A Satellaview research blog.

Internals of a BS-X Cartridge.

Actually posting this because it seems the ZSNES forum is down and so I can’t track these down there. I believe posted there was also a picture of the Satellaview base’s internals, but I seemingly lost track of it. Blast!

BS-X Internals 1
BS-X Internals 2

I’m not nearly as technically knowledged on these kind of things as Callis, d4s, and many other 16-bit experts are, but I’d like to believe whatever info I supply on here is as good as their word anyhow. ^^;

Of note are two chips in the back, the “4M PSRAM” chip and the “256K SRAM” chip.
I forgot how much of this is speculation and how much of it is actually tested/verified, but the 4M PSRAM is believed to be the extra memory space the Satellaview uses, where many key “Portions” of Soundlink Game content disappeared to – including that BS Fire Emblem CG Art and BS Zelda: Inishie no Sekiban dungeon tiles. As far as I know, there are no PSRAM dumps going around.

The “256K SRAM”… I’m guessing this is the standard SRAM with more traditional “Game save” content. I do know that many BS-X Cartridges going around, even today, have save data about the world of BS-X inside them. This data has the ability to store things such as the last season the BS-X was played in as well as various seemingly-BS-X-related “items” you can use in the item menu.
I’ve wanted to see some of these SRAMs dumped so I could investigate this a bit more deeply, but there does not seem to be any BS-X SRAM dumping tools around. Rather unfortunate. 🙁

Since I can’t think of a good way to close this post, here’s a picture of the internals of an 8M Memory Pack which I wandered across on Google Image search.



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