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.
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
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/
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
If you're wondering about the overall architecture of the NES, I just found this page - it's pretty great and answered all my questions that came up reading the article:
I thought it was a weirdly short article to post a hacker news that really didn’t talk about it’s subject at all before I realized that if I kept scrolling down below what looked like the end of the article there was more.
The EXP port doesn't get any of the useful signals from the PPU that would make that task any easier. It does get the video out signal, but it's the same one that goes to the RCA port, so it's just a different way to access the same pin really.
You cannot make an article like this and not mention the SatellaView, a freaking *satellite modem* for the Super Famicom... in the 90s. Let that sink in.
This article is about the NES expansion port though, so I'm a bit confused at why a Super Famicom peripheral is relevant? I agree the SatellaView is cool though...
That comment is even more bizarre given that there is a brief digression on the Super Famicom's expansion port which explicitly does mention the Satellaview.
