Unfortunately the time you get to the point of even valid HTTP responses it will look less like a SNES and more like whatever-you-plugged-into-a-snes-for-power. E.g. the original Family Computer Network System addon already had more RAM and CPU power than the original console it attaches to just to interface as a modem at all, let alone something "basic" like CGI.
The Wii is probably the first Nintendo console where all the hardware you need to do this is fully built in (though maybe the Nintendo DS, depending how much you're willing to try to get Linux + your server to fit in memory without plugging in a RAM expansion pack to the GBA slot).
This leads to an interesting philosophical debate about where the line to "cheating" is. I'd imagine the NES is more than capable of handling HTTP. I own a small managed network switch with a Web UI (and CGI) all running on an 8051 built into the switch ASIC, and if that can do it, it doesn't seem like such a far fetch that the NES can. The hard part is storage and I/O.
This is purely theoretical, but a 6522 could be used to bitbang SPI, opening the possibility of adding an SD card and Ethernet controller (with a chip like the Wiznet W5500). Add a small amount of SRAM (~16/32Kbit) and a loader ROM, and you'd be able to make the NES into a workable general purpose computer using only the cartridge slot. If needed, one could steal an interrupt from the expansion slot.
Admittedly, this could still be considered "cheating" because the W5500 has a built-in TCP/IP stack, but personally I would feel comfortable saying the NES is hosting the site.
I feel like this would definitely be possible. I was reminded of https://mitxela.com/projects/kiloboot, which uses an ENC28J60 for the ethernet stuff. I feel like you could probably quite easily bitbang SPI, given it's quite a forgiving protocol, just dedicate a couple of addresses in the memory space to interact directly with the bus (maybe with a separate shift register chip if you want to make things a bit easier). If you give up writing anything to the screen, I'd imagine you could just spin until something happened on the ethernet side, then read the requested path, pull some data off the ROM that corresponds to that path and send it back again
> The Wii is probably the first Nintendo console where all the hardware you need to do this is fully built in
Even though accessories were required, you could probably do this with both the N64 Disk Drive or GameCube network adapter. Both were network interfaces that still dispatched to the underlying system.
The N64 Disk Drive [1] would be a fun case, because the storage medium is a glorified floppy disk drive. It does connect over a modem, so there'd be some fun middleware.
The Super Nintendo had a network adapter as well, and both the NES and SNES [2] had satellite networking adapters in Japan. IIRC, there was also a network adapter for the Game Boy. I'm not sure how or if those would work, or how much control was surrendered to the hardware/software of the network adapter itself to let it do all the driving.
My original post was from work, and when I tried to find a reference, I was blocked from following any links! Think they recently instituted a policy...
So I finally do the lookup from home, and what do I find at the bottom of the first page, but a link to YOUR REPLY!
Yeah, the DS probably is the first one that has enough inbuilt support since it has support for Wi-Fi out of the box although Linux seems a bit heavyweight for this perhaps(?)
DSLinux exists but you need the RAM expansion cartridge. from what I found it supports networking but you've only got 8MB minus the space used by the system. and an ancient binary-only toolchain to wrangle with
DSLinux absolutely runs in 4 MB (i.e. w/o a RAM expansion pack), it's just going to take a bit of work to also fit the web server + whatever CGI they wanted without a pack.
The EZ-Flash V 3-in-1 actually added a whopping +16 MB (128 Mb) of PSRAM! Growing up I only ever had the +8 MB pack from Opera... what a weird bit of history that browser port was :).
I wouldn't say uClinux was any less Linux, over time its features even merged to mainline in the 2.x series, including the ability to run MMU-less in version 2.5.46 https://lwn.net/Articles/14823/
The EZ-Flash V 3-in-1 also had either 64 MB or 128 MB of NOR flash (depending on the revision) in addition to the 16 MB of PSRAM. There was also some battery backed SRAM for save data.
I don't know if this is cheating, but there were a few NES games that had extra RAM on the cartridge. Pretty easy to do as the cartridge slot directly breaks out the data and address lines from the CPU.
For SNES - absolutely, if you get an FXPAK PRO and proxy over USB. It would be slooow, though, the transfer rate isn’t amazing (limitation on the firmware side, probably due to ancient USB standard?). Basically though - write incoming packets to a well known place in RAM, read another well known place in RAM for outgoing packets. The good news is that you have 12MB of ROM to work with. The bad news is that you really don’t want to transfer too much data at once, and you only get 128Kb of RAM. Not sure if you could do this easily with an NES, I don’t know if the everdrive supports RAM access over USB (it doesn’t on GB* which makes me super sad).
Whatever you end up doing on the NES would end up not being a website anymore. You want to interface with joystick port 1? Not TCP/IP anymore. Whatever gateway you would use to connect to the custom protocol would have a lot more oomph than a NES.
I don't think so without significant work, NES has only 2KB of RAM and an 8 bit CPU without MMU or many niceties taken for granted in General Purpose OS's
I doubt you can go much further back than Fifth Gen (of consoles) or so
You would have to burn a cart that contained the webpage and TCP stack, as well as having the ethernet hardware, but there are tricks you can do to reduce the memory requirements. It's not going to be able to handle more than a packet or two at a time, but I've seen TCP stacks squeezed onto really low end hardware. Obviously you won't be able to open much of a TCP window so performance will be lousy, but it's a 1.8Mhz CPU so that was always going to be the case. Just don't have any misconceptions about being able to run TLS on it. Remember that TCP was developed on machines that did not have a lot of memory or even CPU cycles.
An Atari 2600 might be a bridge too far, but a NES should be able to do it.
Fair enough, seems a lot simpler than what I had in mind with expansions and custom software, but also a far cry from OP's "flash" a general purpose OS and more or less get to working
All the mainstream 6th gen consoles had first party support for wired ethernet; although only the Xbox had it built in (well, the slim ps2 had it built in too). I'd expect they've all served web pages at one time or another.
5th generation could probably make it happen, but without ethernet, you're looking at a modem or serial interface, and in today's world that's almost certainly talking to something else in your house that's a better host. :P Wikipedia categorizes the Apple Pippin as 5th gen, and it's more or less a Mac with a weird pinout for the PCI slot, so I'd guess it's the easiest to get ethernet with; without resorting to something that has more smarts than the 'host'
Most of my switches are unmanaged, so probably not. Maybe the dsl or cable modem or whatever can serve pages, but especially if it's isp owned, it might not be easy to.
