XBAND - anybody use it, was it a racket?

[BIZ]

Found this amongst other stuff.




Two questions:

1. Did anybody here ever use this back in the day?

2. Was it a racket?

Your $7.95 monthly network subscription gives you 32 play credits per month!

[Frag Mortuus]

My cousin had the SNES version back in the day. He liked it but Im not sure how well it actually worked.

[fastbilly1]

I use to use it to direct call my buddies for SSF2 (this was after the service went down).

[noiseredux]

weird, somehow I missed out on this. Or have very little recollection of it. What's was the deal?

[Ziggy]

I remember seeing it for sale in Blockbuster, I wanted to get the SNES version but never did.

[DownSince86]

weird, somehow I missed out on this. Or have very little recollection of it. What's was the deal?

XBAND was kinda like PSN or live today. I personally never had a chance to use it because I lived way out in the boonies and it was only available to people in the larger metro areas when it first came out. I could've probably used it if I really wanted to but my phone bill would have gone through the roof.

Anyway it worked like this: You'd insert the XBAND cartridge and plug a phone line in to it, then you'd insert the game you wanted to play in to the XBAND cartridge. Not all game were compatible with it, but most of the popular ones were like NBA Jam and Street Fighter 2.

The game would play like it would in 2 player mode. In fact XBAND worked a lot like a modern emulator does when you play a 2 player game over the network. This is why it was not compatible with all games as the XBAND developers would have to reverse engineer each game it supported to properly pass data over the network for each player's input.

It did more than let you play games with random people though. There was a service similar to e-mail that you could use to keep in touch with other gamers. There was a matchmaking service that would try to connect you to players that were in the same local area as you. You had your own username and could even keep a small list of friends. The network would also track your win/lose ratio which ended up begin a bad idea because people that were losing would yank the phone line out of their cartridge to prevent an L from begin added to their records.

The service was before it's time and never really caught on with the masses. The same thing happened with arcades in the mid-90s that had T1s run in and allowed you to play with other people over the network (MK3 is one of the few games that I remember supporting this). There just wasn't a big demand for these type of services.

BTW the Genesis version came out months before the SNES version of XBAND did. I've heard that some of the later SNES games suffered from a lot of lag, MK3 begin the prime example.

[noiseredux]

wow. That's awesome.

[xband411]

Xband was great back in the day. My medium-sized city had about 13 regular users on the SNES version, but my best friend and I hopped on the Nationwide service in order to find better competition.

The engineers at Catapult did a great job trying to deal with the lag. The only time I remember encounter much lag was when one of the phone lines was receiving a call during a game. I played Super Mario Kart most of the time, and the timing was phenomenal when you stop and think that this thing was reverse engineered to play over a dial-up connection.

I have recorded footage of the SNES Xband over at my YouTube profile if you care to see it in action:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Xband411#p/u

[xband411]

2. Was it a racket?

Your $7.95 monthly network subscription gives you 32 play credits per month!

They later switched to an all you can play plan. This is like 17 years ago, so my memory is hazy. It might have been $25 for all you can play Nationwide.

It was nice because you didn't need an internet connection (a godsend for those of us who couldn't afford computers back then), and you could also use it to send email to outside email addresses.

[eSPy]

wow...pretty cool for back then! would be cool if some amazingly smart person out there could make it work on current broadband for free. just need some kinda server i guess.