This humor is golden. Now I have even more reason to keep my stock sticks in working order.
And I 'member the LinksBoks web browser on XBOX in the 2000s that had workable input via analog stick. Point the stick at one of the clusters of letters and press one of four colored face buttons: https://web.archive.org/web/20050903121908/http://ysbox.onli...
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/01/a-fresh-linux-for-the-most-u...
I read about this in "Game Over" by David Sheff, but here's another source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System
Interestingly, the JRA (Japanese horse racing association) continued accepting remote bets from Famicom modem users until 2015. Here's a video of someone placing a bet in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks0JeyhZsR4
[1] https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System
If the Atari 2600 could do it, pretty much anything can.
IIRC, the 2600 had one service that would do it over a dialup modem, and another that got the data from your local cable TV company.
There is a YouTube video out there of what I believe is a Russian dude copying a Dendy or Famicom cartridge through sound, though. The system is powered up with the copier cart. The copier cart copies its code to the system's 2K of RAM, and runs from there. You then remove the copier cart and insert the game you want to copy. This makes the screen garbled as you are removing the graphics data from reach of the PPU, but the code continues to run as the CPU is not reset. The copier cart will then iterate through each byte of the cart and emit FSK tones through the system's audio out which you can record and then convert to an .nes file with a utility. I suppose it has to know the mapper involved and such.
But there's no way for the NES to shove that modulation through a separate audio out (and definitely no real audio input).
Now the Famicom/NES does have a few GPIO-like lines through the expansion connector, so bit-banging a UART I guess would be possible (if appropriate converters for the voltage are present), but it couldn't be very fast as the CPU has to service the PPU every frame with OAM DMA writes if sprites are enabled.
The Commodore 64 RS-232 built-in capability was driven entirely with software and it didn't go faster than 2400 baud.
AdmiralAsshat•4mo ago
hcs•4mo ago
One Linux on N64 project was discussed here a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539319
There was a version of Mosaic in the SharkWire Online device, recently there have been some efforts to make that more usable without the SharkWire, though I don't think much is public yet, some discussion about the ROM here https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1i2odym/update_f...