From Wiki. Supported XBAND games Genesis: Madden NFL 95 Madden NFL 96 Mortal Kombat Mortal Kombat II Mortal Kombat 3 NBA Jam NBA Live 95 NBA Live 96 NHL '95 NHL '96 Primal Rage Super Street Fighter II WeaponLord SNES: DOOM Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball Kirby's Avalanche Killer Instinct Madden NFL 95 Madden NFL 96 Mortal Kombat II Mortal Kombat 3 NBA Jam TE NHL 95 NHL 96 Super Mario Kart Super Street Fighter II WeaponLord The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (secret maze game) Saturn (Japan XBAND branded releases only) Daytona USA Championship Circuit Edition Decathlete Puyo Puyo Sun Puzzle Bobble 3 Saturn Bomberman Sega Rally Championship Plus Sega Worldwide Soccer '98 Virtua Fighter Remix Virtual On World Series Baseball
I played DOOM on Xband once, and it was strange. 1 on 1 death match, and it took forever to even find each other in order to engage in battle. I still have that SNES copy of the game, so I might have to fire it up and check it out again for old time's sake.
1 v 1 death match took forever because it's just the single player maps. PC Users got around this with custom small arena maps for multiplayer. That patch must have been the craziest to do.
That's what I was thinking. Must have been an interesting hack to write to make it work. And sounds like it didn't even work all that well.
i think the patch just removes all monsters, and puts the other player as a monster with the marine skin.
You use the word "just" like this would have been easy. Maybe if ID cooperated by letting the XBAND people have access to source code.
Actually some companies did give us access to the original source, though some did not. I don't believe we had access to the SNES Doom source, though that was after my time. We disassembled each game, and learned where we needed to make modifications. One of the games I was working on, I disassembled the whole ROM and figured out what I needed to do, and then got the source later. --Selgus
Very interesting. I hope you write some sort of document about your experiences with the XBAND as I'm sure many people would love to hear what all you know about it. It would be neat to see someone emulate the XBAND server and write patches for new games.
I would have loved to mess with this crap. I was thinking about getting a Saturn Netplay because it looks like theres a tiny dead community that still play with them...lol.
It was an interesting time, and the big trick was making non-deterministic shipping ROM cartridges deterministic after-the-fact. There were some standard gotchas that we looked for (i.e. using the horizontal counter as a random number on the Genesis, etc.). We basically had 32-bits of data that we could transfer to the other console at 60Hz, so that included our controller information, some communication bits, a bit of game state, and that's it. The other magic was the ability to "intercept" certain addresses on the bus, and have them vector to our SRAM on the modem. This is one way we patched ROM cartridges. This doesn't even go into the whole operating system we had running on the Genesis and SNES. :icon_bigg --Selgus
That's interesting, removing any "random" generated events so everything is input related so you can sync games by having them both have the same input. I actually did this for a "replay" recording in a game I made on PC since no random seeding is done. Sounds like the XBAND has a bit of Game Genie in it.
never said it was easy, i was explaining how I think the two player function would have been done since it wasn't intended unlike the other games.
We wrote an operating system that handled all the communications with the back-end servers, lobby interfaces, match making, etc. It was written in a mixture of C and assembly (68K and 65c816) and had memory management, i/o, etc. just like any other OS. Those flashing LEDs on the front of the modem, they could be programmed to print messages if you waved your head back and forth in front of them. :icon_bigg We also wrote emulators for the consoles that ran on the Mac, so during development of the OS, we didn't need to have actual hardware. --Selgus
