One year after I did "Control The Car", I figured I would try to interface something else with the internet. During Christmas break of 2001, I worked on building the first (and I assume only) Atari 2600 that could be played over the internet.
The process was basically the same as for "Control The Car", the parallel port would be used to control the Atari. I also wanted "Control The Car" to be able to be used at the same time, and both through a single parallel port. I decided to make a generic parallel port controller box, housed in a single unit with a row of inputs on the side. All the controls for the "Atari Online" and "Control The Car" would then go to these inputs, and then the box would be hooked up with a parallel port cable.
For the Atari, there were 4 directions from the controller plus the fire button. Then there was also the Reset and Select buttons on the console itself, which I opened up and soldered leads directly on the Atari's board and ran out to the interface box. The Parallel Port has 8 data lines, and the Atari alone used 7. So to run "Control The Car" at the same time, I also used three Status outputs.
To capture the video from my Atari 2600 Jr., I modified it to output Composite Video. This was fed into a USB video capture device, and streamed across the internet to the user
The actual internet interface worked very similar to "Control The Car", the user was shown the video output and could click directional arrows or press the "fire!" button. The user could also hit the reset and select button on the console through the web interface. These clicks would generate requests for a PHP file on a computer under my desk, which would call an EXE I wrote in BASIC that would send the proper signals to the parallel port and into the interface box. The video streamed at approximately 2-3FPS.
Actually playing games was near impossible, since many of the Atari games required quick reflexes to be able to play. Because of the lag involved in sending the request across the internet, then streaming the video results back to the user, there was nearly a 1 second lag. I intended on changing game cartridges every week, but almost every game was unplayable. Because of this, I would usually just leave Q*bert in and on easy for people to play, at least they could jump around for a while.
Several times, I plugged a regular controller into the second port and actually played some games against whoever was playing online. I'd assume this was the first time a multiplayer Atari game has ever happened online, using an actual Atari system and cartridge.
The fact that the game wasn't too playable didn't stop people from using it. Within a few days of having it online, a few websites had small articles about it. In about a month, there was articles on large websites in Switzerland, Germany, France, Brazil and blogs all around the World. I think it was shown on giga.de TV in Germany and there was a small write-up in a Les Puces Informatiques, a French magazine. Of course, the 300MHZ computer this whole thing was running off of didn't quite appreciate it and needed restarting almost once a day during peak traffic. From the server logs, nearly 2000 people used the "Atari Online" in one day and there were several hits from slashdot.org, but it was never posted on their main page. I guess that's a good thing, since there is no way it would have handled the traffic.
