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Watch an Original NES Run Netflix

Posted by samzenpus on from the watch-and-play dept.

sarahnaomi writes with this story about a NES running Netflix. I don't know how you get Netflix to play on an original Nintendo, but it's been blowing my mind for the last 18 hours or so. Netflix posted the video with painfully little explanation. I have tried in many ways to get in touch with the Netflix developers who did what you see above, but no one is getting back to me, so here are some wild speculations."

12 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Hoax by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why post silly bait and hoaxes on Slashdot? The only way this would be possible would be stripped guts and a NES case.

    We're not that stupid, but clearly the editors are.

    1. Re:Hoax by Dahamma · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, it was more or less a hoax. It was just a hardcoded few pages of static data and a small chunk of one "video" embedded in the ROM.

    2. Re:Hoax by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why post silly bait and hoaxes on Slashdot? The only way this would be possible would be stripped guts and a NES case.

      We're not that stupid, but clearly the editors are.

      You do not need to strip the NES. The NES uses carts which directly connect to the internal bus of the system. You can put whatever chips you want inside the cart to extend the functionality of the base system. It's actually far less impressive than it seems since they probably just stuck a wifi chipset into the cart with a SoC CPU that does the work and feeds the output to the NES video chipset.

      Or it could just be a canned smoke and mirrors demo, depends how lazy/incompetent they were.

  2. umm.... it is called homebrew by Fallen+Kell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Its a homebrew cart with the video and images hardcoded into the chip. There is no networking being done with the video streaming. One of the videos even leaks that when the one developer says something to the effect of "In all its 2 bit glory, as that is all that would fit in 512k".

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    1. Re:umm.... it is called homebrew by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 4, Informative

      You win the internet today

      From on update to the linked story:
      "The original plan we had was to stick a Raspberry Pi in the cart to handle networking and video conversion," one of the devs wrote. "Due to time and resource constraints we ended up building a standalone rom."

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  3. Explained By Devs by Anguirel · · Score: 4, Informative

    As linked in an update to the article, the devs discuss it here.

    "The video frames were converted to tilesets and stored in the rom image. For playback, the memory mapper (MMC3) is used to swap between the frames without having to rely on too much CPU." They intended to attempt a Raspberry Pi trick, but ran out of time.

    --
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  4. Um, get out more, seriously by 50000BTU_barbecue · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There have been so many demos on the Commodore 64 exploiting a new software video mode called NUFLI that basically tweaks the video chip on every video line with data from a big memory add-on.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    That NES stuff didn't even look good. It's easy to put 16G on an old computer and just stream a bunch of images to memory for the video chip to display.

    --
    Mostly random stuff.
  5. Re:FAKE by faedle · · Score: 2

    Yes there were. People were using dial-up modems on the Atari 2600 (see: Gameline), the Commodore 64 (see: QuantumLink) and others. BBSes existed as far back as the late 1970's.

    The NES had no hardware for any kind of networking, dial-up modem or otherwise.

  6. Did everyone miss, or forget.. by ckatko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... the real 8088 Corruption demo? (8088 @ 4.77 Mhz, CGA text-mode Soundblaster)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    And the sequel, Domination (CGA in graphics mode):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  7. Re:FAKE by adolf · · Score: 3, Informative

    The NES had no hardware for any kind of networking, dial-up modem or otherwise.

    The NES has an expansion port on the bottom. It was never used for anything commercially, but was rumored to have been intended for a modem, and was apparently developed into an unreleased accessory to gamble at home with the Minnesota State Lottery.

    Video.

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  8. It's incredibly easy by DrXym · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just fake it. Start by lying you have an unmodified NES and go from there.

  9. Re:FAKE by SuiteSisterMary · · Score: 2

    You don't.

    They made an NES program that had a Netflix-like interface, and a fuckton of, basically, static images that were flipbooked onto the screen, and stuck it onto a cartridge. It's like showing somebody a series of screenshots of a website, and claiming to be accessing the website. Or watching an animated GIF clip of a movie, and claiming to be 'streaming the movie.'

    That said, the NES did, in fact, have network capabilities. Nothing that was released outside of Japan, admittedly.

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