Exploring Commercial Products for the NES Expansion Port

chiffre01 | 46 points | 7mon ago | tedium.co

SllX|7mon ago

I wouldn’t call the Super Famicom and N64 ports unused or put them on a list surrounded by unused ports even with context. They weren’t widely used, but it wasn’t for lack of ambition on their part and SatellaView did decently enough in Nintendo’s home market. The 64DD was intended for export too, but it got delayed into oblivion until by the time it launched in Japan, the Dreamcast had already been on the market for more than a year, and the PlayStation 2 was only a few months out. It was a little too little too late for there to be much developer interest, and it’s not like the Nintendo 64 had received a stellar amount of developer support or sold particularly well to begin with.

leshokunin|7mon ago

Adding connectivity could lead to integration with RetroAchievements and online 2-4 multiplayer. Imagine Contra with a friend online. Or save states with cloud saves. Leaderboards! It could actually become connected to online NES communities and existing web services to ensure it stays alive. That would be so cool

toast0|7mon ago

A 3rd party modem for SNES and Genesis existed, and used the cartridge port: XBⱯND launched in late 1994 and sunset in 1997.

vunderba|7mon ago

You can actually do online multiplayer with retro NES/SNES games now using Nintendo switch online.

There have also been several NES emulators that support online play.

leshokunin|7mon ago

Which is great! However with this expansion, the original hardware would be able to do this too.

NobodyNada|7mon ago

This already exists on the SNES with the usb2snes/SNI family of protocols. On original hardware, it requires a flashcart that can sniff the memory bus and interface with a host PC over USB.

Some things you can do with this include: - RetroAchievements, as you mentioned - Automatic timers/splitters for speedrunning - Co-op mode for Super Metroid: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ilG70fc-IJA - Multiworld co-op randomizers for games like Super Metroid or A Link to the Past -- two or more people play linked randomizer seeds over the Internet, and the items are distributed across games so you can find items for other players in your game: https://archipelago.gg/

leshokunin|7mon ago

Thanks! TIL

xtracto|7mon ago

Imagine a game genie like cart for snes that gave kaillera multi-player capabilities to games, along with an eth or wifi card connected to this port.

leshokunin|7mon ago

There’s a game for NES trying to do this, kinda. It’s called Super Tilt Bro and has a chip to do WiFi multiplayer. Obviously not the same scope, but cool idea on real hardware