I’m writing this one down in light of the fact that many people may not know how to properly emulate Satellaview content. In particular, Soundlink games have difficulty running.
The standard emulators of choice for many people – SNES9X and ZSNES – are not necessarily the optimal choice for Satellaview emulation. In fact, I do not know how to boot many of the ROMs on them properly. Therefore, I use alternative emulators.
The easiest option to use is apparently a modification of SNES9X called “SNES9X SE”. It was written in part for improved Satellaview support.
SNES9X SE
Most ROMs will boot on it, although emulation is not perfected. It is the easiest to use because it can fake Bios emulation, so you do not need the Bios ROM and setup is easier than the others.
My personal preference, however, is SNESGT. It’s homepage is here;
SNESGT Homepage
This requires a bit of work to get working. I have written a tutorial here;
BS Zelda Forums – Broadcast Game emulation tutorial
I’m moving the tutorial here in this post edit. 🙂
Compatibility is more or less the same as SNES9XSE, but there’s less notable glitches on SNESGT, and the ability to modify the game’s real-time clock as you wish is a great touch that’ll let you go quicklly to segments of a game you may wish to re-view.
Before loading a BS-X ROM, you go to Options – > Settings. It should pop up a settings screen. Look to the left of it.
There, click on “BS” and you’ll see this menu. This is specifically for BS-X games.
The most important things to do here are to check “Use BSX-ROM” and have a BS-X BIOs linked to in the “BSX-ROM file”. The BS-X BIOs can be found a various BIOS-hosting sites and the BS Zelda Shrine, likely under the name “BS-X BIOS” or “SATELLAVIEW BIOS”. If this BIOs does not work for you, you may have to remove it’s ROM header, but since I do not know if it’s necessary for SNESGT (it -IS- for BSNES), I’ll wait for my BSNES ROM load tutorial for more on that. Another possibility is that your ROM may still be in compressed formats like .zip – find an extractor to get the .SMC or .SFC file within.
The other settings are to customize your experience. Out of preference, set the clock to the beginning of the hour, so that you see the entirety of the game’s Live Broadcast. 7 minutes in may work for BS Zelda, but for BS Tantei Club and BS F-Zero, segments will be skipped.
“Boot from BS-X ROM” is for Download games and Magazines, as opposed to Live broadcast games. Note that some download games will not boot in this mode, and need to play without it.
“Save BSX Sram separately” makes individual sram saves for each BS-X game, as opposed to lumping them in a single file. For episodic live broadcast games, you might want this UN-checked so that data can more seamlessly transfer over.
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After all these settings are configured, load a BS-X ROM as if it was a standard ROM file, and it should boot. Double check these instructions if it doesn’t. If you still have questions, ask me them here, and I’ll consider them when revising this.
My next article on emulation will likely be about Data Expansions. It will use BSNES.
