Play Your Super Nintendo Online, Thanks to This Open Source Hardware

When we all expect that any modern mulitplayer game has an online element to it, it can come as a bit of a shock to fire up Super Mario Kart and realize that, unless you’ve got a multitap squirreled away, you only get to race one other person. Oh, and they have to be in your living room. If only we could play our old SNES games online.

Some dedicated retro gamers are making that happen. Following a discussion about developing online hardware for Super Nintendo on a German message board, Michael Fitzmayer developed SNESoIP, which he describes as a “network-bridge for sharing local controller-inputs over the Internet.” The project is open source and listed on GitHub, which includes all the components you need to build your own.

In a chat, Fitzmayer said the project took him about four weeks to get to the current proof-of-concept stage, and that he did it all in his spare time.

“I read a few articles about the possibility of playing SNES games online on the message board, and then I was just curious,” he said. “Especially since something similar was done before, back in the mid 90s. It was called XBAND by Catapult Entertainment.”

Sega’s Dreamcast was the first console with native online multiplayer, but the XBAND add-on for SNES and Sega Genesis brought multiplayer to consoles beforehand. The service was subscription based, with unlimited connections to the XBAND server costing $9.95 a month, with extra fees added for dialing out of a local service area. (Remember those?)

The SNESoIP system, via Fitzmayer’s blog

With XBAND long dead, an open source solution could bring online multiplayer back into the hands of retro gamers. As you can see in the demo videos, SNESoIP essentially shares controller inputs to each console, and there is a bit of lag. But it does work, and Fitzmayer said the tech could theoretically be applied to any two player game.

“We did some testing with Zombies Ate My Neighbors,” Fitzmayer wrote. “I do not own many player games and unfortunately no flashcartidge like the sd2snes by ikari_01. But technically yes, any two player game could work. There are some latency issues and problems with random encounters within the games. The XBAND used patches to avoid this.”

With the firmware available on GitHub, anyone with a bit of hardware savvy and surprisingly few bucks in their pocket can build the SNESoIP system. (I’m eventually going to have to give it a try.)

“It’s quite easy (and cheap) to build,” Fitzmayer wrote. “Even on a strip or a breadboard. Basically, it’s just a very popular and small ATmega8 microcontroller and an ENC28J60 ethernet module, which costs about $5 on eBay. The adapter continuesly sends UDP packets to a remote server and receives the data from a second adapter as an answer.”

Asked if he would ever sell the SNESoIP as part of the niche market of SNES hardware and cartridge modding, Fitzmayer said it’s too early to tell. But he did say that, beyond developing a multiplayer platform for existing games, the goal is to use Super Nintendos online in a ways they were never intended.

“Currently the whole project is in an very early stage of development,” he wrote. “It’s just a proof of concept of what’s possible with such little hardware. Actually, playing existing games online isn’t even the main goal but it was a good (and easy to accomplish) starting point.”

“Technically the controller ports are just serial interfaces and currently I’m thinking about some kind of BBS or online game controlled by the server,” he continued. “I already built an PS/2 keyboard to SNES adapter, but I haven’t written any homebrew to use it yet.”

I asked him if that meant we’d see a Steam equivalent for the 16-bit world.

“That’s probably too far-fetched, heh,” he wrote. “More like a simple bulletin board or a simple browser-like game. We’ll see. Till then, there’s a long way to go.”

While love for retro gaming is certainly nostalgia-driven, a major reason why we love to play old games is the stripped-down experience. There’s certainly something to be said for modern blockbusters, like the unbelievably deep gameplay value of GTA V or the immense replay value of the Call of Duty franchise’s online multiplayer. But the hardware limitations of older generations allow you to ignore the graphics and minigames, and focus on the game itself. 

But 16-bit fans continue to develop new ideas for old platforms. Thanks to flash and developer carts, reproduction and custom games continue to trickle out from dedicated folks. (I still need to play Super Mario Kart R.) And now, more than a decade after the Super Nintendo’s last commercial release, new features continue to roll out. Time to dust off those old consoles.

@derektmead