Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles

Video game consoles have a long history with web browsers. From the advent of the World Wide Web, consoles have been trying to get online. Browsers on video game consoles were initially very much an attempt to provide a cheap gateway to the web for a casual audience lacking technical expertise, though as time progressed they’ve become a greater and more integrated part of systems. This article takes a look at browsers on video game consoles in detail, though only covers official web browsers. Many consoles have browsers installable via custom firmware and homebrew, but they’re beyond the scope of this post, as are non-web systems such as Satellaview and online services that didn’t provide a browser, such as XBAND, Sega Meganet, and Sega Channel. Game console browsers were of interest to web developers for a period while personal computing devices and mobile browsers were still establishing themselves. Overall, the development of console browsers provides an insight into a juvenile web, slowly growing and establishing itself, as well as an insight into game console user interfaces. CD-i The Compact Disc-Interactive format and hardware created by Philips and Sony was an ill-fated attempt to bring interactive multimedia to the masses. Development on the project started in the mid ’80s, and home players arrived in 1991. The CD-i’s inclusion as a ‘game console’ here is debatable as it was designed for and touted with much broader capabilities. However, towards the end of its life it was marketed much more as a game console, and it is as a game console that it is best known today – especially thanks to the infamous Mario and Zelda games. With a modem and a CD-Online disc (known as Web-i in the United States) released in late 1995, users could access the web in a very rudimentary manner. The term ‘internet-lite’ is seen paired with the CD-i frequently, for not only was the internet and indeed the entire World Wide Web burgeoning, but the CD-i was a rather limited machine that wasn’t well equipped for supporting the full-scale web. The main menu of CD-Online Disc 97-10. The browser worked and had links to various web portals but was very limited, even given the primitive web of the time.

The CD-i’s limited RAM meant that it could store very little, and that simply using the browser would overwrite other values in memory, such as preferences and game saves. The idea was that the CD-i would be a cheaper, TV-based computing device, available at a price point lower than typical home computers that could make it the gateway to the internet for the less technologically literate. During 1996, the CD-i KeyControl keyboard was released, as were additional CD-Online discs. The idea being that new discs would be released periodically with additional games, software, and peripheral support. Records indicate six discs were released in total, with later versions including the ability to develop and deploy your own homepage. By late 1998, CD-Online was winding down on the CD-i, with a version of the service launching for PCs during the turn of the millennium. Throughout the early 2000s it fizzled out and domains went offline, with everything CD-Online coming to a complete close in the mid-2000s. Sega Saturn Sega’s 1994 console, the Saturn, gained internet access in late 1996 with the release of Sega Net Link – a tiny device with a custom chip and 28.8kbps modem that fit into the cartridge port. For the Net Link, United States based company PlanetWeb provided their PlanetWeb Browser as the ‘NetLink Custom Web Browser’, an efficient and lightweight browser with a bespoke engine which was tailored and released for various devices in collaboration with manufacturers. Reading PlanetWeb’s frequently asked questions page from 1997, it is clear their browser was built carefully to target television-based devices and existing consoles, making it optimal for the Saturn. Due to televisions having low-resolution screens compared to dedicated monitors, the PlanetWeb browser made use of ‘proprietary software technology for displaying clear, readable text and sharp images on an ordinary television.’. In other words, ‘the Browser features such advances as anti-aliased fonts’. For its time, and given it is on an extremely limited console, it is remarkably fully featured.

