I have a bunch of xband snes footage I recorded back in 96. Played Mario kart, killer instinct, and mortal kombat 2 and 3. Mostly local in New York since nation wide was pricey for the phone bill lol. I’ll add the video footage have once I dig out my vhs tapes and transfer the video
The way it worked is both modems would search for another person who was trying to connect at the same time. It would either search within a local area code or long distance (depending on your settings). When two modems would find each other one modem would record the "phone number" of the other modem. Then both modems would disconnect and one would call the other one. The other one would answer the call and that was how they connected. Eventually people discovered they could record the dial tones the modem made and connect directly for free, bypassing the Xband service. That was one of many reasons the xband eventually failed. Wikipedia goes more indepth.
XBand was never a big profit generator to begin with, as I get. I figure the guys who ran it must just have just cared about the project personally, that they just really wanted there to be console multiplayer.
Skytel Pager #s lmfao ahhh Xband was dope I was aL CoHoLiC x & KI was my thing well MK2 as well. Use to love being in the back of Game Informer Natl Rank but between "Pullers" & "Swappers" it lost its appeal tho playing was dope. I'll always have luv for them days, met good ppl, had much fun & can honestly say the best days as a gamer I ever did have. Thnx for comments, I'ma go check wiki now. Peace folks ✌️
eb verge I just wanted to show my friends at school what Xband was like. It looks like not many other people did the same. Or at least those people didn’t upload their videos to UA-cam yet.
+Xband FourOneOne Tell StArfOx I'lll never forget when I beat him in battle and he pulled on me! Only 11 losses my ass... - "Greedy Fly" And, you should also tell him if he wants to get his ass beat again, he can take it up to Kart_King over at snesot.com. Tell him to sign up and post a comment on the front page.
XBand stopped working in 1997! But, if you're still looking to have some multiplayer online fun with SNES, you can come over to snesot.com. These guys host fun tournaments all the time for many games.
oh xband, god i miss those days... and btw i remember you omega_death... seriously? always battle mode, never vs races... also i remember willow, but cant remember if they were ever at the Eastpoint mall xband meetups ~ Bob_Smith
Seeing this possible on the SNES just blows my mind. Online play back in 1994? Damn. EDIT: Yeah, I know this was recorded 3 years after, but the XBand was first made in '94, so yeah.
Oh wow, X-Band's menus were rad as shit. Makes me wish I were able to use it instead of lustily leering at it and Sega Channel during episodes of Gamepro TV and Twitch.
I found one of these purple xband things at a consignment shop today in its original box in good condition. If the system was still running I would totally go back and buy it.
@Tredik Man, I nearly forgot about Gamepro TV! *haha* Did you ever watch the game show "Video Power" where the final contestant wore a velcro suit and ran around a maze sticking video games to their suit? I wanted to be on that show so bad.
@@JustinLodes They had a bunch of problems; First, only one game explicitly supported it. XBand developers had to reverse engineer every other game that they wanted to support, which was expensive, time consuming, and meant that you couldn't use XBand when the game first came out. You had to wait for an update. Then you had the problem that very few people had the internet back in 1994. That's a small market you're aiming for. Nintendo gamers with good (for the time) internet is a pretty small market. Then they had barely any advertising, so most of that tiny target audience didn't even know XBand existed. Last, they had problems competing against First-Party online services like Nintendo Satellaview for the Super Famicom and the Netlink for the Sega Saturn. Nintendo and Sega both chose to exclusively support their own online services.
The 64th Shadow actually the problem with xBand is that they had very little advertising when it first came out. It was a great idea that everyone who knew about it loved. It was by sheer luck that I found out about it myself. Never seen one ad for it on tv or in magazines. And I pretty sure they had more than 15k ppl nationwide. It was a great service that was well worth the money
Oh wow, I can't believe you have X-Band game footage! I loved that thing, but it was a bit expensive for my blood (you were charged by X-Band by the minute if I remember right). I spent hours upon hours looking at people's profiles, and I remember people would use up all 4 profiles to create "homepages" and talked about various topics, like anime, games, etc. But you only had so many connections per month, so I had to go easy on it and only look up ones I knew I wanted to read haha.
