Satellablog

It appears this year one of our more interesting ROM gets of the year is a tad last-second. My friends, let me tell you a story about true Christmas spirit, great ambitions, the hot-blooded determination of mankind, and hex editing! … Or possibly something resembling that. I’m not entirely sure.

A bit earlier in the month, there was a Satellaview set on eBay. Noting that it seemed a tad cheaper than what most models recently sell for, I basically went up to Callis and was like “OMG GET IT PLZ KTHXBAI”. With enough pressure, he caved. Yes, I probably am a dick for doing that.

Flash forward to just last Wednesday. Yep, the 21st.

Callis, in his typical Satellaview ROM dumping pattern, sends me a dump of both the 8M Pack ROM and the BS-X SRAM. It initially looked bad. Why? Well, see…

Yeah, that’s why. I couldn’t get it to boot even in an attempt to fix the checksum at first. He was initially disappointed. I didn’t want to give up yet, though… I’m stubborn like that. I wanted to salvage as much as I could out of this.

For reference, So far that salvaging hasn’t quite resulted in anything as dramatic as repairing that bad Kirby Guruguru Ball dump yet. Yes, I really did try that once… but anyway!

First, I asked him to pull out the Romaji for the game’s header. It was “スターソルジャー2MINS”.
“Hmm? 2MINS is a bit odd, but, that “Suta Soruja”… ‘Star Soldier?’ That NES Game?”

When Callis told me he could spot 8-bit game tiles in the tile editor (along with partially-overwritten BS Zelda graphics. D’oh!), I figured this was something worth the attempt to save. In a search to find a ROM Hacker, I hopped into the IRC chatroom for The Cutting Room Floor.
Linking the ROM to the folks, I was actually sort of surprised by the immediate interest.
One person in particular was very eager to analyze the ROM; BMF.

After about an hour of digging and looking up various ROM aspects, he did a comparison between this game and the “Caravan Shooting Collection” retail cart and, somehow, this gave him a solution to get the ROM working…

Change the first byte.

A single byte being the difference between working and non-working? Now, I will admit, this sounded familiar, so I should not have been taken off-guard. At least not completely. But I was pretty floored regardless. I decided to change that byte and pop in that ROM and see it play for myself.

Yes, I do still suck at vertical shmups, but that’s besides the point!

And so, what at first seemed to be a letdown turned out to be one of the more interesting ROM finds of the year!

I’ve tried looking up the specific title, but can’t find ANY documentation about a Satellaview-specific 2 Minute Star Soldier. (There’s a lot of entries for Caravan Shooting Collection, though..)
All I have to go on here is that it’s download date is August 24th, and that it overwrote some BS Zelda data…. perhaps it was from the 1995 broadcast year?
Either way, in the meantime I’ll bring up this info which is probably similar enough for the time being;
The ROM appears to be based on “Star Soldier Special Version” for Famicom, which featured 2-minute and 5-minute modes. Here’s some Youtube video of that for reference.
The ROM code appears to have some 5-minute mode stuff in the hex data, but currently I do not know how to access it in-game. Perhaps another ROM hacker can look at it?
The game’s code is obviously based on the “Caravan Shooting Collection” version of Star Soldier, so it has the same minor touch-ups.
It’s possible this ROM was released to promote a “Hudson Caravan” event.
I unfortunately can’t seem to find much info on the “Special Versions” of Star Soldier for Famicom, either.

Anyhow, yes, enough talking about the ROM, let me supply it! But a few notes; The file I’m linking contains the ROM in it’s original dumped state, and an IPS patch that does the following:
1) Changes the first byte so it can boot.
2) Fixes the missing Maker/Checksum info.
3) Removes the excess BS Zelda ROM data.

This is all an attempt to restore it as close to it’s original broadcast state as possible.

(NOTE: Anyone who I might’ve sent a patch to earlier – redownload if you want to run this on bsnes.)

STAR SOLDIER 2MINS (BS) | スターソルジャー2MINS
(Bad dump with repair patch)
ROM Download.

