An Informal Engineer Finds a Way to Load Messages in a 1995 SNES Game

Slack is a relatively simple chat application with a set of extremely complex features. Example: Bertrand Fan's "Slack on a SNES" project, in which engineer Slack explained how to load messages from a custom channel into a 1995 Nintendo game through a machined satellite transmission.

BS-X: The history of the city whose name was stolen was an SNES game bundled with an accessory called Satellaview, which was a modem device for the Super Famicom (Japanese SNES) that allowed it to receive data transmissions in a very different way from the way the games are now updated on the Internet. At the time, however, you had to wait for Nintendo to send you data. In addition, the configuration seemed extremely complicated:

Picture: Muband

But Nintendo has actually updated the game every day for five years, according to Fan. Of course, he had neither an old SNES console nor Satellaview. And Nintendo stopped supporting the network about 18 years ago. Instead, Fan used an SNES emulator, an 8-bit controller mods kit, and a software tool called SatellaWave that lets you generate your own Satellaview files.

From there, Fan has come up with a method to update the game's merchants by BS-X with the information of a Slack channel, using the time and the sender of a message as the title of the item and the content of the message as description. He then automated the process by writing some custom code, then using a bot and one of the Slack APIs to check the channel history and extract the 10 most recent messages. Keeping the emulator running would update stores in real time with messages as they arrive.

Image: Bertrand Fan

Fan is the first to admit that the project is obviously stupid and impractical, but it still bears witness to the resilience of Nintendo's prospective technology in 1995, which can still be imitated and used more than 20 years later.