The Sega Saturn NetLink League

I will let you guys know very soon what will be happening with the project, as well as what we can all do to help, if you'd like to. I for one know I will be contributing whatever I can to the effort.

I mailed my functioning Xband off to neviksti today. He should have it by Saturday, and we'll see what happens after he gets the material out of the SRAM.

P.S. - I'm pretty sure the last game I played was Mario Kart, so more than anything, I hope that any developments focus around that game (one of my favs in the XB days)

thoudx wrote:P.S. - I'm pretty sure the last game I played was Mario Kart, so more than anything, I hope that any developments focus around that game (one of my favs in the XB days)

Thats a great game.

thoudx wrote:I mailed my functioning Xband off to neviksti today. He should have it by Saturday, and we'll see what happens after he gets the material out of the SRAM.

Excellent. The more SRAM saves he has the better. Something else is concerning me-the Genesis version. We need to find somebody that has the capability of dumping the SRAM from this version, to make sure the Genesis game patches aren't lost forever.

I only knew one Genesis player in my Local area back in the day, but I'm not sure how many games he played. I'll try to contact him and find out.

Very cool. My relative's Genesis Xband may have the data on it as well. I am having him find out if it still is. I am awaiting a response from Neviksti at Cherryroms to see what he thinks we may all do.

i got some info for ya, i actually talked to the developers and got ahold of some info and maybe a bios rom for the snes version that has direct dialing and answering modes in the bios (pre release version used for testing patches) only game that would fully work would be weaponlord for snes because it was released with the xband support in it. anyway ill keep you guys updated.

Wow, which developers did you get a hold of? This is interesting news, is this the same as Neviksti's project?

The Neviksti's project i think is dead. ive tried to get ahold of him several times but with no luck. ive been talking to some of the former programmers of xband and one of them forwarded my msg to a friend of his who worked on xband also and he is talking to someone else who worked with him on it and ive gotten alot of usefull information and found some developers with the source code of the snes and genesis versions since they have the rights to it but they dont have the rights to the server side. ill let you guys know more once i get info, id like to get some more people helping me with this project. i currently have an snes but no xband modem for it anymore. i used to play on xband but that was on the genesis, i bought the xband modem for the snes some time after the service was shut down in an attempt to maybe fool with it and get it to work but nothing came of it so i sold it. anyone who has access to an eprom burner and some xband modems for the snes still and maybe someone who has access to hardware to dump memory from the xband sram to get the patches needed to play the games would be good. one patch is all we need then we can learn from that and maybe make our own.

Hey, if you think anyone on here can help, just let us know! Neviksti told me he was close to writing a server program, or had already written one, just needed to test it, so I really hope he resurfaces. It's great the Xband devs are willing to help. A really helpful place to go was Cherryroms, but unfortunately, that's been non-functional for over a month .

FYI: the original XBand site from 1996:

http://web.archive.org/web/199702090558 ... xband.com/

Yup, there it is. Weird though, when I visited it about 2 years ago, there were pages and images that just aren't showing up in the archive anymore. Sad .

Xranger60 wrote:Neviksti told me he was close to writing a server program, or had already written one, just needed to test it, so I really hope he resurfaces.

Your wish is my command! I have resurfaced

Unfortunately, I never got as far along on this project as you seem to think. I found out some of the base protocal (the packets and checksums), as well as the conection initialization. I wrote a test server to play with, but I don't have a land line (let alone two) to test this with... besides, without more knowledge of the code, I had no clear picture of what I would be looking for anyway.

I was getting lost in the BIOS code and eventually worked on it less and less... and it faded away. Sorry about that.

thoudx wrote:I mailed my functioning Xband off to neviksti today. He should have it by Saturday, and we'll see what happens after he gets the material out of the SRAM.

Just to make sure, I got that back to you eventually, right?

rush6432 wrote:i got some info for ya, i actually talked to the developers and got ahold of some info and maybe a bios rom for the snes version that has direct dialing and answering modes in the bios (pre release version used for testing patches) only game that would fully work would be weaponlord for snes because it was released with the xband support in it. anyway ill keep you guys updated.

What is the update on this? I have the capability to run custom code as the BIOS on the XBand hardware... so I could actually test and use such a version. Direct dialing would be great to see how everything works.

rush6432 wrote:The Neviksti's project i think is dead. ive tried to get ahold of him several times but with no luck.

I hope I haven't been losing emails. Or were you trying to contact me through acmlm or something? (my acmlm account is screwed up and I can't even log in)

It sounds like you are making progress regardless. That is good to hear.

rush6432 wrote:ive gotten alot of usefull information and found some developers with the source code of the snes and genesis versions...

ill let you guys know more once i get info, id like to get some more people helping me with this project.

...

maybe someone who has access to hardware to dump memory from the xband sram to get the patches needed to play the games would be good. one patch is all we need then we can learn from that and maybe make our own.

I'd love to look through any information you've found.

In addition, I'm willing to loan hardware so that others may continue this project (I would like to make it clear that it is a loan though). And of course I can dump any SNES Xband you run across.

I do have free time now and then, and if I could have at least one technical person to work with, I could probably keep my interest focussed on this for a little while (sorry I can't commit long-term). Two people really putting their heads together could figure out A LOT in a couple months.

Two quick things:
1] Along the way I also talked to some XBand coders. However, I never ran across anyone that could explain the details (or even rough details) of the patching hardware. If you find someone that could explain this, it would be great. And any source code they are willing to part with would be nice as well (especially the header files so I can see their data structures).

2] As mentioned way before, there are still a couple ways people can help if they know a smidge of programming, but aren't ready for SNES disassembly work. If someone could find low level details of the appletalk protocal used in the system (don't remember the protocal name even, I'll need to look it up from previous posts) it would be EXTREMELY helpful in trying to read/understand the disassembled BIOS code.

Again, sorry I disappeared, and sorry that I can't commit long term to this, but depending on interest I can contribute to your efforts in the near future if you'd like.

Good luck everyone.