Slack on an SNES? Engineer beams Slack messages to decades old Super Nintendo game

The Super Nintendo really was far ahead of its time.

Bertrand Fan, a senior engineer for the messaging and chat application Slack, recently came across an interesting find. During the mid-'90s in Japan, Nintendo released a satellite modem peripheral for its SNES game console (called the Super Famicom over there).

Known as the Satellaview, Nintendo would beam daily broadcasts to gamers’ consoles. According to Fan, Nintendo actually did this for years, broadcasting content over Satellaview every day from April 1995 to June 2000. 

This gave Fan an idea. “If you can beam satellite signals to a SNES, you can probably run Slack on it,” the engineer said in a post. So, that’s what Fan set out to do. Read more...