Found in my friend's house, his relative used to work at Nintendo. It looks like it has a little keyboard port in the back or something. Google didn't really turn up anything. found some clues courtesy of some guy on 4chan "April 1996: BT runs an interactive TV trial in Ipswich and Colchester. Interactive ads for Walkers Crisps allow viewers to play a quiz, watch the 10 greatest goals or play a spot-the-bag game." http://www.telecompaper.com/news/bt-joins-forces-with-nintendo--59186 looks like it's a chip commercial lmao
Looks like a mini DIN 8-pin connector to me. No clue what for, but it's not a common keyboard plug afaik. What's the board look like? Screws are already out, might as well look inside, right?
took this earlier, I'll try to get a better picture later apparently it might have been some kind of streaming service
Noice. Looking forward to more photos. I was thinking, that plug might be somehow tied in with the "greatest goals" feature (and others that needed to play videos), since you'd need to interface with some kind of player. So maybe it's an output to control a video player or sth like that. User: "Show me footy", cart starts the tape, switches video source to player, waits n seconds or until next user input, switches back - sth along those lines. Those ICs on the left are NOR memory (might be interesting stuff in there still, wiating to be dumped).
The two chips on the left are 1MB (8Mbit) flash chips - that brown socket looks like it's designed for a PLCC EPROM, which probably contained the actual operating program - but it looks like it's missing. One surprising thing is that the board has a 411 CIC soldered on it - which is the CIC for NTSC machines (the PAL ones used a 413) - I'm rather confused why a cart that was apparently supplied by BT would have a NTSC CIC, since it would render it incompatible with a standard PAL SNES. Unless that was the idea...
I'm curious about the traces to the DIN connector, but those seem to be on the other side (or this board has even more than the usual two layers)... And there seem to be two very thick studs going through the board right below the NOA label, I wonder what those could be?
47th week of 1995 is the latest chip date I see. 8 pin din looks like old school apple serial maybe for input of keyboard or numpad to enter cc# or even dialup? Or programming from the serial port of a MAC
It was to be the UK equivalent of Satellaview. BT ran a trial of their interactive TV service to 2,500 homes in two towns in 1995-6, but it didn't amount to much. It used the Voyager 2000 set-top box and there were nine services. BSkyB were interested in partnering with BT the following year, and I think was scrapped in favour of Open TV. I don't know what they ended up using in Sky boxes, but it wasn't the same as the trial.
I think it probably is a serial port - that xtal at the top left of the board seems to be 3.6864MHz - which is 32 x 115200 bps. This could be a coincidence, but I doubt it. There doesn't appear to be any UART on the visible side of the board, though. It's probable there are more parts on the back of the board, though - not least the other 16Mbit of flash if that "32M Flash" is to be believed.
I was just poking through news archives, and this is more or less what I came up with too. I suspect that this tech was recycled into the British Airways in-flight system.
Very surprised nobody has posted this yet; https://bt.kuluvalley.com/view/VBMOtELbTEl Talks about its Nintendo capabilities from 4:50. "Once it's downloaded, you can play it on any TV in the house" I wonder how that would have worked. edit: https://ia601709.us.archive.org/Boo...uture_Publishing_GB_0029.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0 gives a name of somebody using the system. Somebody could try and contact them
I've known about the BT (British Telecom) Interactive TV service for a while. It was quite innovative for its day. It was shown on popular British technology show "Tomorrow's World" (from 3:24) - (nothing about the SNES part in that though). However I should also mention that Apple designed and built the set top box for this service, known as the Apple Interactive Television Box - it featured a DIN port on its rear - see here - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Apple_set_top_box_back.jpg Apple built the box in partnership with telecoms companies such as BT, with BT rebranding the box as their own Voyager 2000. The cart probably connected into the rear of that. Oh, and there's even a manual for the set top box on Apple's website (despite the fact it was never sold directly to people). https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1458/en_US/0306983AppleTVBox.pdf The manual refers to the DIN port as Apple System/Peripheral 8. I'd love to see this cartridge loaded up on a SNES - it could contain some of the only remaining pieces of software relating to BT's interactive TV trial.
