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Hardware Hacking Nintendo

Watch an Original NES Run Netflix 80

Posted by samzenpus 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."
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Watch an Original NES Run Netflix More

Watch an Original NES Run Netflix

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  • Hoax (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @06:35PM (#49237557)

    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: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

  • umm.... it is called homebrew (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fallen Kell ( 165468 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @06:41PM (#49237601)
    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".

    • Re:umm.... it is called homebrew (Score:5, Informative)

      by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @06:50PM (#49237653)

      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."

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • The more impressive part of the story could have been identified by just stripping "Netflix" from the headline.

  • How the hell do you connect an "Unmodified" original NES to the network? They did not even have network capabilities.

    • 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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nomel ( 244635 )

      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.

      • NES and SNES systems used virtually the same method to communicate with their controllers (reset strobe signal, then bit-by-bit serial read of the button states). If I were building custom hardware to feed data into the system anyhow, I think that I'd implement it as a custom memory-mapper, where a write into a read-only address on the cartridge would fill the PPU's (Picture Processing Unit/GPU) memory space with the next frame of video, and the CPU's memory with the next chunk of digital audio (the NES was

    • use the Expansion Port

      http://enio.chykn.com/wiki/ind... [chykn.com]

    • You could in theory with a custom cart and reading a couple special memory addresses as serial data or something.

    • 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.

    • 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)

    by Anguirel ( 58085 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @06:46PM (#49237623)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Myself ( 57572 )

      Been done on a PC/XT too: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/808... [oldskool.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xyrus ( 755017 )

      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)

    by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @06:48PM (#49237633) Journal

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Fake, they didn't even have to blow/spit in the cartridge to make it work.

  • Did everyone miss, or forget.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chris Katko ( 2923353 ) on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @07:27PM (#49237871)
    ... the real 8088 Corruption demo? (8088 @ 4.77 Mhz, CGA text-mode Soundblaster)

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

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

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

  • Junis has something to upgrade to.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dahamma ( 304068 )

      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.

    • 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)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Thursday March 12, 2015 @06:25AM (#49240107)
    Just fake it. Start by lying you have an unmodified NES and go from there.

  • 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

    • 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

      • 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

        • 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

          • 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

            • 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).

              • 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

                • 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]

                  • 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!

    • 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.)

      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rakarra ( 112805 )

        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.

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