A few days ago ChronoMoogle invited me into the euIRCnet chatroom #snesfreaks. Being the curious person I am, I accepted. #snesfreaks is the official chatroom of Snesfreaks.com, a German SNES fansite. NOTE TO SELF: Google Translate is your friend. Sometimes.
There, I learned that ikari – the same one byuu dubbed “Hero of the month”. Dawww, I want a title like that! – was working on… some stuff. *coughcough*
Yes, I got vague there. I’ll just say “A method to load Satellaview Homebrew onto an actual Satellaview/SFC” for the time being, although I’m certain the folks who pay attention to the blog’ll put two-n-two together.
Potential fears aside, though, seeing the attempt as it unfolded was interesting, and we learned quite a bit more about the Satellaview’s technical aspects. The articles on things such as the Satellaview Header format are being updated as we speak with bits of new technical info.
Among one of the more significant things; To start, it appears another way to invoke error 41 has been found. Error 41, apparently, happens when an 8M pack fails to “finish” writing properly (There is a piece of code in BS-X itself to finish up a write in some manner.)
Also, the header value previously identified as “ROM size” apparently is a bit more than that – both the Size -and- the file allocation in the 8M Memory pack. The current draft (where a graph of the exact details hasn’t been ironed out yet) looks like this;
“The value can be regarded as an allocation map, i.e. where the data is actually stored on the Data Pack. One bit corresponds to one megabit block on the Data Pack, with the MSB being the last “page” ($ce0000-$cfffff) and the LSB being the first ($c00000-$c1ffff).”
On a real-life memory pack, if the filesize/allocation isn’t correct, the ROM will pew an “error 09” as if it’s checksum was bad.
This info should be helpful in future ROM dumps and emulator releases.
Ikari also has a 8M Pack ROM dumper, meaning there could be more ROMs coming around soon. Whew! I had such a dry spell, I was dying of thirst!
Luigiblood and Callis have popped into the chat to listen to the conversations as well… speaking of which, LuigiBlood’s BS-X Project is still going, and is having a level of progress which honestly has surprised me. I can’t wait to see it in action!
Oh, and MadHatter? That Wikia contributor was me. Sorry for being really lazy on the Wiki, honestly. I’ll edit some of the articles with some extra details here n’ there.
Ahh, it’s been a while since I’ve actually felt this active with the Satellaview developments…