Oh, and because this one is actually -smaller- in filesize…
STAR SOLDIER 2MINS pre-patched w/repair patch
ROM Download.

Oh, and by the way, the BS Zelda forum folks are already analyzing the BS Zelda code portion.

Whew, all that, and this wasn’t even my originally planned Christmas present!

There’s more coming tomorrow, folks!
Ho! Ho! Ho!

Alright, a new ROM batch!

So, here’s a bit of personal Satellaview collecting story for you.

Three times prior, a 8M Pack described as having the game “Lemmings” appeared on Yahoo Japan Auctions. Three times, I noticed and tried to obtain it. And three times, I failed!

… thankfully, it appears that third one must have gotten to ikari somehow!

Now, mind, since it appeared on YJA that many times it can’t necessarily be that rare, and it’s not like it’s likely that different from retail, but man, there’s just something to feel happy about when finally grabbing something that just loved to tease you with it’s presence.

For anyone unfamiliar, Lemmings practically started a whole genre involving trying to indirectly control a bunch of stupid and borderline suicidal auto-moving characters to reach a specific objective without dying in a gruesome and embarrassing manner. Therefore at least one version is generally considered one of those “required plays”. You’ll probably take a PC or Mac version over the SNES one, though.

As for the Satellaview ROM, it’s… Very, very English! I’d swear that they just tossed the US version of the game up on there!

Lemmings (BS) | レミングス (BS)
ROM Download

Okie dokie! Next up is… hmm!
“Kessen! Dokapon Oukoku IV”…

I am actually not too familiar with the “Dokapon” franchise, so I tried looking up some info on this.
I suppose you’re best looking up Dokapon Kingdom to have a general sense of this.
Weirdly enough, in spite of having the “IV” in the title this seems to be the earliest entry Wikipedia can obtain info on. Can anyone at Hardcoregaming101 help here?

Anyway, this Dokapon takes the gameplay of a party board game and mixes it up with a classic JRPG.
You roll dice, land on tiles, fight monsters, get items, and use against – against the other players. Presumably like any other party game, you win the game by doing better than your enemies.

This game was released in retail – I don’t suspect any differences between that and this Satellaview dump.

A Satellaview dump of a different Dokapon game, “Dokapon Gaiden: Honoo no Audition” also appears to be circulating around. Maybe I should play that sometime…

Kessen! Dokapon Oukoku IV – Densetsu no Yuusha-tachi (BS) | 決戦！ドカポン王国IV 〜伝説の勇者たち〜 (BS)
ROM Download

Anddd a magazine!

Maria. Not “Mario”. Maria.

… huh.

The header sets this as “Part1″ out of some… total amount of these.

… yeah, I’m terrible at this! bluesun, help me!

[This ROM] seems to be a blog by Kawamura Maria, a VA from Shoujo Kakumei Utena.

… Well that’s interesting! Maybe someday I’ll toss Satellablog on one of these ROMs!

The blog has a lot of pictures, too! In this one, the way the SNES’s limited palette messes with the colors makes it difficult to tell if this guy is actually Caucasian, or just has dyed blond hair!

And this one is… ohhh, are they actually at a Satellaview recording studio here? This looks kind of like that picture d4s found! Except not exactly.

MARIA Part1 (BS)
ROM Download

Amidst all the BS-X Project news (Download v002 today!) it’s almost been tough to keep up with the “Schedule”, per se. Regardless, I promised to have the following ROM up on my birthday, which is, well, November 4th!

This ROM is probably the worst-kept secret of the blog since around May or so, when it was initially obtained. It’s also, in my opinion, one of the best releases since Konae-chan no DokiDoki Pengin Kazoku, and a nice recovery of what we’ve only had video of before.

Can you guess what it is? Well, if you’ve checked some of the comments I made or checked what I was doing around Youtube, it should be easy to guess, actually:

BS-X Shooting! The first of the three “Satella-shooting trilogy” games, this little Dezaemon-engine shmup is short, yet crazy and chaotic.
Launch 8M Packs at your enemies! Face the likes of surfing dog and kissing shark! Beware the enemies with weird quasi-realistic faces plastered on them!

