Watch an Original NES Run Netflix 80
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."
Hoax (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.
Re:Hoax (Score:4, 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.
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I would say it was more of a proof of concept. The developers go into detail on how they were going to get the pi to stream, convert and write new frames to the cart.
https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
It seems like it's quite possible with enough time you could do it, but why would you. They proved a concept and there's not much point in continuing really.
https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
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Why would you need a proof of concept for something that is almost completely useless? It's not like they are going to now put the effort into making it a "real product". As far as "hacks" go, it's pretty hokey.
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I agree it is useless, I wouldn't even say it's almost completely useless. I do see the appeal in doing it though, doing crazy hacks like that can be fun. So I would say it was for entertainment value. It is interesting to see that the Nintendo could handle any kind of video like that.
But yes very useless.
Re: (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.
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All the wires from the display (which has next to no chance of having a connector the NES could actually plug in to) go straight to the right..
You sure about that? A month ago I plugged in my old NES right into my home theater system. It was enough to verify that my old NES was truly dead, but I did get perfectly viewable video. If your HT system or monitor has a composite port (I've had Dell monitors that accepted composite signals, then the NES will work without any converters. Otherwise, you'd need a small composite -> VGA converter box.
Yes, most people used the TV-style RF connection, but the North American NES also had two RCA-style ports
umm.... it is called homebrew (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:umm.... it is called homebrew (Score:5, 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."
Re: umm.... it is called homebrew (Score:2)
Network, pfft. It would be a legit Netflix offering if they could manage to stuff it in one of those floppy envelopes and mail it.
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They should add a color touch screen to that cartridge. Maybe throw in some wifi & cellular radios, and a microphone and speakers so you can use it as a phone. It's amazing what you can do with those old NES machines.
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The more impressive part of the story could have been identified by just stripping "Netflix" from the headline.
FAKE (Score:2)
How the hell do you connect an "Unmodified" original NES to the network? They did not even have network capabilities.
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How the hell do you connect an "Unmodified" original NES to the network? They did not even have network capabilities.
Don't know if they really did it or if it's rigged, but couldn't they put a wi-fi dongle in the cartridge?
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Except no, they just put a fairly lame hardcoded demo in ROM. This is such a non story...
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Yeah - have you seen Star Fox for the SNES? Same thing. Powerful DSP on the cart doing most of the heavy lifting. Still respected as an actual SNES game.
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I'd take expansion ROMS over buying a new console every few years any day. It's shameful how often consoles are pushed into obsolescence.
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I'm talking about even on the Nintendo side, who only publishes one Mario game (of each type, potentially) per console. Not all games require the latest and greatest.
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I'm talking about even on the Nintendo side, who only publishes one Mario game (of each type, potentially) per console. Not all games require the latest and greatest.
Most of those Mario games were created with the intention of selling new consoles and showing effects the previous console generation had no hope of doing, like Super Mario World's rotating sprites or Mario 64's 3D world.
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Super Mario World didn't have rotating sprites. That was Super Mario World 2 (which isn't a sequel so much as the start of a new game series). It required an extra ROM chip and it came out only a few months before the N64 was announced, so it was definitely not to sell a new console.
There's nothing in New Super Mario Wii U that's so exciting that it truly requires new hardware over NSMB Wii. Most people who like the series don't need anything fancy but great level design.
I realize it's all with the inten
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I'm not so sure, there was a fair overlap between console generations, and console generations tend to last 5-7 years or more. That's a very long time to develop for any one platform. Expansion ROMs for the NES were expensive... they had to be, you were getting entirely new hardware, and they were game-specific. It's not like upgrading a computer's video card, where multiple programs can take advange of the new capabilities. If you bought five games with expansion ROMs that did the same thing, you'd be buyi
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This was more an annoyed jab at how Nintendo now drops old generations and only releases one Mario per platform (maybe one of each "type", but no guarantees). The NES was the only one to get 3 releases in the same series (technically only in Japan, since we got the rebranded Doki Doki Panic here for 2 instead).
