Satellablog

Another entry caused by “I got nothing new on Satellaview”.

Out of boredom I decded to try looking up info on “Family Basic”, for the Famicom. If you already have an, um, “basic” idea of what the BASIC Programming Language is, then you should know what this would be just by the name.

Family Basic Sets tend to be expensive as heck on eBay, so purchasing one was not in my ability at the moment. Apparently Matthew Callis himself has some stuff though.

Digging down a bit more, though, I found this listing for a Hudson cassette.
To clarify this – Family Basic stored and read data off Data Cassettes using the Famicom Data Recorder add-on. Now, I heard of a lot of generic cassettes being usable here, but I don’t really recall hearing much about the commerically-sold products based around Family Basic, aside from the programming tools themselves. I tried digging up for info, but unfortunately I still need some more Japanese language skills – I only have some vague hints.
Either way, apparently stuff was commerically sold as Famicom Data Cassettes – how would one archive these? … perhaps a lossless audio format like FLAC?

… but yeah, going on from that, after looking that up, I decided to try throwing a search for Family Basic up on NicoNicoDouga. There are a -lot- of results, more than what I think I could fit in a blog article here (Maybe even demanding it’s own blog set?).
I unfortunately lazied out on getting the original links for these, but you can find them under a tag search for ファミリーベーシック on NicoNicoDouga. Some of these videos had descriptions or dates which implied them being homemade, but some have dates such as 1983 or 1986, and many of the NND descriptions clearly reference “Family Compuer Magazine”….

These are just some of the videos. It’s still quite a lot, though, so please use the “more” link to view them. Read the rest of this entry »

There hasn’t been many updates this month, hasn’t there?

Sorry folks, Satellaview progress has been slow. I’d gladly post some more info as it comes along, but quite frankly, there isn’t much I can recall at the moment. In the meantime, since you guys already know that I tend to look at other bits of obscure gaming, I’ll fill up time by posting some things.

Let me start with the Sega Pico. Yes, -that- Sega Pico, if you already are familiar with it in the USA. The “Edutainment” gaming system Sega released in their days of oversaturating the market with Genesis upgrades and derivatives, it seems the Sega Pico actually had a much more startling success story in Japan than in what I believe to be the country of it’s birth…

I tried collecting some JP Pico titles a bit ago, but holy moly the shipping is hell on these things – packaged in heavy plastic casings similar to old-fashioned Disney VHS tapes (except heavier and more hard plastic), and considerably larger than a typical game cartridge, JP Pico titles have high shipping and commission costs to import in spite of the low “bid prices” on YJA.

Fortunately, they worked A-OK on US Pico Systems as far as I tested – as long as the game doesn’t require a unique accessory, a US system will run it. You can watch me play “Futari wa Pretty Cure” to verify that – I upped this on Youtube quite a while ago.

This game, copyright 2004 by Bandai… based off a still-running anime franchise in Japan, recently being dubbed for Canada… In comparison, in the USA the Sega Pico was a dead weight nearly 6 years prior.

I eventually went digging around for more titles, and came across these.



… Yes, that last one is POKEMON. I’m not making this up. There’s also two other Pokemon games I’ve yet to successfully purchase. Not only that, but the Pokemon games continued being produced as the Pico was overplaced – by a SUCCESSOR console, the “Beena”, which I unfortunately have nothing on. The Beena has a Pokemon Diamond/Pearl themed game of some sort.

If anyone can help me find a ROM Copier for these titles, I’d really appreciate it.

Callis sent me this rom to examine… and… well, it just seemed like a corrupted to me, and I told him that.
He then told me something weird – The Memory Pack this image came from caused his Satellaview to -really- mess up. It gave out an “Error 41″ message, according to him.

I looked through my old entry on Errors, and realized I never came across such an error. What is Error 41? He wasn’t able to take a picture. Can someone hack or modify the ROM in such a way that error 41 can be called out? Of course, if someone -could- do that, I’d expect even grander things, like access to many of the “locked” BS-X areas…

This strange download, if one ever dares try making a tool to put new data into a 8M Memory Pack, could replicate this “Error 41″ that Callis told me about.

Someone who’s been backreading on my old Blogspot blog location asked me why I was missing the “All Night Nippon” article (He found it a very interesting read).

I told him that I thought the article was a bit misplaced at the time, but developments were coming along and I thought to revive it. Well, the development I got wasn’t quite what I expected, but I got it!

This one’s a fairly long one, so I’m gonna use that “more” code I haven’t used in a while. Read the rest of this entry »

About 2 and a half months ago, I won a Yahoo Japan Auctions clothing lot.

I got to open the contents just this Christmas. Taking a look with me?

Ah, this wasn’t the only one, no…

Admitably, these latter ones are a bit more difficult to make out, but the gist of it should be obvious – they’re all clothing branded with “Satellaview Tsushin”, the Satellaview-themed spinoff of “Famicom Tsushin”.

Feel free to right click -> “Save picture as” to save larger versions.

I unfortunately do not know the circumstances under which these were originally distributed, but I’d imagine they were among the many prizes given out to folks who participated in Satellaview events, or given to subscribers of Satellaview Tsushin.

The T-shirt and Jacket are a size L. While I’m certain I’m gonna have a few Japanese natives laughing at me for this, I’ve put them on my tubby Gaijin self out of sheer enthusiasm and took some pics of how well they fit – surprisingly nicely. This is probably one of the best clothing buys I’ve ever done. O: