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Comment by FillardMillmore | Hacker News Reader

Interesting tangent from the article:

>Today, SNES emulation is in a very good place. Barring unusual peripherals that are resistant to emulation (such as a light-sensor based golf club, an exercise bike, or a dial-up modem used to place real-money bets on live horse races in Japan), every officially licensed SNES title is fully playable

I had to look up the 'dial-up modem' reference - apparently it's a Japan-only peripheral called the "Famicom Network System" that did in fact have software available that allowed for bets to be placed on live horse races.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System

http://niwanetwork.org/wiki/JRA-PAT

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A brazilian bank released software for the Mega Drive. Looks like it could display the accounts as well as manage investments and credit cards. Wonder how many people actually used this...

https://segaretro.org/Telebradesco_Residência

https://www.sega-brasil.com.br/Tectoy/Telebradesco_Residenci...

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1995/3/22/dinheiro/26.html

I guess many - Sega was uuuuuuge in Brazil. It was almost like a PC.

Interesting. Do you remember the Mega PC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_Mega_PC

It was a Sega Mega Drive and a PC.

I only learned about it long after

What the heck?!? This is awesome!!!

I wonder what the security solution was, assuming this didn't use SSL/TLS

Yeah, that was my first thought as well. I doubt the 68000 could have done any serious encryption.

The security solution was probably that the user had to type the account's PIN, and that it uses the phone line instead of the Internet. It's from 1995 (check the date of the Folha de São Paulo article above), not using encryption at all was very common back then; and even today, phone lines are still considered reliable enough that one can type the account PIN on it without any encryption (for instance: if I want to solve any issue with my credit card through the phone, I must type the full number on the card and the credit card PIN before the URA will connect me to an operator).

Faxes are unencrypted and send medical crap all the time today.

Most fax machines today aren't actually sending faxes - they're sending emails, using SSL.

As someone who works in the telecom industry and has to deal with faxes in medical facilities all the time, no they're not. I fucking wish they were.

I beg people to use e-fax solutions if they insist on using fax at all, but there are so many damn human macros out there who learned how to do something one way and totally break down if you try to make them do something different.

Annoyingly while most modern fax machines are also network printers and support email in both directions, the majority do not provide any way to configure a mapping so that a user can type in a number like a normal fax machine and the machine will convert it to the required email format for an e-fax service. This would be so easy and solve so many problems.

SSL e-mail isn't ETE though

So awesome... I guess someone at that bank tried to pull of a fantastic side-move. It was just 20 years too early, but that guy saw "apps" before Jobs had even returned at Apple!

If this is interesting to you, I recommend this (1) documentary on XBAND, a peripheral used to access an Xbox Live-like service for the Super Nintendo. It's a fascinating piece of engineering for the time.

(1) - https://youtu.be/k_5M-z_RUKA

I rented an XBAND from Blockbuster video in 1995 and it was one of my first “online” experiences outside of using USENET in elementary school. We got a new family computer (a Pentium 90!) with a 14.4 modem and Windows 95 about 6 months later — and that’s what started me on the life I know now. But the XBAND and the article in Nintendo Power about it were an early party of my lifelong love affair with the web.

Nintendo had dial up modems and their own intranet in 37% of Japanese households in the mid 80s? How did I not know this was a thing.

SNES was 90s iirc?

Yes, I believe it was, but this peripheral and the software was (unless I read or interpreted incorrectly) designed for the original NES.

(There is a note that there were remakes of the horse race betting software for SNES and Dreamcast)

Not the Famicom according to GPs wiki.

>Nintendo had dial up modems and their own intranet in 37% of Japanese households in the mid 80s?

That Wikipedia link says that the Famicom (NES) was in 37% of households. Nintendo only shipped 130,000 modems, a tiny percentage of the total Famicom units sold.

I imagine that these could still be emulatable in software, right? I.e. you could simulate whatever data the golf club was generating and pipe it into the emulator, such that you could play that golf game with a Wiimote or some other peripheral.

Similarly you could have some shim code for the online games like the horse race one that talks to some community run server, re-enabling a new kind of net experience.

You can to varying degrees, yes. There's a barcode scanner, an exercise bike, a baseball bat, and more. I designed higan around a modular tree structure so that you can just create a new derived node for any peripheral, and define whatever API you like, so that we can emulate the protocol. Then it's up to the GUI to figure out how to do something when it sees Node::ExerciseBike, and how to do I/O with its API interface.

One could imagine, for instance, connecting an actual USB barcode reader to emulate the Barcode Battler, or providing a text box to hand-type a barcode number.

I don't see anyone actually bothering to simulate the entire horse betting network complete with virtual bank accounts, but if you're really interested, Raphael Assenat reverse engineered quite a bit of the JRA-PAT system for fun here:

https://www.raphnet.net/divers/retro_challenge_2018_09/index...

It's a pretty good read as well!

They also had a Satellite service (Satellaview) where they delivered a 4 episode Zelda Game that could only be playing during certain hours.

https://zelda.gamepedia.com/BS_The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ancient_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview_games_from_The_Leg...

This can actually be played today, with the FM sound track, all translated into English

https://bszelda.zeldalegends.net/bs1files.shtml

For those curious, here it is in action: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wtMlEcf8x6Q

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