Online Sega Genesis

[HyruleHero]

Was at a Play N Trade in Jersey and they has some pretty good vintage stuff in this week including a Atari 5200,Turbo Graphix 16, CD-I and some weird shit I haven't seen before. They had SEALED some sort of Genesis Online adaptor..I have pretty good video game knowledge but I have never heard of such a thing...I collect myself,,but I feel what the hells the worth of collecting if you can't experience it.. so I didn't buy it figuring it is obsolete..What do you guys know about it and what do you think?

[Tupin]

Probably a Sega Channel adapter, used in the mid 90's to download games and demos to your Genesis through a phone line. It actually had a few games not released in the USA on carts on the service, such as Mega Man: The Wily Wars and Pulseman.

I would have gotten it, mainly because I think it boots up to a BIOS, and a sealed one is probably is worth a bit.

[rbudrick]

The X Band? Yeah, pretty useless now, but I remember some dudes were trying to reverse engineer it to bring it alive again or something, but I don't have any idea of the results.

The Sega Channel cable modem did not come sealed or in retail packaging. There were at least two versions of it, though.

-Rob

[garagesaleking!!]

ya the x band is what i assumed was being referred to, i had the snes version of an xband a while back and think i ended up selling it for like $2 at a flea market, they are worthless for the most part, a cool item though with a history to it.

[old_skoolin_jim]

I used to want this back in the mid-90's, but man, I can only imagine how long it would have taken to connect to a game (was it a 28.8 or only a 14.4 modem?), and playing Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat must have been laggy as hell.
I sadly didn't get into online gaming until early 1999 with Quake 2 and C&C: Red Alert on heat.net. Good times.
Anybody have actual user experience with this? How well did it work? Was it a pain in the arse to get up & running?

[Kiddo]

The device being referred to is highly likely to be the Xband (unless somehow the canned Telegenesis got into someone's hands.)

I've read quite a bit into it and found it pretty interesting. If you look it up on Youtube now you can find archives of people using the SNES and Sega Saturn versions of the service.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Xband411 - This Youtube account in particular is nice for it's SNES Mario Kart matchups.

I myself never got to touch one of these, unfortunately. :(

[rbudrick]

I remember back in the day, ISPs were so few and the long distance charges for most people made owning one of these nearly impossible. I think if ISPs were more common and local, the Xband would have done incredibly, but it was mostly a failure.

-Rob

[chrisbid]

i wonder how bad the lag actually was on these devices, a console not having to negotiate an operating system on a console and using direct dial rather than navigating through a server, the lag might not be so horrible.

[Kiddo]

From what I heard second-hand (talked to a few XBand users), lag was actually not that bad - or at least, certainly not as bad as people who are used to ISP-style netgaming where lag can be a problem even with broadband might expect.
I hope at some point I could try setting up a Saturn NetLink to see if I could really see for myself, though. Having mostly looked into online gaming from Dreamcast onward (the move towards ISP-based online gaming), it sounds rather surprising to me.

[portnoyd]

I remember back in the day, ISPs were so few and the long distance charges for most people made owning one of these nearly impossible. I think if ISPs were more common and local, the Xband would have done incredibly, but it was mostly a failure.

I remember getting the SNES version back in the day with a friend with the hopes of playing MKII against each other. What we found is that we weren't in the same "area" (despite living 20 minutes away from each other) and we couldn't play unless we paid for national gaming, which our parents would not go for. So I ended up playing like 3-4 games of MKII with random people before saying hell with it. I mean, the lag wasn't that bad at all, but not being able to play with my best friend at the time made it lose its luster.

[Kiddo]

Bumping this thread to show a bit o' osmething I found on NicoNicoDouga.

http://kiddocabbusses.tryhappy.net/notbs/Xband%20SFC%20PuyoPuyo.mp4

This is more or less the only "archival" of the Japanese Super Famicom XBand I've ever seen.

[DreamTR]

The lag was very good and there weren't all these problems like there are with PSN and XBL.

I can honestly say I still prefer Xband in a lot of ways over everything now.

You direct connected, and it worked well. Nothing was overloaded.

Japanese used this well for years all the way through Dreamcast and PS2, had no problems...

Telegenesis Modem actually came out for the Mega Drive in Japan..

[swlovinist]

The lag was very good and there weren't all these problems like there are with PSN and XBL.

I can honestly say I still prefer Xband in a lot of ways over everything now.

You direct connected, and it worked well. Nothing was overloaded.

Japanese used this well for years all the way through Dreamcast and PS2, had no problems...

Telegenesis Modem actually came out for the Mega Drive in Japan..

I had a friend that played A TON of Madden on it back in the day. He loved it :)

[DreamTR]

God yes, I remember Madden 95 on Sega Genesis online. Wow. Amazing to say the least.

[thoudx]

Here's a decent artcile from a 1994 issue of Popular Science that tells how they managed to keep lag down. I was on Xband (those are my Youtube videos linked above), and the only time I noticed lots of lag was when a phone call was coming in during a match.

http://mysite.verizon.net/tacosmith/xbimages/popScience.jpg

[sebastiankirchoff]

I always found X-band to be very fascinating. I wish the servers were still up, because I would have to track down a cartridge for it and play some Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat with friends. It sounded like a lot of fun, sucks I had to be born in 1993...