Nintendo’s hybrid Switch console has completely destroyed sales records even without a deep online network service like its competitors. While we are apparently less than one month away from the launch of its better-late-than-never online service, the new SNES Party hack is already live.
In fact, the completely unofficial online emulator app, comes on the heels of NES party which launched about a year ago. They are basically experimental ways to play NES and SNES games with your buddies online inside your browser.
Developer Haukur Rosinkranz said he discovered how far along the RTC implementation in Chrome had come and decided somebody needed to do something about it. After realizing he was able to work with network video streaming fairly easily, he figured it was time to implement some emulators. About seven months later, NES party was born, followed by the release of SNES support this week.
The lone programmer had this to say about the project:
It’s hard to say how long it took because I basically created my own framework for web applications that need realtime communication between one or more participants.
Now clearly there is no official support here and everything is running on less than legal copies of Nintendo classics, but it all happens pretty smooth as far as reports go. You simply hit the link for NES or SNES Party, create a room and then you’ll get hit with a prompt to load up the ROM (game) of your choice. From that point WebRTC takes over, streaming the video to your friends and you’re good to go.
As usual with these kinds of interesting Nintendo hacks, it’s only a matter of time before the company strikes down with the long arm of the law and closes the doors for good. Having said that, NES Party has been in business for a while now, so it’s impossible to say when Nintendo might suddenly become interested. The launch of the official service next month might be a good time, but again it’s hard to say.
Nintendo’s official online service is set to launch is just a few weeks time. You can expect online play in compatible games, cloud saves, 20 NES games at launch (with more added regularly) and special offers via the Switch app. All of that will run you $20 a year or $4 a month when it launches.
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