A Satellaview research blog.

BS Dragon Quest

(WARNING: OLD POST. May be obsolete.)

These videos were originally on NicoNicoDouga, but I’m not sure of their position on things such as redistributing videos. If anyone has a complaint, they can post a comment and I’ll remove the offense.

So, right.

I’ll start with these BS Dragon Quest videos. Why? Because the videos of it are abridged, making for easier viewing.

First, an abridged “week 1”. Huh? Week 1? Yes. Remember when I mentioned this experimented with “Episodic Content”? Soundlink titles, downloads, and magazines, among other things, were distributed in episodes. Soundlink titles usually in a set of four.

Seeing the gameplay of this, you should note the few differences between this and it’s non-BS-X Counterpart, “Dragon Quest 1 and 2” for the Super Famicom.

This next video is Week 2, abridged.

When you went to the next week of gameplay, you had to re-download the game. The save data was stored in the BS-X SRAM for the new episode to read, to continue where you left off.

What I have of the third week is split into 2 parts, and seems incomplete. This is the last of the BS Dragon Quest videos from an actual broadcast that I have.

And with that, you should have a decent idea of how the game played.

Now I shall go off on a tangent here, directed specifically to ROM users, because this specific game is a peculiar topic when it comes to it’s ROM.

There is only a single ROM dump of BS Dragon Quest that I have. This ROM dump apparently has all 4 “weeks” of the game available in an option screen, with the chance to choose things like your starting items and some of your stats. This would not make sense in the BS-X’s actual distribution. Therefore, I must ask: What, exactly, is this “BS Dragon Quest” ROM I have?

Now tossing in the original NicoNicoDouga links for proper crediting’s sake.

BSドラクエ第一週
BSドラクエ第二週
BSドラクエ第三週1/2
BSドラクエ第三週2/2


3 thoughts on BS Dragon Quest

  1. One possibility is that they broadcasted new ASM routines downloaded into Satellaview’s SRAM or PSRAM among with the actual ROM, and used those routines to automatically select which week and scene the player was supposed to be in.

    However that doesn’t explain why the menu is left visible, though you would never see the menu during broadcasts or after them, since you couldn’t boot up the game from the satellaview menu.
    ..After all, what we’re doing here dumping these games and emulating them isn’t actually what the Big N intended 😀

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