
Satellaview - miobrien
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview
======
jcrawfordor
There's an interesting history of one-way content delivery by satellite.
Although info on the service is now sparse, since at least 1995 PageSat was
delivering a constant feed of Usenet updates via satellite broadcast as a
means for smaller ISPs and BBS operators to avoid the (at the time)
substantial bandwidth required to receive NNTP - I once worked in a rural
university IT operation that no longer used the service but still had the
hardware lying around. This sparked an interest in the broader ways that
content has been delivered by satellite, predating the practicality of two-way
VSATs. A prime example is the use of IP-over-MPEG to deliver the downlink side
of a consumer internet connection via satellite television broadcast, while
the uplink uses dial-up or ADSL. This arrangement is unusual in the US today
but still in use occasionally.

On the other hand, there are still organizations trying to use the same
"broadcast internet" model. Cidera nèe SkyCache flopped on using satellite
broadcast to deliver content to edge CDN nodes in the early 2000s, and
Outernet is currently flopping (minor opinion inserted there) on delivering
educational content using a similar model.

This is viable in certain niches. The broadcast industry, for example, makes
use of similar systems with the Public Radio Satellite System (affiliated with
NPR) using one-way UDP broadcast to deliver live events and recorded
syndicated programs to member stations. This has the upside of lower and
latency and much lower jitter compared to the internet but the margin of
superiority over conventional internet delivery is getting narrower by the
day.

On a slightly related tangent, the general nature of the design of satellite
data relay (with spot antennas covering relatively broad areas of the planet)
means that the downlink channel of any satellite internet customer can
generally be received over a wide area, even if they are using a modern two-
way VSAT. With reasonable encryption this doesn't pose much of a problem, but
some satellite ISPs, particularly in the developing world, continue to make
use of unencrypted IP-over-MPEG for their downlink. This allows a malicious
eavesdropper anywhere in the region to receive the traffic one direction,
which has the extremely important implication that it allows them to hijack
TCP sessions by intercepting sequence numbers - this enables IP spoofing over
TCP, something that is generally regarded as impossible. This is sufficiently
reliable that it has been used as part of the C2 infrastructure in botnets. I
have a research paper on this somewhere.

~~~
ZenPsycho
satellite is still the only way to get internet in many regions of Australia.
This is a major consideration when it comes to how websites are designed if
you intend for that audience to be able to access your service. Tiny uplink
bandwidth, large amount of latency. Therefore, for instance, large images
aren't as big a problem as many many small images, or transitive dependencies.

~~~
naniwaduni
> Tiny uplink bandwidth, large amount of latency. Therefore, for instance,
> large images aren't as big a problem as many many small images, or
> transitive dependencies.

Is this a typo, or is it just that many small/transitive dependencies are
_much_ worse?

~~~
ZenPsycho
many small transitive dependencies are much worse when request turnaround is
up to 1 second. so for an external image loaded from an external CSS file,
that's 2 seconds. It's a bandwidth scenario where reducing the number of
seperate http requests makes a _huge_ difference.

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farmerbb
An unreleased SNES game, Cooly Skunk, was recently discovered and likely never
would have come to light if it wasn't for Satellaview broadcasting a demo of
the game while the service was active, and a user preserving it on a
Satellaview download cartridge. Fascinating stuff.

See:
[https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-cooly...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-cooly-
skunk-the-cross-gen-console-game-recovered-from-oblivion)

~~~
PostOnce
Wow, neat. The demo is new, but knowledge of the game isn't. Newly-found roms
are cool.

I didn't know that, I just looked it up on unseen64.net and found some old
magazine scans:

[https://www.unseen64.net/2010/02/08/cooly-skunk-snes-
unrelea...](https://www.unseen64.net/2010/02/08/cooly-skunk-snes-unreleased/)

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, not only is
[https://unseen64.net/](https://unseen64.net/) neat (about unreleased and
cancelled games), but so is
[https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor](https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor)

the latter being scrapped content/levels/characters/etc from games that were
released with unused models/maps still included from a previous version.

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TAForObvReasons
Slack on an SNES powered by emu Satellaview:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwXY2raEzPk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwXY2raEzPk)

~~~
dmix
The little town interface is adorable.

~~~
teeray
It reminds me so much of Onett in Earthbound

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shorts_theory
I really love that Nintendo did something like Satellaview, and it's always
been something that has struck me as a niche product that was far ahead of its
time. It's too bad that we will never be able to experience what using the
Satellaview was like (admittedly, probably pretty slow and crappy), but at the
time I can only imagine it would have felt quite novel.

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hcarvalhoalves
Living the 80s-90s in Japan was like living 10 years in the future, it’s crazy
how much technology was already making its way into the consumer market.

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martin1975
I was expecting a Satya Nadella or at least a Microsoft joke there

~~~
thebiglebrewski
Same! Satyanadellaview.

