FujiNet Comes to the NES, Bringing Internet Play, Shared Excitebike Tracks and SSH to Nintendo's 8-Bit Box

Thom Cherryhomes brings FujiNet networking to the NES via RP2354 firmware, enabling NetPlay, cloud-shared Excitebike tracks, and SSH terminal access on 8-bit Nintendo hardware.

FujiNet's mission to give vintage machines thoroughly inappropriate modern networking abilities has reached the Nintendo Entertainment System. Project developer Thom Cherryhomes has confirmed active NES bring-up work, with the RP2354 portion of the firmware already in the master codebase and NES hardware definitions publicly available. The current work goes substantially beyond simply making a network adapter respond. FujiNet games including Fujitzee, 5 Card Stud, Texas Hold'Em, FujiRealm and Fujirkle have been ported, while patched versions of Double Dribble and Tecmo Bowl demonstrate NetPlay possibilities. A NetCat ANSI terminal can connect through both Telnet and SSH, allowing an NES to communicate with modern networked systems in a manner Nintendo's engineers probably did not anticipate while designing a machine primarily expected to display plumbers and ducks. Perhaps the most charming demonstration is a modified Excitebike capable of saving custom tracks over the internet so other players can share them. A FujiNet Go NES Desktop application for Linux, macOS and Windows also allows experimentation before physical hardware is available. FujiNet began with Atari systems but has steadily expanded across classic platforms, turning networking into a preservation and development tool rather than merely a novelty. An NES talking SSH to a Linux box is objectively unnecessary. This is precisely why retrocomputing is wonderful.