There hasn't been a good first-party Nintendo Wii title since the Wii U was announced. At least if you only want the classic games.
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WAIT.... it would be even cooler if they did that. You just turned the NES into a modular Blade Server chassis!
Imagine if you could pull that off on one of the dual-cartridge systems.
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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.
Re:FAKE (Score:4, Informative)
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. [youtube.com]
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I vaguely recall there being a midi adapter for that so you could do something with a Keyboard (musical type), but it's a really old memory, and I'm too lazy to look it up.
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The NES had no hardware for any kind of networking, dial-up modem or otherwise.
Well, the NES had an expansion port that could have accommodated such. The Japanese Famicon did have modem support, but it was pretty primitive, and Nintendo of America dropped support for it after seeing the problems the Japanese console had getting this to work (same thing with the NES disk drive).
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You can use the controller signals as a data connection on the super nintendo [destructoid.com]. I'm assuming you could do it on an NES also.
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use the Expansion Port
http://enio.chykn.com/wiki/ind... [chykn.com]
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You could in theory with a custom cart and reading a couple special memory addresses as serial data or something.
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If I was going to attempt something like this, the "cartridge" would really be the IO pins from a microcontroller or Beagle Bone board. The board emulates a real cartridge. It takes source video and converts it to something displayable by the NES.
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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.
Explained By Devs (Score:5, Informative)
As linked in an update to the article, the devs discuss it here [ycombinator.com].
"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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Been done on a PC/XT too: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/808... [oldskool.org]
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I don't see what the "accomplishment" is. The video stream was decoded and tile mapped outside of the NES itself. All the NES is doing is reading the tilemaps and displaying them. You don't need to be a genius to figure out how to do that.
In fact, they could increase the "quality" by taking advantage of the HBLANK interrupt (didn't seem like they were doing that in the video).
Regardless, this isn't "streaming" video on a NES.
Um, get out more, seriously (Score:4, 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?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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.
blow (Score:1)
Fake, they didn't even have to blow/spit in the cartridge to make it work.
Game Boy video playback (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Did everyone miss, or forget.. (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And the sequel, Domination (CGA in graphics mode):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Paging Jon Katz (Score:2)
Junis has something to upgrade to.
It can't be done (Score:2)
Any form of DRM on a simple system like the NES could be circumvented rather quickly. And since the primary purpose of Netflix is to promote DRM, they won't drop DRM from that.
Without DRM it would obviously be rather simple, just add a network card and copy raw frames from it to the graphics chip. That's a no brainer.
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And since the primary purpose of Netflix is to promote DRM, they won't drop DRM from that.
I thought the original article was the dumbest thing I'd read on /. today until I read this post.
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The cartridge could have its own DRM chip. That's just easy.
If you want to pirate your 256x240 2-bit video, go ahead. It won't have a very high fidelity. But it won't get you an HD feed, DRM-free.
It's incredibly easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Just what everybody needs (Score:2)
This has been making the rounds of all the tech sites in the last couple of days.
And yet here I am unable to use netflix on my dual core 3ghz machine intel machine with 8gb RAM, being labelled "thief" because I choose not to settle for a substandard experience and because I'm not interested in re-downloading Alien every time I want to re-watch it, all because Netflix can't be bothered releasing a Linux client.
It's nice to see they have their prorities straight.
Before anybody suggests it: browsers are for vi
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Before anybody suggests it: browsers are for viewing web pages, not playing videos.
There's no need for a Mac or Windows native client either. A desktop isn't really ideal for playing HD videos. Get a Roku. And when you're streaming, you download the show/movie every time you want to watch it anyway.
But really, on a modern computer, running a second browser or second window just for video - especially hardware accelerated HTML5 video (which Netflix now supports [webupd8.org]) - is not a major issue. No need to install Silverlight or involve Wine. HTML and Javascript is not much worse than some othe
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A desktop isn't really ideal for playing HD videos.