The browser has an inbuilt magnifier that can zoom to multiple levels, image support, history, bookmarks, an address book, the ability to download files temporarily, and full parental controls for filtering.1 That is in addition to all the configurable options and settings available in a menu accessed by pressing Start. There is a wide selection of themes with different cursors and sounds – any of which wouldn’t be out of place in Kid Pix, with blips and bloops and springy sounds of all varieties. The main Net Link page in version 2 of the browser. Each district of the city is a navigable hyperlink. Each time PlanetWeb boots, a random splash screen is shown. Net Link was tied in to the Saturn’s wider online gaming capabilities, allowing ‘On-Line’ battles. Beyond direct multiplayer, it also built a community around the console. For a while PlanetWeb hosted a game exchange mail-in forum allowing users to email in their Saturn game saves via the browser to share them with other people. PlanetWeb also launched Planet WebMaster, a web development and hosting platform that people could use with their browser. In the United States of America, two versions of the browser were widely distributed. Version 2 and version 3. Version 3 brought greater optimisation, more legible fonts, and IRC support. Neither of these versions supported frames, however, instead displaying them as text links. The final version of the browser was Beta 4.035, which was never released physically and was only available as a downloadable update. Version 4 introduced full support for displaying frames inline, more IRC commands, support for embedded wav and aif audio, more shortcuts, faster input, different bullet shapes, outlined fonts, better image format compatibility, and many bug fixes. Beta 4.035 even introduced SSL for e-commerce. It is likely version 4 would have seen a complete and full release had Sega not discontinued the Saturn in 1998 after rapidly losing market share to the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, which dominated the market. Following the discontinuation, some users took it upon themselves to splice bits of version 4’s beta and previous stable versions together to compile a more complete and final browser experience. Apple Bandai Pippin Apple Computer Inc released the infamous Pippin in collaboration with Bandai in 1996.

The Pippin is a fairly standard PowerPC computer under the hood and runs software built atop Classic Mac OS. As such, several variants of mainstream desktop browsers were ported. These browsers never saw major utilisation, however, as the Pippin was a failure, and people noted that the Sega Saturn was a far cheaper gateway to the web, even factoring in the additional cost of the Net Link attachment. For the North American market the @WORLD Browser, based upon Spyglass Mosaic, was released in 1996, bundled with @WORLD branded consoles sold in the United States. @WORLD browser came with plug-ins providing support for QuickTime and Macromedia Shockwave. It had filtering control via SurfWatch ProServer and support for some of Apple’s StyleWriter set of ink-jet printers. In mid-1997, a beta version titled @WORLD Online Suite Premium had an terrifically limited release. In early 1998, version 3 of the browser released, but details on what it changed are scarce, and by that time Bandai were announcing they were dropping support for the Pippin due to extremely poor sales. The local getting started page of @WORLD Browser. In April 1997, SurfEZ! (also called the Katz Media browser) was released for the Katz Media Player 2000 – an improved version of the Pippin distributed under licence in Canada and Europe. The console boasted mildly improved specs, and the browser supports HTML, plug-ins and Java, with capabilities for developers to customise the interface for specific solutions. In Japan, a disc titled ‘Internet Kit’ was distributed with Pippins. Version 1.0 was based on Netscape Navigator 1.12 and released in March 1996. It was superseded by version 1.1 in June of that year, which added support for saving images to floppy disc. Version 2.0 released in December 1996 and updated the browser to a Netscape Navigator 2.01 base while adding support for some StyleWriter printers. A Japanese/English machine translation plug-in was available for this version but required a 2MB memory module to use.

J-DATA, a company that offered internet services for the Pippin in Japan, released NetCruiser (ネットクルーザー) 2.0 in a bundle with other software for the Pippin. NetCruiser was originally a Windows browser, before it was ported to the Macintosh and then to the Pippin via a process Apple called ‘pippinizing’, which was possible due to Pippin’s similarity to the Mac. J-DATA also published a monthly J.D.Press magazine which included listings of website addresses as barcodes, which could be scanned via a barcode reader device (titled the ‘Super Cat’) to bypass the laborious task of typing out a URL. In 1997, the final Pippin browser for the Japanese market, WebViewer, released in Japan. WebViewer, instead of being built upon Netscape Navigator, was instead built upon Internet Explorer 3.0. It brought much-improved performance but required an 8MB memory module to function. In some cases it was bundled with NetCruiser 3.0, an updated version of J-Data’s browser. Apple wouldn’t release their own browser, Safari, until several years later in 2003, long after they had stopped supporting the Pippin. Sega Dreamcast What would be Sega’s last console, the Dreamcast, released in 1998. It didn’t get one browser like its predecessor, the Saturn, but instead received three distinct lineages of browsers. Dream Passport, various versions of the PlanetWeb Browser, and Dreamkey. Dream Passport (ドリームパスポート) version 1.01 was bundled with Dreamcasts sold in Japan on launch. It lacked support for many web standards and common formats, so it was quickly obsoleted by the updated Dream Passport 2. Owners of the first version of Dream Passport could exchange their copy at some retailers for Dream Passport 2, free-of-charge, between the 5th and 31st August, 1999. After that time it had to be purchased online via Sega Direct.