it? What was your favorite game to play online?

[godslabrat]

Always wanted to, but it was a hard sell to the parental units. By the time they were amicable toward it, we had a PC that gave us internet access instead.  

 

I imagine this experience was pretty typical.

[Flojomojo]

I was really interested in Sega Channel (not xband), but never got to play either one. 

[Video]

Once, but only game that I played was doom. Actually, it's the only game I was aware that used it. Neat idea, just say ahead of its time.

 

had a Sega channel, loved that, a bit high priced, but a rental service done right. I think it should have used the CD save cart to save your games, but for single session games it was great.

 

As for xband, I'm to far away, though we had great internet at the time and I didn't recall lag or anything. I did recall a lot of people cheating (you could unplug it to avoid a loss count) but cheating has always been a prob.

Edited November 29, 2019 by Video

[+selgus]

I worked at Catapult, building the XBAND Modem and Network, back in the mid-90's. I was one of the people that reverse engineered different cartridge games, figured out where they were reading their inputs from controllers, modified any non-deterministic patterns (i.e. random numbers couldn't actually be "random") and hooked in our synch-o-tron routines to allow two remote consoles play each other, over the CompuServe modem pool.

 

It was really interesting back then, as we built hardware that plugged into the consoles, and you plugged your game cartridge into our hardware. From there, we had 64K of RAM, plus all the address lines flowed thru us, and as such, we had hardware that could sniff the bus looking for software modifiable addresses, have "patch" ROM cartridges to vector into our RAM to change how the games executed.

 

We did have issues with people trying to cheat, if they were losing, pulling their modem phone connecting, etc. We had code in our OS, to try and detect this, as pulling the cord was different than noise on the line, or other kinds of error conditions.

[Video]

Cool that someone who worked on it dropped by to say some stuff about it.

 

I do know in the late 90's many of those early cheaters got found out on x games. It's just like "wow, you had to cheat to become one of the "greats" but thought that would fly in an actual competition? " lol

 

Always wondered if you could cut the middleman and use xband to link two systems directly today. How much was handled by servers? Granted, what's the interest, since, as far as I'm aware, all its games are still available today in better formats.

[Keatah]

My old radar detector had X-band on it.

 

[+selgus]

On 7/26/2020 at 2:01 AM, Video said:

Always wondered if you could cut the middleman and use xband to link two systems directly today. How much was handled by servers? Granted, what's the interest, since, as far as I'm aware, all its games are still available today in better formats.

We were able to link two systems together directly.. this is how we developed the patches for the games. I had special XBAND cards, that we could link with a null modem cable, so we could test our code.

 

Our servers were pretty complex too.. we had match making, news and mail systems, it was really ahead of it's time.