Satellablog

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.

This ROM dump is a bit of a story.
A few days ago Ikari_01 came up to me and told me that he dumped something named “Tamori no Picross 6/26″. Being the eager person who is interested in new ROM dumps, I wanted to take a look at it.

Ah, one catch, though.


It was one of -those- kind of ROM dumps again.

I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to fix the checksum. Y’know why? I was stumped at why ucon64 wasn’t giving me the correct one for a while, until I asked Luigiblood for some help. He looked at the ROM, asked me for some details about the ROM filesize, and then called my attention to the excess data in the lower half of ikari’s 8M Pack dump…

Ah, what could this be? Based on the tiles being RPG graphics and a bit of text in the ROM itself, Luigiblood and I believe there was once an “RPG Tsukuru SUPER DANTE” data piece previously in this 8M Pack.

He told me that ucon64 gives the proper checksum when this extra data was removed. He was right. Thus, an IPS patch for the ROM was made. It both corrects the checksum/maker data and removes the “RPG Tsukuru SUPER DANTE” data, which should let the game be played in BSNES.

So, what is all this effort for?
As you can see in the Youtube video embed, this is a new Tamori no Picross ROM. It appears to be just a few weeks after the previous ROM dump chronologically, and has some obvious similarities to it. However, the puzzles are different… and so is that title screen, for some reason.

Tamori no Picross 6/26 | タモリのピクロス 6/26
ROM+IPS Patch (for headers, removal of excess data)
Click here to download

Since I’ve been having a bit of a computer shuffle lately, I figured I should finish up releasing these ROMs before I forget to. Unfortunately, this means they aren’t all entirely researched thoroughly, but it’s better to make sure they’re up now, I guess.

A bit ago, Callis sent me this ROM. While it has the RPG Tsukuru brand, it does not seem to be a RPG Tsukuru 2 add-on, but rather a standalone “RPG Tsukuru SUPER DANTE” product.

“Jewel of Live” is a seemingly simple Dragon Quest-like JRPG. With a focus on grinding and little to nothing in terms of puzzles or exploration, it’s probably not something one would normally consider much fun to play. Perhaps it’s plot is compelling? Unfortunately, I do not believe I know enough Japanese to fan-translate it. It seems a bit complex for the simple gameplay, though.

I’ve tried researching the nature of this – is it an indie-developed product? A fan-made product put up for distribution? Or just something ASCII put up themselves to promote their RPG making tool? Again, hoping someone who has more info can give me some more details.

The game should run in BSNES, SNESGT, or SNES9X.

Jewel of Live (RPG Tsukuru SUPER DANTE) |ＪＥＷＥＬ ＯＦ ＬＩＶＥ (ＲＰＧツクール ＳＵＰＥＲ ＤＡＮＴＥ)
ROM DOWNLOAD

As typical, my next two releases are magazines. First up….

A Magazine about Japanese “Idols”. I do not think I have this specific one’s proper title, but I can clearly make out メディア・ストロベリー (Media Strawberry), so it’s reason for now to call this “Media Strawberry Volume 12″.

Among the pictures you’ll see are a mixture of real-life and… these really crude drawings. I thought people liked Idols because they looked pretty? Indeed, I’m fairly certain these are supposed to be cartoonish interpretations of the actual idols. Aw, well.

I’ve tried googling up the “Media Strawberry” term, but none of the results appear related to this. It’s possible the folks behind this magazine are defunct or changed their identities. In the meantime, here’s the ROM.

Media Strawberry Volume 12 | メディア・ストロベリー VOL. 12
ROM Download

After this last one, I’ll be more or less finished releasing all I’ve gotten up to this point. Here’s hoping the next few months have a slew of new material to work with!

To start, notice how I got a screencap from BSNES this time? It’s because you’ll need it to run this one.
After a while of trying to read the Katakana at the title screen of this, I… gave up, checked Wikipedia, and noticed it matched with ドレミでふぁ～！ (DoReMi DeFa~!)
This appears to be from the original “DoReMi DeFa~!” Line – previous ROM dumps were of “DoReMi DeFa 2~!”, which covered the same material but in a notably different formatting…

COMPARISONS:



“DoReMi DeFa~!” is a music-themed magazine which has things like TOP charts and whatnot. As we can see in this issue, Bob Marley was big in this time, for some reason.

DoReMi DeFa~! Volume 6 5/4 | ドレミでふぁ～！VOL. 6 5/4
ROM Download