A Satellaview research blog.

Trying to understand a Satellaview ROM’s SRAM system.

Something that’s confused me for a while about download games on the Satellaview, is how the SRAM stuff functions. Mostly, because it tends to be a problem when I try hacking around with ROMs. (I tend to try to get random ROMs to boot on BS-X in BSNES in my spare time.)

For reference, this has been an issue with getting various ROMs to play in older emulator versions and ROM Copiers, as well as with doing projects such as fan translations. Unfortunately, I do not have old tech notes on the Radical Dreamers fan translation lying around my computer to help with this at the moment.

I figured that to attempt to analyze this, I’d look into three of the retail-game ROM Dumps that support SRAM and compare them to the dumps of the retail carts.

– Actraiser
– Super Nazo Puyo
– Zelda No Densetsu: Kamigami no Triforce

Unfortunately, this just ended up confusing me even more. Running the original Actraiser up against the BS Counterpart in UltraCompare on Ubuntu showed no differences outside of the header (A measly 25 byes of difference?), and the same went for Super Nazo Puyo. As for Kamigami? There’s three different revisions to choose from, and the BS Version is slightly off from -all- of them in various random spots (and with a lot of “FFs in place of 00s” which are not helpful, either.)

I currently don’t have much of anything in terms of notes to help me out here, either. So much for my quick attempt to port SMW…



2 thoughts on Trying to understand a Satellaview ROM’s SRAM system.

  1. I’ve tried looking at those three games, and it looks like they aren’t very helpful, because the save systems don’t seem to have been changed at all. In both the original and the BS versions, they load and save from bank $70. I guess that’s SRAM on the original cartridge, but it’s PSRAM on the BS-X.

    Do you know of any other BS games that have save games besides Square’s game and the Soundlink games?

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