I recently watched a video about a man who connected his Atari 8 bit computer to a modern day fan run BBS, and it worked. I was wondering if this is possible with a Famicom via a Famicom Modem. I would test it myself, but I don't have one, and don't want to buy one unless I know it works.
The short answer is No.
The long answer is Yes, but only if you have a lot of time and talent for hacking up Famicom hardware and software.
The modem goes into the cartridge slot and takes in smaller cards (they look kinda like PCMCIA cards). If you don't have one of these cards, then the Famicom + modem do nothing when you power it on. So, if you wanted to make your own BBS client, you'd have to figure out some way of getting your own software on there (by hacking one of the cards or some other means). You'd also have to figure out the interface between the Famicom and the modem since, afaik, this has not been reverse-engineered yet.
Those Famicom Modems are used for "internet"-banking and/or "online" gambling services. Collectable, but not valuable.
To connect to BBS or IRC you'd rather to have RS-232 interface on fami, some custom software and use PC as host to deal with :telnet and :irc
IMO main issue is very low horizontal resolution on fami.
A famicom IRC client would be pretty badass.
I'm sure I saw someone post on FamicomWorld from something like that once? Many years back??
This? (http://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index.php?topic=1273.msg14323#msg14323)
Possibly, I think it was the MSX.
There was that ENIO project (http://www.famicomworld.com/forum/index.php?topic=8187.0) from a while back to get ethernet working on an NES.