I've always been fascinated by interesting ways of sharing data. The Gamecube had very little online support, but it had some cool stuff like Animal Crossing's passwords that you could exchange with other people, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! that you could play over Warp Pipe using the LAN functionality, or even stuff like sharing Timesplitters custom maps over the internet by buying a special memory card-to-USB adapter.
What are some more interesting things like this? Other things that come to mind would be Sega NetLink for Saturn, Morita Shogi 64 with a phone port built into the cartridge, or how you could bring your F-Zero GX memory card to the arcade and plug it into the machine for DLC. Let's talk about the cool and crazy systems that developers have devised for sharing data.
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Mario's Photography, a Japanese release for the Nintendo 64, had a Smart Media cart slot so you could import pictures from a digital camera.
https://tcrf.net/Mario_no_Photopi
Wow, I've never even heard of this before. Extremely cool. You have to wonder how they thought this was going to be popular enough to greenlight a custom cartridge like that. I can't imagine it was cheap to support this.
Even with having virtually "every" rom downloaded, I'm still surprised to learn these ancient consoles had games I never heard of. Pretty cool, anon.
Weren’t SD cards only a thing a few years after the N64’s demise or are they really older than I think? If they are this old of a technology, why didn’t the GameCube have SD card slots?
Smartmedia cards are a different format that existed in the 90's
>why didn’t the GameCube have SD card slots?
Funny you mention that, because Gamecube Memory Cards are basically just SD cards.
check out this site:
>gamecube.onlineconsoles.com
this site has been running for like 20 years. it has tons of info about DC, GC and PS2 and how to get them online. it also has lists of every online game for each console in addition to games with other semi-online features like leaderboards, passwords etc. sadly, it's mostly dead at this point and the forums get like 3 posts a year, but it's an incredible resource for this stuff.
This is awesome.
>Twin Snakes and Ikaruga internet rankings
Whoa, what's this now? How did this work?
Twin snakes I have no idea, ikaruga had a feature where it would output a password you would enter in a website. Double dash has it too, https://tcrf.net/Mario_Kart:_Double_Dash!!#Contest_Code
The PS1 had some weird Japanese only cable you could plug your late 90s Jap cellphone for WAP connectivity to your PS1. Don't have much information on it.
In the early 80s there was some subscription service where with a provided part you could plug your Atari 2600 (might have been a later model - maybe it wasn't even Atari) into your phone line and down a new game onto an cartridge or tape every week. Im very hazy on that one. I think it was an NYC area thing only? Anybody remember those?
>Anybody remember those?
Never heard of it before now, but it looks like it was this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameLine
In a similar vein...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System
Though it doesn't seem like you could download games over the FCNS.
Didn’t “Mario Kart: Double Dash” have a LAN party mode?
yep
Nintendont on Wii can even support it via Wi-Fi.
What seriously? Got a reliable link that explains how to set that up?
>Mario Kart: Double Dash!! that you could play over Warp Pipe using the LAN functionality
more on this?
Warp Pipe was basically like Xbox Connect, a tunneling service that allowed you to play LAN-enabled games over the internet. It basically tricks the console into thinking you're on a local area network when you're actually communicating over the internet.
or like this, for PC games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)
New pinball machines have cameras in them. You make an account and then scan your account's QR code and that signs you into your account such that the machine awards you achievements like a videogame, keeps track of your high scores, and sometimes other stuff. For instance, Venom keeps track of your progress so there's some carry-over from game to game. It's more complicated than that, but you get the idea.
James Bond 60th Anniversary Edition has a thing where you can scan different QR codes besides the one for your account to unlock different soundtracks.
GB kiss link. Let's you share data between 2 games with no cables.
It's also possible to use it with a device you plug into your computer to download games or levels for your games, actual (free) DLC for the game boy.
> Between August 6, 1995 and May 30, 1999, Nintendo, in collaboration with St.GIGA, broadcast three different The Legend of Zelda titles to fans for download via the Super Famicom's Satellaview subsystem. BS Zelda no Densetsu, BS Zelda no Densetsu: MAP2, and BS Zelda no Densetsu: Inishie no Sekiban all featured SoundLink narration which was the first time that Nintendo-sponsored Zelda titles made use of voice-actors to provide vocal tracks. As the first SoundLink Game released via Satellaview, BS Zelda no Densetsu in particular was identified by Nintendo as the world's first integrated radio-game.