$10 or $20 a month, Nationwide was per HR. We had unlimited long distance land line but some folks paid crazy smh this was my life for a yr or 2 & since it shut down I never quite loved gaming the same. Really can't even express what a time my friends & I had on Xband, the arcade tournaments we use to set up. Geez I loved it. Thanks for comments and upload folks, stay blessed.
FYI You can still play online... Retro gaming servers are online for SNES & Sega Genesis X Band Modems as well as info on how to easily run your own server. There is an adaptor to connect it up to your Wi-Fi 2019.
You can plug one in and navigate around the menus, but you cannot connect and play against other users. The modems dialed directly to central servers at Xband, and those were shut down around 12 years ago.
This is pretty cool! I wish something like this was around during the GameCube/PS2 era. I know there was the PS2 network adapter, but you couldn't play Mario Kart online with it :P
Catapult built these things to really reduce lag. Here are some specifics I found in Popular Science Magazine: "They produced a custom modem that reduces tranmitting delays to 1/30 of a second, compared with the usual 1/5 second delay of regular modems. They also wrote software that locks the game systems together by synchronizing their speed controlling-crystals, which auto-compensates for different versions of the same game".
calminaeon That is awesome man. I never got around to ordering one. I wish I had, because typing with the controller was a PITA! Did you play Nationwide or just within your local area?
I wish I wasn't poor when this came out back in the day, I was so poor I had a sega instead of a SNES. You had to have really cool or wealthy parents to have this back in the day.
This is crazy. I wasn't even born yet. Io still have a SNES but got it recently so the only Mario games I have are all stars, time machine, and Mario is missing (I know right) xband was also on genesis to I believe
EpicKnuxeles2002 That's correct, it was on the Genesis as well. I only owned the SNES version, but a few friends are sending me some of their recorded Genesis gameplay footage soon that I'll then upload to my channel.
Does this still works? I´m planning on getting a SNES (for the good times) and it would be awesome if a friend of mine and I could play some retro games (Also, does it works outside US? Because we both live in Venezuela)
It wouldn't surprise me if, in some corner of the internet, there are people making and selling some kind of add-on for the SNES which allows you to go online and play games. X-Band may be almost 20 years gone but where there's a will, there's a way. OK, I just did a cursory Google, and this does exist. It's called SNESoIP.
rumor has it some folks are trying to rig a server that attempts to emulate this. not sure if it's gonna be phone again (apparently free this time.) or if it'll be ethernet (not free seeing as you you may have to buy their adapter). i'm not clear on the whole story. i guess time will tell. in the mean time, zsnes emulator allows for online play. i wish it were more like n64's online play where you can join actual rooms.
@@ChristopherSobieniak My family had a Hi-fi VCR by the 1990s. In fact even here in former Yugoslavia by the 1990s most had a Hi-fi VCR, whether it was cheap for them, or simply because it was a good investment.
@@fungo6631 I'm sure it varied from country to country. America just wasn't really sold on quality than it was for reliability. You had to be really smart not to be taken in by bad deals, and I've seen plenty. We ought to be glad someone even had the chance to record this when it was a thing, even if he or she didn't had the best recorder handy.
The way it worked is both modems would search for another person who was trying to connect at the same time. It would either search within a local area code or long distance (depending on your settings). When two modems would find each other one modem would record the "phone number" of the other modem. Then both modems would disconnect and one would call the other one. The other one would answer the call and that was how they connected. Eventually people discovered they could record the dial tones the modem made and connect directly for free, bypassing the Xband service. That was one of many reasons the xband eventually failed. Wikipedia goes more indepth.
wow now adays we have nintendo wifi and all the good games and good 128 graphics sound effects and music but this came first so this is the grandfather or gandmother of online video gaming befor the nintendo wifi was invented
Usually, footage of stuff like this gets lost behind in the forgotten past. So this footage is pretty much a miracle to nerds like me!
+zangoosevsseviper999 Thank goodness for cheap VHS tapes back in the 90's!
agreed
Did you record these videos back in the 90s or are they tapes you found?
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine in the description he says he recorded these back in March of 1997...
I have a bunch of xband snes footage I recorded back in 96. Played Mario kart, killer instinct, and mortal kombat 2 and 3. Mostly local in New York since nation wide was pricey for the phone bill lol.
