Perhaps not everyone knows that, in 1995, Nintendo had created an absolutely pioneering video game service called Satellite viewwhich allowed subscribers to download games through a satellite network and use them on Super Famicom (the Japanese Super Nintendo).
It was not the first time that something like this had been attempted, considering that a few years earlier, in 1990, Sega Meganet had already gone down this road and before that the Famicom Net System had perhaps been the precursor of all the others, but Satellaview had a clearly superior potential and also met with a fair amount of success in Japan.
However, it was retired in 2000, when the Nintendo 64 was already establishing itself, which was supposed to use the similar RandNet service, which however had a much shorter life.
Downloadable content via satellite
The peculiarity of Satellaview was its reliance on a satellite network for download the contents and then store them in special cartridges to be used on the Super Famicom, using the St.Giga broadcasting system through a dedicated tuner that was applied directly under the console.
The concept of DLC and downloadable content is now the order of the day, but this does not take away the charm of a system like the one developed by Nintendo, which is being relaunched by a group of enthusiasts.
The Satellaview+ project obviously it has nothing to do with Nintendo but it aims to remind it, at least: the anger is to provide a platform for the diffusion of homebrew titles for SNES, through a “local client created by the team organizer”, which downloads “Saldata” data from a server where live updates are inserted.
It doesn’t work on retail hardware, at least not yet, but it is compatible with the SNES9X and BSNESPlus emulators on Windows, and with the Super Disc+, a never-released reproduction of the SNES CD.
The service was opened to the public in early August, with the intention of broadcasting games belonging to the retrogaming field and also something new in the field homebrewfor which the team is looking for collaborators.
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