The Sega Saturn NetLink League

any luck on bringing the official xband modems for sega genesis and super nintendo ? i would really like to see where this goes and if we can succesfully bring them back. you guys have most of the stuff you need, now you just need to tinker with the games.

Ive given up more or less. ive contacted everyone that worked for catpult that i could find any none of them have any other files or info on how to get it running again. not to mention no one really wants to help get it running. ive got the files here and patches but its more or less worthless.

Best bet is to just wait for krazystyle to finish up the new revision of xband2 hopefully and play that. its about as close to the real thing as you'll get other than the sega saturn netlink version.

I've decided that there just isn't enough interest out there anymore - from myself or others - to keep investing time in this. It would be cool, but only for a moment - then its moment will have passed. I feel that this is what happened with XBAND 2. Initially, there was a ton of excitement. A few days later, almost no one was playing. Most of the activity was in the chat box - and there are thousands of places to chat online.

Just as not as many people seem to care about obtaining Daytona Netlink Edition officially anymore (at least not at the prices demanded by sellers), the interest in XBAND is fading. I don't think there's enough nostalgia power or new interest to get this going again.

And as I said - I just don't have the interest anymore. I have other projects that I'm working on now that have a lot more relevance to the modern world - and hopefully my future.

you guys cant give up. i still believe that we can bring it back as long as we work together.

I figured there might be more interest in Xband too but perhaps the time has passed.

Sort of like Net Link. We have a nice small group of people who care, and about 4-5 of us played over the last 2 years but nothing really more than that. At least with the Saturn Net Link everything still works so nothing needs to be done.

What a shame, I wish this would've been accomplished.

and it still can be accomplished, i even have an old gateway with dialup that can be used to host the servers if we can get more help with this project. please guys dont give up, i have faith in all of you that we can get this going.

Im curious if you guys want i can possibly hook, a computer to the sega genesis Xband, and see if any packets go though, and have a packet sniffer so we can study the modem better

This was one of my goals for a long time. The problems are threefold.

First: The XBAND won't dial without a dial tone. I would need a telephone line simulator to provide this tone to the XBAND... or some computer software... and I haven't found any or been able to write any that would suit my purpose.

Second: My computer needs to know when to pick up. A telephone line simulator would solve this problem as well, or (again) some carefully crafted software and some timing.

Third: The XBAND has to connect to an XBAND server. This server no longer exists, so even if we got the XBAND to try to talk to the computer, and had some kind of sniffer software running... when the XBAND fails to get a proper response from the server, it'll most likely just hang up. We don't have software to emulate the server because we don't have the knowledge to write it, and we can't get that knowledge easily because the original server doesn't exist to learn from and we haven't been able to get the server code. It's kind of a Catch-22 situation.

i thought someone on here has the server hosting software? i really still have hope that we can pull this off, or even create a new xband modem

We got ahold of bits and pieces of various types of code, but what was most lacking was information on the server software. We might not be able to get it - stuff that was based off of that server software is still in use today, and therefore can't legally be distributed - at least not without the permission of the company who owns the rights to it.

Sorry if this information is already available, but there's a list of the games compatible?

I have hope that one day the server software will be made available. I don't know how soon that will be, but there will be a day when that code isn't useful for current applications anymore, and hopefully it will be released for us to use. Until then, as Warp said, it's nearly impossible to reverse engineer the Xband server without having an actual server in use.

Rogue wrote:Sorry if this information is already available, but there's a list of the games compatible?

Here's the full article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBAND

And here's a list of just the supported games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBAND#Supp ... BAND_games

Catapult could have made more games compatible - they just had to write a patch for every game they wanted to add to the list. Granted, reverse-engineering a game and writing a patch for it wasn't an easy feat, so they only did it for really popular games. If we did somehow get a server running, we'd need the server to serve up patches to each XBAND as well. Many of these patches no longer exist. There were some patches in the code that we got, but I'm not sure we know how to compile them and we don't know how the server distributed them.

Well, they are most sports games.

The project here is to play in the original hardware?