I’ll add the video footage have once I dig out my vhs tapes and transfer the video
This was advanced for the 90s, crazy to think you can hop online with a Super Nintendo. Thanks for sharing.
The way it worked is both modems would search for another person who was trying to connect at the same time. It would either search within a local area code or long distance (depending on your settings). When two modems would find each other one modem would record the "phone number" of the other modem. Then both modems would disconnect and one would call the other one. The other one would answer the call and that was how they connected. Eventually people discovered they could record the dial tones the modem made and connect directly for free, bypassing the Xband service. That was one of many reasons the xband eventually failed. Wikipedia goes more indepth.
XBand was never a big profit generator to begin with, as I get. I figure the guys who ran it must just have just cared about the project personally, that they just really wanted there to be console multiplayer.
Skytel Pager #s lmfao ahhh Xband was dope I was aL CoHoLiC x & KI was my thing well MK2 as well. Use to love being in the back of Game Informer Natl Rank but between "Pullers" & "Swappers" it lost its appeal tho playing was dope. I'll always have luv for them days, met good ppl, had much fun & can honestly say the best days as a gamer I ever did have. Thnx for comments, I'ma go check wiki now. Peace folks ✌️
I was ranked 2nd place in Mario cart on there for a while. I was obsessed with it and my long distance phone bills proved it
To have had the foresight to record this moment, truly amazing.
eb verge I just wanted to show my friends at school what Xband was like. It looks like not many other people did the same. Or at least those people didn’t upload their videos to UA-cam yet.
This video was taken back in 1997. Just ran across some old VHS tapes and wanted to put the footage online for the sake of nostalgia.
God the 90s were so awsome.
138 Junkie
90's internet costed a shit load per hour cuz of the phone line.
Now everything is dead including hope.
138 Junkie Try to stay positive and not live in the past but fuck it, I really want to go back to this time
Super Mario Kart + Xband SNES Modem = AWESOMESAUCE!
Countless hours of fun climbing the ranks. My toin, Archnog, could never beat the top racer at the time, StarFox
JD Sanzone Hey man, Starfox is active over on the Xband Facebook group. Look for posts by Dennis from Arizona.
+Xband FourOneOne Tell StArfOx I'lll never forget when I beat him in battle and he pulled on me! Only 11 losses my ass... - "Greedy Fly"
And, you should also tell him if he wants to get his ass beat again, he can take it up to Kart_King over at snesot.com. Tell him to sign up and post a comment on the front page.
+Xband FourOneOne Does Xband still work?
XBand stopped working in 1997! But, if you're still looking to have some multiplayer online fun with SNES, you can come over to snesot.com. These guys host fun tournaments all the time for many games.
oh xband, god i miss those days... and btw i remember you omega_death... seriously? always battle mode, never vs races... also i remember willow, but cant remember if they were ever at the Eastpoint mall xband meetups ~ Bob_Smith
apparently some SNES games on the switch will support online play, so of course i had to come back here
And that doesnt seem to be coming :/ The switch online has been up for about 8 months and only nes games are on it.
@@JUSXTREME96 Well, today is your lucky day. :)
@@grg6090 I know right? :D
Man, who knew there was ONLINE Mario Kart before Mario Kart DS, and it all started in the 16-bit era no less, that's mind blowing
Seeing this possible on the SNES just blows my mind. Online play back in 1994? Damn.
EDIT: Yeah, I know this was recorded 3 years after, but the XBand was first made in '94, so yeah.
God I miss XBand so much, I’d even take using dialup again just to have that experience back
Man those were the days. I miss Xband so much... RIP
Wow, never knew SNES had online compatibility at some point. Interesting!
I remember playing these matches every day after school. I also remember playing the *KA* Kart Assassins.
Considering that Xband was licensed by Nintendo, that would make Super Mario Kart the first Mario Kart with online play.
Oh wow, X-Band's menus were rad as shit. Makes me wish I were able to use it instead of lustily leering at it and Sega Channel during episodes of Gamepro TV and Twitch.
I found one of these purple xband things at a consignment shop today in its original box in good condition. If the system was still running I would totally go back and buy it.