> With the exception of Kamigami no Triforce all Zelda titles broadcast to the Satellaview were Satellaview-exclusive. Because the Satellaview was only released in Japan, these games were also all Japan-only releases. To date none of these titles have been released in any other form and due to the download limitations imposed on the broadcasts and the termination of support for the system these games are no longer available on the commercial market.
> The Satellaview is a satellite modem peripheral produced by Nintendo for the Super Famicom in 1995. Containing 1 megabyte of ROM space and an additional 512 kB of RAM, Satellaview allowed players to download games, magazines, and other media through satellite broadcasts provided by Japanese company St.GIGA. Its heavy third-party support included Squaresoft, Taito, Konami, Capcom, and Seta. To use Satellaview, players purchased a special broadcast satellite (BS) tuner directly from St.GIGA or rented one for a six-month fee. It attaches to the expansion port on the bottom of the Super Famicom.
Nintendo was really gung ho about the online stuff pre-GC, and even post launch for a couple of years. Then they just gave up and basically stopped caring. I have to wonder how things would have changed if Nintendo was more competent with the online stuff like the other 3. I also wonder what happened to cause them to change course so suddenly. It's jarring watching them talk about networking in 2000 for dolphin then just say nah lmao later on.
They realized it’s not worth the effort. Their audience purchases their core games regardless of internet capabilities. Mario Party didn’t get an online mode until a few years ago iirc
>I also wonder what happened to cause them to change course so suddenly
Nintendo stopped doing network stuff internally and moved every single network connected thing that's so much as associated with Nintendo to a third party company
It's a long story but basically one of the guys that was an important part of the N64 hardware development went on to start his company soon after. This company has had many names over the years but it's commonly known as either Routefree or BroadOn.
If you look at the Gigaleaks you'll notice that this company was basically the guys organizing the development of GameCube, Wii and even the WiiU behind the scenes. They were responsible for getting third parties like IBM and ATI to work on consoles and managing them, rather than Nintendo doing it directly. Meanwhile Nintendo mostly focused on making controllers for their systems.
At some point Nintendo decided to move every single thing in their entire corporate network to this companys servers. That's where the gigaleaks are from.
Nintendo also went with them for all consumer-facing online infra, such as multiplayer and download servers. They kept this up until the start of the Switch-era where Nintendo has finally moved their online development in-house. Console development is now also handled between Nvidia and Nintendo directly with no third party in between.
Well of course there were occasionally passwords for sharing data between games (but not involving multiple players), like with the Zelda Oracle games
It's not quite "retro" so I won't explain but look into this because it's awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syK3ma0UCPQ
I guess the N64 Controller Pak was partly intended for use in this way. Like, you'd make your own custom character and then take it to your friend's house and load it into your friend's game or whatever. It's basically a normal memory card of course, but associating it with the controller does give it a player-specific feeling that normal memory cards lack. It's clear to all players that the person holding the controller is going to be the one using that memory. And also, of course it guarantees that there will be exactly one chunk of memory for each player, unlike on the GameCube which has four controller ports but only two memory card slots.
I haven't ever heard of anybody really benefiting from that design though. It doesn't seem to have panned out. But it's something Nintendo seemed to want to promote for a while.
Xbox carried on that mantle hence the profile system it used, you would start a game "sign in" to a profile which kept things like an online name, controller config, progress, etc. That's why they had those memory cards, so you can bring your profile to a friends place.
Somewhat related, Anyone know any interesting ways of storing data?
F-Zero AX used magstripe cards along with memory cards, if I remember correctly. I think a lot of arcade games at the time were magstripe.
I suppose it's not exactly retro if it's a remake but the Kingdom Hearts PC ports store your save data in .png images. I think it's the same icon as the PS3/PSP XMB save files so I'd call it a mostly faithful recreation.
>or how you could bring your F-Zero GX memory card to the arcade and plug it into the machine for DLC
I'm pretty sure that some Midway arcade games also had this for NFL Blitz and Gauntlet Legends, but I have no idea what connecting an N64 memory card actually did. I assumed it just let you save your character and continue on the N64 version as a kid, but the N64 game itself is very different from the arcade version (at least for Gauntlet Legends) so I'm not sure if that's correct.