A Satellaview research blog.

Month: April 2010

Internals of a BS-X Cartridge.

Actually posting this because it seems the ZSNES forum is down and so I can’t track these down there. I believe posted there was also a picture of the Satellaview base’s internals, but I seemingly lost track of it. Blast!

BS-X Internals 1
BS-X Internals 2

I’m not nearly as technically knowledged on these kind of things as Callis, d4s, and many other 16-bit experts are, but I’d like to believe whatever info I supply on here is as good as their word anyhow. ^^;

Of note are two chips in the back, the “4M PSRAM” chip and the “256K SRAM” chip.
I forgot how much of this is speculation and how much of it is actually tested/verified, but the 4M PSRAM is believed to be the extra memory space the Satellaview uses, where many key “Portions” of Soundlink Game content disappeared to – including that BS Fire Emblem CG Art and BS Zelda: Inishie no Sekiban dungeon tiles. As far as I know, there are no PSRAM dumps going around.

The “256K SRAM”… I’m guessing this is the standard SRAM with more traditional “Game save” content. I do know that many BS-X Cartridges going around, even today, have save data about the world of BS-X inside them. This data has the ability to store things such as the last season the BS-X was played in as well as various seemingly-BS-X-related “items” you can use in the item menu.
I’ve wanted to see some of these SRAMs dumped so I could investigate this a bit more deeply, but there does not seem to be any BS-X SRAM dumping tools around. Rather unfortunate. 🙁

Since I can’t think of a good way to close this post, here’s a picture of the internals of an 8M Memory Pack which I wandered across on Google Image search.


Redumps. Because sometimes identical ROMs happen, except for the times they aren’t -that- identical.

I posted an upload of these before in various ROM sites, but now I’ve checked them out in slightly more detail than before.

These are some redumps of previous dumps. Although most of these redumps – much like the new dumps – were pure chance dumps (with the exception of the Panel De Pon 98′ Redump, which I bought with my own cash), there’s quite a bit of good and/or interesting to take note of nonetheless.

Due to the nature of these being redumps and many of them being hard to tell from the initial releases, I’ve taken into marking the Month/Day values in the ROM Headers as part of the ROM filename – similar to how GoodTools and No-Intro manage multiple similar-appearing ROM dumps.

Currently these redumps are being hosted elsewhere – chalk it up to mere laziness.

I’ll start with this one. Should be familiar if you checked out the blog just a bit ago –

Gambler Jiko Chuushinsha 2 – Dorapon Quest.
Marked December 20th as opposed to the previous dump’s December 19th. It is otherwise identical down to the checksum.

Let’s Panchinko Nate Gindama 4.
Date is set as November 24th. The dump previously floating around is dated March 21st.

Panel De Pon ’98 Event Version.
Dated December 28th – the previous dump is marked January 11th.

Zelda no Densetsu Kamigami no Triforce.
Dated November 30th. The previous dump was dated May 21st. This dump is “locked” (It was apparently played to it’s 5-bootup limit), so you can’t run it on BSNES, even though the previous dump runs fine on it last I checked. It otherwise appears to be the same game, of course.

Cu On Pa SFC.
This dump is dated June 15th. The previous was dated May 31st. This also has had it’s boot-ups exhausted and is marked as “locked”.

A bad BS F-Zero 2 Practice dump. The title screen graphics are corrupted. It otherwise seems to play fine. Weird…….

Multple Yoshi no Panepon – BS Ban dumps.
Marked January 2nd, June 14th, and July 5th. I think this is ample evidence to say that this data is fairly common and easy to find.

Peculiar Sutte Hakkun BS Version 2 dumps.
These seem to be a similar case as what the “AK Live Hit Gang” dump was – checksum and maker values were zero’d out. Due to this BSNES and SNESGT won’t run them. They are dated October 19th and November 25th, respectively.


Kirby no Omachahako – Hoshi Kuzushi.
Dated Feb. 26th. THIS DUMP WORKS FOLKS. YOU CAN PLAY IT. IT RUNS ON NEARLY ANYTHING. IT’S A KIRBY GAME. C’MON ALREADY.