@Tredik Man, I nearly forgot about Gamepro TV! *haha* Did you ever watch the game show "Video Power" where the final contestant wore a velcro suit and ran around a maze sticking video games to their suit? I wanted to be on that show so bad.
Imagine they had this with the n64 and Goldeneye...
Omg I wish!! I don't know why xband stopped running when they had such a huge demand for online gaming
Beats me why they went out of production
John J. Rambo 15,000 peak users is not high demand.
@@JustinLodes They had a bunch of problems; First, only one game explicitly supported it. XBand developers had to reverse engineer every other game that they wanted to support, which was expensive, time consuming, and meant that you couldn't use XBand when the game first came out. You had to wait for an update. Then you had the problem that very few people had the internet back in 1994. That's a small market you're aiming for. Nintendo gamers with good (for the time) internet is a pretty small market. Then they had barely any advertising, so most of that tiny target audience didn't even know XBand existed. Last, they had problems competing against First-Party online services like Nintendo Satellaview for the Super Famicom and the Netlink for the Sega Saturn. Nintendo and Sega both chose to exclusively support their own online services.
The 64th Shadow actually the problem with xBand is that they had very little advertising when it first came out. It was a great idea that everyone who knew about it loved. It was by sheer luck that I found out about it myself. Never seen one ad for it on tv or in magazines. And I pretty sure they had more than 15k ppl nationwide. It was a great service that was well worth the money
Oh wow, I can't believe you have X-Band game footage! I loved that thing, but it was a bit expensive for my blood (you were charged by X-Band by the minute if I remember right). I spent hours upon hours looking at people's profiles, and I remember people would use up all 4 profiles to create "homepages" and talked about various topics, like anime, games, etc. But you only had so many connections per month, so I had to go easy on it and only look up ones I knew I wanted to read haha.
$10 or $20 a month, Nationwide was per HR. We had unlimited long distance land line but some folks paid crazy smh this was my life for a yr or 2 & since it shut down I never quite loved gaming the same. Really can't even express what a time my friends & I had on Xband, the arcade tournaments we use to set up. Geez I loved it. Thanks for comments and upload folks, stay blessed.
FYI You can still play online... Retro gaming servers are online for SNES & Sega Genesis X Band Modems as well as info on how to easily run your own server. There is an adaptor to connect it up to your Wi-Fi 2019.
Such good memories! Thanks for sharing!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Man I played so much SMK battle mode with my sis, back in the day, it was so awesome.
Woah, I was in the Kart Assassins clan too =)
Small world man. Do you remember your username from back in the day?
Locutus of K^A
The service shut down completely on April 30, 1997
Yes. The game was made years before Xband around, so it was never coded to have a full screen player vs. player mode.
This is siiick! Super Mario Kart had freaking online!! It's crazy
You can plug one in and navigate around the menus, but you cannot connect and play against other users. The modems dialed directly to central servers at Xband, and those were shut down around 12 years ago.
This is pretty cool! I wish something like this was around during the GameCube/PS2 era. I know there was the PS2 network adapter, but you couldn't play Mario Kart online with it :P
Catapult built these things to really reduce lag. Here are some specifics I found in Popular Science Magazine:
"They produced a custom modem that reduces tranmitting delays to 1/30 of a second, compared with the usual 1/5 second delay of regular modems. They also wrote software that locks the game systems together by synchronizing their speed controlling-crystals, which auto-compensates for different versions of the same game".
This is flippin awesome!
How did this work better than wii online or sometimes switch online !
Gawd I played so much KI on xband
Still have my XBand. And the keyboard you had to send away for. :D
calminaeon That is awesome man. I never got around to ordering one. I wish I had, because typing with the controller was a PITA! Did you play Nationwide or just within your local area?
the music maaaaaaaaan
I miss this nonsense, was pretty awesome
I still have it! Wish it was in service!
I wish I wasn't poor when this came out back in the day, I was so poor I had a sega instead of a SNES. You had to have really cool or wealthy parents to have this back in the day.
This is crazy. I wasn't even born yet. Io still have a SNES but got it recently so the only Mario games I have are all stars, time machine, and Mario is missing (I know right) xband was also on genesis to I believe
EpicKnuxeles2002 That's correct, it was on the Genesis as well. I only owned the SNES version, but a few friends are sending me some of their recorded Genesis gameplay footage soon that I'll then upload to my channel.
