A few years back, someone set up a custom server to be used with the Sega Channel bios; if you connect a Mega Everdrive to a Raspberry Pi through usb and load up the bios, you can use the service on real hardware just like the 90s! That's already pretty neat (and more practical than buying a separate adapter) but it's got me thinking, could we do the same with a genuine Sega Channel adapter? If we could find a way to connect a coaxial cable to a computer and write software for handling it, then it should be hypothetically possible. I'm not sure what what kind of coaxial the adapter needs though....the information the adapter downloaded was binary, but that doesn't necessarily mean the cable signal itself was digital. Does anyone have any info on the kind of cable typically used for the service? Because if it's designed for analog, that's going to complicate things.
From looking at the Sega Retro page on the matter, it seems that the data was transmitted from the cable company via analogue, but then cleaned into a more digital-like signal to be fed into the adapter. Data was sent in loops, and you would have to wait for the start of the proper segment of the loop to download information. But the biggest factor here is that the transmission is the same as a cable channel in the 90s. I don't know if there is a way to set up a private cable broadcast system to send the data to the Sega Channel adapter without praying for old cable relay equipment to show up on eBay.
I always thought it would be neat if an emulator could be set up to mimic the Sega Channel. Would be a really neat way to distribute hacks and home brew, where you could just check what's new on Sega channel instead of having to search different forums or whatever.
This guy has a sd card inserted right in the back of his unit. Couldn’t find the follow up video on how he pulled this off.
I had to do some digging around and found out from a trusted resource that the adapter in the video is nothing more than an everdrive and some tricky video editing. Its most obvious at the 4:10 mark when you can see a slight change in lighting when the game goes from the load screen to the everdrive menu. However there is the following items: (NOTE: The following is self promotion.) https://twitter.com/BillytimeG/status/1450681752163393539
