WANTED: SNES "X*BAND" Modem

[CaryMG]

SNES "X*BAND" is being re-started & I wanna be there when it does.
See for yourself > SNES "X*BAND" Revival (http://board.acmlm.org/thread.php?id=14914)

Please PM me or email.
My email address > cary@easy.com


Later!
:) :) :)

[shiningslade]

Link does not work :hmm:

[CaryMG]

Link does not work :hmm:

Yeah -- I know.
Sorry about that ....

There is a forum where the guy behind the "X*BAND Revival" says what he's gonna do & how he's gonna do it.

I've looked it up & here's what he said ....

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Hello, for those that don't know of me, I love playing with old hardware. Half the fun is learning how it works ... or in some cases, just getting it to work.

I have considered this for quite some time now, and decided I want to work on the SNES X-Band. I am looking for people to help."

"For those that don't know, the X-Band was a device for the SNES that:
- in essence was a massive "Game Genie", it is a hacker's dream come true, allowing fairly massive patching of almost any game
- the "main program" on the device itself was updatable
- it contained a modem
- there used to be a service that you could call into and download updates, and hacks ... Which allowed many games to be turned into multi-player modem games!
- the US user base was fairly large and enthralled with it, but when the company was bought out the service was shut down (I'm probably getting history a bit wrong here, but they were bought out ... eventually leading to Qualcomm as the owners I think)
- From the sounds of it, the programmers were a close knit group of hard working youngsters just out of college. They disassembled and gutted many a game to hack it and over came the obstacles to make games 2-player modem games ... which they obviously weren't originally designed to be!
- You could also send mail and read news "online".

and finally
- There is actually a secret built in memory viewer/hexeditor! (This means if we can get something working, by making just a couple changes, ie the dialup number in memory, anyone with an X-Band could try out what we create... they don't need a copier or any other special equipment.)


This thing has plenty of potential.
Who's interested in helping?

What would really help:
- If you own an X-Band, check if the memory (battery backed SRAM) is still good by starting it up. If so, I'd love to get a copy of some real patches (haven't found any X-Bands with good bateries yet).
- Try checking local used game stores and seeing if they have some X-Bands that still have the saved memory.
- If you have an X-Band and can't help, but would like to donate it ... well, it would be very much appreciated

Side oddities that would be fun to fiddle with:
- If you own an X-Band keyboard (or know where to get one), I'd be interested seeing how it works. (This was added later in its life, and I'm not sure if it got beyond the proto-type phase.)


For those interested in helping with the hacking, some skills that would be helpful (not required though):

Code readers:
- understand SNES asm
- understand C at a low level (We will be looking at the code in asm, but it was originally written in C and then compiled ... so it looks kinda weird unless you understand C at a low level.)
- goals are to figure out software protocals and hardware features so that we can make this puppy do whatever we want

Code writers:
- can write a modem program for a PC (I have done this in DOS in C with asm thrown in as well, but I used direct register writes and swapped interrupt vectors ... I'm not sure how to do it "the modern way" in Windows)
- this is for eventually making a new "server" ... which will depend on info from the code readers above, but I'd like to have at least the fundemental communication routines setup so we can play with / test info as it comes in.

- also plenty of test programs to figure out the hardware will be necessary (SNES programs)
- ultimately, it would be fun to do a proof of concept with MarioWorld (It's two player, but you take turns ... so there are no synchronizing issues). Then try out MarioKart.

- maybe someone that could write a crude "decompiler" to turn the X-Band code back into a crude form of C (would make reading it much quicker).


Hardware skills:
- even if you don't understand asm, you may be able to help interpret strange findings from the code ... a good understanding of the memory map and chips involved will help us figure out the hardware (I already have a rough sketch of the memory map, and have a datasheet explaining the modem chip used in this cartridge)
- For testing purposes, it would be nice to connect the X-Band directly to the modem of a PC. There appears to be a mode of the modem chip on the X-Band that supports this ... however, I have no idea how to get the PC modem to do this. Help here will be nice as well.
- help with understanding the theory behind how they overcame the lag in a phone line to make a synchonous multiplayer modem game


Basically, there are plenty of fun things to work on.
After this progresses a bit, I can supply the following to big helpers that need it:
- a SF3 or SF7 (an SNES copier) which is versatile enough to use the XBand on pass through and still allow modifying the ROM
- an X-Band for testing


So who's up for the thrill of conquering this rom hacking challenge?
People with all ranges and levels of interest are welcome!

Thanks,
-nevisti...

P.S. If you guys know other places to pull in friends to work on this, feel free to ask them as well.

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There ya have it ....

And that's why I SO want an SNES X*BAND modem ....

Anyone have one for sale?


Later!
:) :) :)

[Jagasian]

I got mine off of Ebay. Once I saw the revival project, I did a "save favorite search" on Ebay for every spelling of the Xband as follows:
(xband,x band,x-band,snes modem)

Then I bid on the first catch that got stuck in my net. I even dumped the SRAM contents, to contribute to the revival project. That is what is needed now more than ever. As many SRAM dumps as possible.

[shiningslade]

I sold one last year on ebay. It went dirt cheap & the guy that won it from me paid me more than what it ended at saying it was worth much more. You don't find many people like that anymore! :eek 2: Anyway I still have one for myself but do not know much about how it works internally. I used to play my friends on it back in the day. Killer Instinct rocked back then! :D

[heyricochet]

Much more? Doubt it, its just a collectors item. I picked mine up for 5 bucks at a indie game store.

[badinsults]

Wow, it is awesome that Nevisti is doing this. I remember a couple of years ago how he was hacking away at the Xband. Much of the information he had on the zsnes board was unfortunately lost, although I may try to search for it.