A Satellaview research blog.

Trying to understand a Satellaview ROM’s SRAM system.

Something that’s confused me for a while about download games on the Satellaview, is how the SRAM stuff functions. Mostly, because it tends to be a problem when I try hacking around with ROMs. (I tend to try to get random ROMs to boot on BS-X in BSNES in my spare time.)

For reference, this has been an issue with getting various ROMs to play in older emulator versions and ROM Copiers, as well as with doing projects such as fan translations. Unfortunately, I do not have old tech notes on the Radical Dreamers fan translation lying around my computer to help with this at the moment.

I figured that to attempt to analyze this, I’d look into three of the retail-game ROM Dumps that support SRAM and compare them to the dumps of the retail carts.

– Actraiser
– Super Nazo Puyo
– Zelda No Densetsu: Kamigami no Triforce

Unfortunately, this just ended up confusing me even more. Running the original Actraiser up against the BS Counterpart in UltraCompare on Ubuntu showed no differences outside of the header (A measly 25 byes of difference?), and the same went for Super Nazo Puyo. As for Kamigami? There’s three different revisions to choose from, and the BS Version is slightly off from -all- of them in various random spots (and with a lot of “FFs in place of 00s” which are not helpful, either.)

I currently don’t have much of anything in terms of notes to help me out here, either. So much for my quick attempt to port SMW…



2 thoughts on Trying to understand a Satellaview ROM’s SRAM system.

  1. The Sutte Hakkun games. In fact, one bit of a minor update.
    As a bit of an experiment, I tried “Reversing” the BS-X headers into standard SFC headers.
    On Super Nazo Puyo, Actraiser and Kamigami no Triforce, this somehow got them working fine in ZSNES. However, this doesn’t seem to affect the Square games or Sutte Hakkun games, and they still have screwy SRAM behaviors on ZSNES.

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