It's worked just fine for me for playing all kinds of videos, SD and HD, and music, in every format imaginable, for about 15 years now. I'd even call it "ideal" - I the same buttons on my remote mapped various functions on multiple applications via LIRC, so everything behaves consistently and works wonderfully. It looks really nice plugged into my projector and running at 1080p, and it sounds great running through my surround sound system. In fact it's better than any other experience I've ever had - you ca
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The Roku 3 only uses 1 watt on standby and maybe 2 watts playing HD video. It only requires one HDMI cable unless your wireless isn't up to the job. Mine's programmed into my universal remote. I do have a MythTV HTPC connected to my TV (no keyboard or mouse). Everything is LIRC on the same universal remote including starting/exiting emulators. All of my DVD and Blu-Ray movies are ripped menu-free to MKV and play from MythTV with AC3 through Lossless sound on my surround system. It's ideal in the sense
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It only requires one HDMI cable unless your wireless isn't up to the job
Or you have a separate hifi system. But now I'm just arguing semantics for the sake of it. My point is that I'm not interested in spending money on redundant hardware.
It's ideal in the sense that I don't need a keyboard or mouse except for maintenance.
I don't need them either to just watch movies, play music, etc, but I like them (especially wireless ones) and use them often. This machine just happens to also double as a real computer - dev environment, web browser, all kinds of stuff. Coding from my couch is great. To each his own.
It's one of those few things where I really think a unitasking device is much more practical
It depends on what you want to use it for. I tend to actual
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I don't know which graphics chip you're using, but the browser having hardware acceleration support isn't the end of the story. It depends on having access to something like vaapi or vdpau and not a terrible compositing engine (compiz/unity are terrible with vsynced video IME).
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It's a 1G GeForce 8800 GT. Getting old now but still very capable - as I said it runs things like Metro Last Light just fine, there aren't many games available for linux that it struggles with, borderlands is the only one I can think of of the top of my head where I've had to turn detail down. I'm using nvidia drivers. xine uses vdpau and runs brilliantly, so vdpau is available and works. And yeah, I know enough to stay well away from compiz, I'm using xfwm with compton for compositing.
I did investigate at
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Ah - your GPU supports an older VDPAU. It has H.264 acceleration but not full support for VC-1. Netflix uses VC-1 on the browser. It only has partial support for MPEG-2, so xine playing DVD may rely on the CPU a lot but that's not a CPU-intensive codec these days.
It's simply not part of your hardware. You wouldn't even need anything high end to do it. Just more recent (most 2009 or later).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
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Aha, helpful!
To be clear, though, I'm not just talking about xine playing DVDs, I've never had any problem playing anything with xine. But then most HD stuff tends to be h264. I might have to go find something encoded with VC-1 and try to play it in xine, see if it handles it.
Thanks muchly for the info, it's nice to just be told the answer every once in a while!
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here I am unable to use netflix on my dual core 3ghz machine intel machine with 8gb RAM, being labelled "thief" because I choose not to settle for a substandard experience and because I'm not interested in re-downloading Alien every time I want to re-watch it, all because Netflix can't be bothered releasing a Linux client...
Before anybody suggests it: browsers are for viewing web pages, not playing videos.
Huh? The reason you have to download the movie every time you want to watch it is because Netflix isn't a store, it's a rental service. They've always been very clear about this. Remember when they mailed DVDs? You were supposed to return those. This has nothing to do with the "lack of" a Linux native client. (HTML5 works fine on Linux, by the way. If you wanted to use Netflix rather than going to a store and buying DVDs, which is what you really want, you could do so on Linux.)
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Fair enough, I did get my rants crossed there.
So netflix doesn't offer any way to actually buy movies then? I guess that makes them entirely unsuitable for me.
HTML5 works fine on Linux, by the way.
As discussed above, no it doesn't.
which is what you really want
What I really want is to be able to buy a digital copy. Like going to a store and buying DVDs, but without the whole "getting up from the couch" part.
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Remember when they mailed DVDs? You were supposed to return those.
Remember? They still do that. I'd say that's the useful Netflix service. Thanks to studio shenanigans, their online streaming is often not very useful.