Super Tilt Bro. Brings Super Smash Bros.-Inspired Online Wi-Fi Multiplayer to Classic NES Consoles

Powered by an ESP8266 module, the Super Tilt Bro. cartridge brings online multiplayer to Nintendo's classic NES console.

Gareth Halfacree
5 years ago • Retro Tech / Gaming

Retro gaming enthusiast Sylvain Gadrat has developed a game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) eight-bit console with a difference: It includes an on-board Wi-Fi module, giving the classic console online multiplayer capabilities.

"Super Tilt Bro. is not a retro game. It always tried to be a modern game on retro hardware, and modern games are playable online," Gadrat explains of the project. "We 'simply' put a Wi-Fi chipset in the cartridge, and let's rock! New millennium, here we come!"

"Super Tilt Bro. is a demake of the Super Smash Bros. series compatible with the good old Nintendo Entertainment System from the 1980s. You and a friend take control of a clone of Sinbad, the badass mascot of Ogre3D. Two fellows, one platform: You will have to fight to throw the other out. It is developed entirely in assembly language. Programming the NES in assembly is the most straightforward way to do it, a big part of the job is to speak directly with the hardware, there is no operating system to help and when it comes to performances assembly lets us use tricks not even documented by Nintendo."

The original Super Tilt Bro. release was a simple two-player offline-only affair, playable in an emulator or on real NES hardware. In its latest incarnation, it's a custom cartridge which gives the NES Wi-Fi connectivity for online multiplayer. An ESP8266 module is attached to the top of a home-brew NES cartridge provides connectivity — and some very clever programming crams rollback netcode into just 2kB of RAM and a 1.5MHz CPU, while keeping the game itself fully playable.

The Super Tilt Bro. ROM is available from Itch.io now; while a cartridge release is planned, it is not yet available to order. More information is available from the project's Discord, the Video Game Sage website, and Gadrat's Twitter. The latest source code can be found on GitHub under the permissive WTFPL license.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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