[brookman64k]

> The game runs on a Nintendo GameCube, a 24-year-old console with a 485 MHz PowerPC processor, 24MB of RAM, and absolutely no internet connectivity.

In fact, Nintendo did release an official add-on called the Broadband Adapter, which plugged into the bottom expansion port and provided an Ethernet jack. Only a handful of games supported it, one was Phantasy Star Online. I also used it to stream games/roms from a PC. This worked by exploiting a memory vulnerability in Phantasy Star Online to load arbitrary code over the network, though with slower load times compared to running from disc.

[b3lvedere]

This is mentioned in the article:

"What About the GameCube Broadband Adapter?

Yes, the GameCube had an official Broadband Adapter (BBA). But Animal Crossing shipped without networking primitives, sockets, or any game-layer protocol to use it. Using the BBA here would have required building a tiny networking stack and patching the game to call it. That means: hooking engine callsites, scheduling async I/O, and handling retries/timeouts, all inside a codebase that never expected the network to exist."

[brookman64k]

I didn't finish reading the article before commenting. Mea culpa! Maybe it would be possible to use Phantasy Star Online's network stack via the streaming exploit. But that would leave the hooking part.

[LeoPanthera]

I wonder if you can bitbang an ethernet interface to abuse it into being a serial port.