Ch@btalk, The Online Dreamcast Talk and Text Service

[Nz17]

Has anyone here ever used the Japanese Ch@btalk service? I believe I remember registering an ISAO account many years ago and was hoping to use Ch@btalk back then to chat with people using text or talk, but nobody was still using it at the time. I know that Ch@btalk was included with Japanese Dreamcast Web browsers as well as the XDP browser.

Who here has used Ch@btalk? How about using the PlanetWeb equivalent that was included in, what, the ver. 2.62 PlanetWeb browser?

[Nz17]

Here is some information for the ages from "The Dreamcast Browsers Group:"

2.3.1 - What is Ch@bTalk?
Ch@bTalk is an Instant Messenger service that supports text and voice messaging...
you can find Ch@bTalk users in Japan, Europe, America, and elsewhere in the world, on Dreamcasts, PCs and Macs, cell phones, and other platforms...

it IS NOT irc-based like AIMirc that many dreamcast users are familiar with, nor is it anything like the "PWIM" found in the Planetweb v3 browser...

a short summary of how it works would be that when you are on the Web and receive a Ch@b IM, a little marker appears in the top right corner of the screen... you click on it and a little pop-up box appears with the message... you can read and reply to the message in the pop-up box without ever leaving the webpage you are currently on...
it is a little different on different platforms, but, that is basically how it works...

[beanboy]

Wow! That info you gave us, is really interesting.
I think I might have randomly heard or read, about that Ch@btalk service thing years ago.

[SparxsteR]

I cant remember what chat/talk service Planetweb or Dreamkey used, all i remeber that US got the worst Browsers for Dreamcast.
How could we use a chat or voice today when Dreamarena and SegaNet is long gone?

[Blayer98]

This is a late reply but I figured what I’m posting might be of interest to someone out there and there isn’t really any point making yet another thread, Dreamkey 3.0 still has some partial support for Ch@b since it can recognise links and you can try searching for people, sending messages and looking up user profiles, but most text on the UI has been blanked and trying to do anything useful with Ch@b on Dreamkey will just result in the game trying to connect to something for a split second and then instantly fail, all with blank UI text but ? And ! Icons will still show up on certain dialog boxes. At least from what I tested. I’ve tested the Who is Who function, the send message function, and also tested searching for other users, to no avail...

I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone tried to revive that service or make something similar?

[247]

Well if xdp support that we can always try :p