Thread by @agirisan

i've been working on a proper reimplementation of the XBAND server, and i just had a conversation with someone over X-Mail!

i guess i'll make this a development log thread

(i'm going to say right off the bat that gameplay isn't going to work due to voip latency issues, and you should check out retro.link if you're interested in online gameplay on snes/md. also, i'll post xband connection info when the server is more finished)

the next milestone can speak for itself :)

snes supports compression on a lot of the network traffic, and is mandatory for outbound mail. you can send the box mail without compressing it, but everything it sends up is compressed. had to implement RLE + digram. works now!

hey @xband411, i don't know if you're still around, but you might be interested in this :)

long time, no progress updates huh...

so i made an offhand comment about an image looking like an xband avatar. and of course i had the immediate realization that the xband os lets you push down custom avatar images for players. and everyone said i should make it reality...

this is the first step towards that. i haven't gone through and worked out the actual bitmap format yet, but i extracted this one from the ROM DB and pushed it down. you're not exactly supposed to have an oversized basketball as your avatar ^_^

so now that i've worked out the details of sending the box the image, i "just" need to figure out how to encode and compress my own

YES! major milestone: news working on snes. on genesis it's easy, but snes news is a lot more powerful (and thus more complicated) and it took a few hours of ripping into it to get it functioning

multiple objects working too. will have to play around with the other types (images, sound, animation, etc) tomorrow

looking at some of the other text modes. cool that it lets you do this. very demoscene

animations!!!

new arrival

already got it talking to my server, despite the handshake being a little different. now to implement all the protocol changes for this version...

that was easier than i thought it would be

player lists (essentially address books) are now mostly working. also, i finally got a capture card, so no more photos of screens :)

rankings are working. just using some test data, since there aren't actually any game results to generate stats from (yet?)

earlier on in this thread, i said i wanted to get completely custom icons working. i had figured out how to upload them, but not the actual icon format.

well, the icon format is no longer a mystery on genesis, and i uploaded everyone's favorite moon rabbit~

custom icons are now working on snes as well

the snes planar tile format is mind-bending at first, but i got it figured out

a brief aside:

the genesis xband modem has 7 LEDs on the front. normally they display animations when you're on different UI screens. at the player select screen, all of the LEDs appear to be on, but slightly flickering...

i'm not sure how many people realized this, but it's actually a persistence of vision effect that spells out XB∀ND

and of course, i found the data for it (and the other animations), so now i can set custom ones :D

no updates in a little while, huh...

i've still slowly been working on things, but most of that was a rewrite of a large part of the server, so i haven't had a whole lot to post.

yesterday and today i spent some time working on getting the snes news pages on par with snes. while doing this i thought i'd grab screenshots of some of the old company logos sitting in the snes romdb, and here they are. including that blockbuster logo i posted yesterday ;p

but that is not the biggest xband news item...

a few days ago a friend told me that BlastEm, the genesis emulator, actually has some rudimentary support for the xband custom chip, just enough to get the OS booted. somehow i wasn't aware of this! (thanks @Krazystyle for the tip)

@Krazystyle so today i patched a rom dump so it runs, and told a few friends that support for connecting would be possible, but that i wasn't going to spend the time writing the required modem emulation right now.

...and a few minutes after saying that, i started working on it. and now it works! mostly!

it still needs a ton of polish before it can be released, and it also needs my server to be finished, but this is no doubt the first time emulated xband has been online

thank you @mikepavone for blastem, the source was very easy to understand and work with. i'll get my changes cleaned up and contributed somehow if you're interested

on par with genesis*
oops