This ROM was generously donated to me by ChronoMoogle and dumped by ikari_01 of #snesfreaks. A few things of note: The header is slightly different from the one in the NND video upload. In particular, the header is “ＢＳ－Ｘシューティング” instead of the “DEZAEMON BSX” in said video.
The ROM has simple and easy emulator compatibility – it appears to work on anything that isn’t ZSNES. (I ran it on ZSNES by removing the header data, interestingly enough.)

DEZAEMON BSX VERSION – BS-X Shooting | ＢＳ－Ｘシューティング
ROM DOWNLOAD

Ah, not done yet, though, not done yet. As like days of… uh, a bit further back, I got two magazines to show as well. And one is kind of not what we expected. In fact, when Callis dumped it, he didn’t even realize it was a magazine; the original filename was “Horse Data.bs”.

And starting from that screen, can you really blame him?
Previous bootups that went into a black screen with text were Data Packs. The one major difference is, this one had 6 lines full. I thought it’d be worth investigating, so I tried booting it myself;

Looking at this header, I think it says… “Satesupo DX 4″ or some like that, yes? Actually, I’m literally figuring this out as I write this, lol!

So I open it up in BSNES, take a printscreen and then-

Woah wait what?

This is a very text-laden magazine, of course. It’s not in any of the previous formats I got used to, though! L and R do some funky navigation things, and…

I don’t think I’ve seen a chart quite like this in the other magazines!

So far, I’ve only gotten this to boot on BSNES, too. Callis seemed unable to boot it even on a real hardware setup. Weird!

Satesupo DX Dai-4-Gou | サテスポDX第4号
ROM download
please excuse the misnamed file. This is kind of last-second here.

Alright, one more.

This last magazine is in a more familiar format.
“Gal Kan Bazooka!” appears to be a magazine about girls. I like girls. I’m not so sure I like bazookas, though. They’re kinda hazardous.

Reading from the top-down, this is a very text-heavy magazine.

It has very few pictures, even. I mean, I think I got half of them in these screenshots as it is. Ouchie.

If my personal contact info was on a commercial Super Famicom product, should I be proud, or very, very concerned?

But enough random comments. At the moment I only got this one to boot on SNES9XPP XE. I didn’t check the header – assuming for whatever reason it’s not reading right on emulators due to it. But too lazy at the moment to adjust it.

Gal Kan Bazooka Dai-5-Kan | ギャル缶Ｂａｚｏｏｋａ！ 第5缶
ROM download

I’ll have to backpedal a bit before getting into what I wanted to say, because a bit ago, ChronoMoogle had me looking back at the previous Sutte Hakkun Event Version 2 dumps from around here.

It turned out that when he tried to play the ROMs, the October 19th dump had screwed-up level layouts. The November 25th dump, on the other hand, is identical to the older “good” dumps. This even showed when I tried a checksum/maker fix and the checksum ended up matching the old dump. Therefore, it’s safe to assume the Oct. 19th one is bad.

A bit later, Callis sent me a batch of dumps yet again.

In it, was this Sutte Hakkun Event 98 Version ROM dump. Like the previous redumps, checksum/maker values were absent. I tried fixing and then plopping into an emulator, but it wouldn’t boot up.

I told Callis that I believed the dump was bad. He did a comparison between it and the previous dump, and told me the results…

Here’s where it gets weird, and where it gets the “1-byte-different” title. Technically, that’s not entirely accurate – the download date is different, and the maker and checksum being absent makes for additional different bytes. However, those don’t factor into the checksum or the overall game data.

The very 2nd byte of the ROM (0×01 in hex), however, does. And it’s an “00″ when it used to be an “0B”. With every other byte being the same, doesn’t this make for a strange situation?
A “fix” is easy – simply changing the byte back will have the ROM boot again, although you’ll also want the checksum/maker fixes to have the game detect as Satellaview-based in emulators. Yet, the question of why it’s even like this in the first place remains.

Continuing where I left off, we’re almost done this game.

annndd now we -are- done this game.

Again, any one with additional info on this game’s plot, origins, or whatnot, please contact me.