So fucking jealous that I never experienced this.... 😞
Same here… I was 4 when X-Band shut down in 1997.
February 26, 2023 10:53 am
Does this still works? I´m planning on getting a SNES (for the good times) and it would be awesome if a friend of mine and I could play some retro games (Also, does it works outside US? Because we both live in Venezuela)
Sorry, but Xband no longer works. The whole service died in 1997 when they shut the central servers down.
It wouldn't surprise me if, in some corner of the internet, there are people making and selling some kind of add-on for the SNES which allows you to go online and play games. X-Band may be almost 20 years gone but where there's a will, there's a way.
OK, I just did a cursory Google, and this does exist. It's called SNESoIP.
GGPO is a popular option too.
You can play retro games with people online using PC emulators. Snes9x is the one too use for snes games.
Someone should make a way to use the Xband service without the original service being online for years.
I think it was early 1997.
@De5con what are you talking about? the frame rate looks exactly like it does if you weren't playing on xband
@Xband411 I remeber that dark day :(
These people went on to work on Xbox live
i think that's when the service stopped?
No, just in the Wash DC area...
I tried playing MK Wii for awhile, it's nothing like these 1v1 CQB matches.
How do you record this? Elgato time machine?
VCR
rumor has it some folks are trying to rig a server that attempts to emulate this. not sure if it's gonna be phone again (apparently free this time.) or if it'll be ethernet (not free seeing as you you may have to buy their adapter). i'm not clear on the whole story. i guess time will tell. in the mean time, zsnes emulator allows for online play. i wish it were more like n64's online play where you can join actual rooms.
What games did you enjoy the most on Xband?
What was your name on Xband? Did you play nationwide?
hehe a online game with screen peeking
Can you still use the Xband modem?
wow, i used to play mk2 on xband lol
Yeah, having only 2 players is obviously going to have less lag than 12-18.
So, did it have a double screen even though you were playing it online?
Why wasn't it recorded with Hi-Fi stereo audio?
Probably too cheap for a HiFi VCR. I knew families that didn't know any better and bought non-HiFi models without knowing what they're missing.
@@ChristopherSobieniak My family had a Hi-fi VCR by the 1990s. In fact even here in former Yugoslavia by the 1990s most had a Hi-fi VCR, whether it was cheap for them, or simply because it was a good investment.
@@fungo6631 I'm sure it varied from country to country. America just wasn't really sold on quality than it was for reliability. You had to be really smart not to be taken in by bad deals, and I've seen plenty. We ought to be glad someone even had the chance to record this when it was a thing, even if he or she didn't had the best recorder handy.
It's clear that peach was the more skilled player XD
Huh. So Xband had a modem speaker.
Also, what's up with it dialing "pound" over and over while the line's ringing?
The way it worked is both modems would search for another person who was trying to connect at the same time. It would either search within a local area code or long distance (depending on your settings). When two modems would find each other one modem would record the "phone number" of the other modem. Then both modems would disconnect and one would call the other one. The other one would answer the call and that was how they connected. Eventually people discovered they could record the dial tones the modem made and connect directly for free, bypassing the Xband service. That was one of many reasons the xband eventually failed. Wikipedia goes more indepth.
@@DoomFinger511 So direct-dial works?
I don't follow. Are you referring to the split screen aspect of the game.
wow now adays we have nintendo wifi and all the good games and good 128 graphics sound effects and music but this came first so this is the grandfather or gandmother of online video gaming befor the nintendo wifi was invented
XBAND was only usa or other countries
The USA and Japan were the only countries that could use X-band.
ok Xband FourOneOne
dang what year was this footage?
Is this footage recorded from the 90s?
Yeah, I recorded this on a VHS tape back in 1997.
Peach took Koopa's ass to school.
Which year was this recorded in?
March of 1997.
1996.
Nice
I sucked at Doom on Xband.
Doom was da shit on xband.
How is what I said fanboy-related at all? It's just common sense. You need to chill out.
Ft Wayne represent!
you can play super street fighter 2 turbo lag free, just google GGPO.
Never heard of this in my life.
MK2 for me.