Internet on old hardware could have "sustainable" netplay?

Hi, While researching way to make my games more authentic to the time they came out, (1989,1994) I came across 3 things that were about the internet on nes:

1: Nintendo's stock market modem (Family Computer Network System)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Co ... ork_System

This piece of hard ware interests me the most as it was the first time Nintendo went into online (for stock markets....and Horse racing ... and Super Mario club)
This also had an Idea to make a game of Go go online but was scrapped due to Issues with the system, the stock markets went down, and that it was hard to really implement it and use it.
More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSj6hLfTRt8

2: Modem from the third party (Teleplay Modem)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleplay_Modem
This is the closest we've got in the NES' Life span. This Modem flaunts that you can "Experience Head to Head Competition Without Leaving Your House " Reference: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... _large.jpg

However as the wiki says: "Bushnell later dropped out of the project, and Keith Rupp founded the company Baton Technologies. He continued to develop the modem, changing its name to the Teleplay Modem, increasing the speed to 2400 bit/s." There was also going to be cross platform play but unsurprisingly Both Declined to even licence it (Would of loved that but I understand).

3: SHOGI!?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morita_Shogi_64
Yes. This is a cartridge with a builtin "RJ-45" modem on the top "which players were able to connect to (now defunct) servers to play against other players all around Japan."
Now It's servers were short lived and are down, so no real way to really stdy that.

4: ROM Stores
The other thing that could be of reference is the BSX and otrher hardware online shop for free, and sometimes exclusive, games.

Here, I just want to see if this "new" concept at the time could of been done on The Famicom or Nes.
Scream at me if I got anything wrong and yell if my rambling are nonsensical. Please and thank you for your time.
PS: I know there is netplay on emulators.

Not certain exactly what jack that is, but RJ-42 doesn't exist.

Pictures of the inside sure look like a 6P2C jack, i.e. RJ-11

Sorry copy and paste. What I think he ment was an RJ-45 Jack, a bigger version of an RJ-11.

I think it could be possible at the time.
Wasn't 2400bps enough to send key presses to both sides?
But I don't know how they would be kept in sync, maybe a game specific function?

Teleplay, had it been released, IMHO would have almost certainly been DOA. Games would have needed to be coded for it specifically, and unless the launch titles were incredibly good, nobody would have bought it, and the people that did would have surely regretted it.

The X-Band by contrast, took the more difficult path of supporting existing games, and it actually did see some use. They would have needed to patch netplay support into each game individually, which is pretty impressive. I wonder how many games it actually supported. On the NintendoAge forum, DreamTR had talked a little about his experience using it at the time. It sounded like all anyone played on it was fighting games, Mario Kart, and to a lesser degree, some sports games. X-Band wasn't on NES of course, but as far as "netplay capability" goes in general, SNES is pretty much on par with NES.

For NES there is also the Minnesota State Lottery modem, which supposedly was developed but never released.

So yeah, it would have worked fine, had it been done. X-Band's success is evidence of that. I'm not sure to what degree a modem slower than 2400 baud would have been a limiting factor.

Also see: GameLine for the Atari 2600. I think AOL actually descended from that.

edit: BTW, kevtris has 1 (or 2?) of those software cards for the Famicom modem. I wonder if anyone ever dumped those, or if there's even anything interesting to do with them? I don't know if anyone has ever opened one up.

I am interested. In the few pictures of the famicom modem PCB out there, I see 128k of CHR-RAM, 128k other RAM, and 2 chips in the same rectangular QFP-100 package as MMC5. The PCB is at least 3 layers. I am wondering what this thing can do, especially wondering if it has extra audio channels.

Yeah, that thing looked really expensive inside. I had not thought about audio expansion being in it, but that should be easy to verify just by tracing the connector. I checked on ebay and it looks like there were listings for as little as $26 shipped from Japan (for modem-only at that price though), they seem to be neither rare nor expensive. The one that I was able to see in person was complete in the original box, it looked like it had barely been used.

The software cards didn't seem to have any screws or obvious ways of opening them. IIRC, holding one it felt surprisingly heavy. We had speculated that maybe they are potted inside. Since it was used for banking and gambling there surely must have been some sort of security features to it. If it's based on battery-backed RAM, they may be extinct already. Not that we'd be able to connect to the service, anyways.

I ordered one. Will do what I can to take the card apart. There are youtube videos out there of the thing playing each of the 2 cards. It worked but was not able to connect. I think there is hope. Without developing some new cards, they are basically useless as-is. I guess that explains the low cost and high availability.

Pins 45 and 46 (Audio) DO appear to go somewhere, not just shorted together. Hopefully not just for dialup modem sounds.