October 14, 2024 | Satellablog

There’s been a lot of incidents going on lately that threaten the ROM preservation scene, including an attack on the Internet Archive (It’s currently down as of this writing and it’s affecting how the article is being written!) and the typical Nintendo site takedowns.

Somehow, though, I’m still pushing on.

This is not the expected October release, BTW, this is something I’m doing now because I hit some good, juicy hidden data from exploring the dump!

So what do we got?

Well, actually, we gotta do a recap before this one, because we’re pulling from a series of dumps here.
So, let’s go way back, to the days of GoodSNES. There was a ROM on their set simply called “BS Super Famicom Wars”.

Upon looking this up, on various sites, including the archives of Satellaivew History Museum, it turned out there were actually four distinct broadcasts of this.

(This has been edited to omit parts of the listing not relevant for today’s release)

03/01(日) スーパーファミコンウォーズスーパーファミコンウォーズ　ＢＳ版『ソラマメジマ』 | Super Famicom Wars BS Ban “Soramejima”
03/08(日) スーパーファミコンウォーズスーパーファミコンウォーズ　ＢＳ版『ハゴロモジマ』 | Super Famicom Wars BS Ban “Hagarojima”
3/15(日) スーパーファミコンウォーズスーパーファミコンウォーズ　ＢＳ版『ノアカザントウ』| Super Famicom Wars BS Ban “Noakazantou”
03/22(日) スーパーファミコンウォーズ４週目スーパーファミコンウォーズ　ＢＳ版『ツキノワジマ』 | Super Famicom Wars BS Ban 4-shuume “Tsukinowajima”

Turns out the dump on GoodSNES was “Tsukinowajima”. Oddly, on the listing here on the site, it’s the only one given an episode number. ( 4-shuume )

A while back, a different Super Famicom Wars broadcast, with episode 2, “Hagarojima” was recovered.
… We did have that on this blog, didn’t we? I can’t recall when we got an article up for it, so let me just link this here just in case;
Super Famicom Wars BS Ban – Hagarojima

Recently, a third volume was recovered – and by that, I mean it’s both the third recovered, and the third in the series.

This is “Noakazantou”.

As you can see, all of these are pretty similar, so after obtaining these and seeing the GoodSNES one, I figured if I could compare them I’d be able to find some way to toggle through the episodes to access the “missing” map, which according to the Satellaview History Museum would be the first one, “Soramejima.”

The summary of what ended up happening would basically be “I got quite a bit more than I bargained for”.

Going through the process of what I did would be boring so I’ll cut to the chase; the primary difference in each episode is hex values 363F6 and 363F8 respectively.

The latter value is still not entirely understood but it seems tied to the broadcast order, as each of the recovered ROMs is marked sequentially with 02, 03 and 04 respectively. My speculation is that this changes the password generation at the end of winning a map. Further updates on this may be necessary.

The former value is the interesting one… tinker with it, and you can change the map!
So, if Soramejima was the first map, would that make it 01?

Why yes, yes it would. (Yes, my line of thinking is that naive, and it just happened to work this time. Go fig.)

But that’s peculiar… Hagaro-jima is 06, Noakazantou 0B and Tsukinowa-jima 0C. These hex values don’t exactly go up in a sequence that looks predictable or expected at first glance.

So… what’s 02? I mean, 00 is a crash, so certainly there’d be nothing at-

Oh wait WHAT

There’s MORE maps! Maps that were not officially broadcast are in fact buried, unused, in the ROM data! They are fully playable, almost as if they may had intended to be broadcast!

You can tinker with the value for a total of 16 maps (The 4 that were broadcast, and 12 unused ones).

At the time it feels like 16 is the most I can get out of this. Attempts to break any higher will lead to bugged results.
But there’s one more really good bit: If I set 363F6 to 12, I get something resembling a proper, in-game map select, where I can scroll up or down and choose one of the 16 maps to play. (You can also try scrolling past that amount to buggy results. Not recommended.)

Perhaps with more tinkering someone can enable 2-player mode or something? Or disable BGM, or plant the retail version’s fan translation to this. Would be great for the Satellaview+ audience.

Why 12 of the 16 complete and fully playable maps were never officially broadcast is probably something we’ll never truly know the reason for. It’s especially unfortunate to think about, since St.GIGA often lamented being starved for games!

Super Famicom Wars BS Ban – Noakazantou
ROM Download

Incidentally, you may be wondering “With all this data, can you replicate the missing broadcast’s ROM?”
Well, I can certainly try. Here’s my attempt:

Super Famicom Wars BS Ban – Soramejima (Theoretical Replica)
ROM Download

I admit, I kinda consider a reconstructed replica to be a bit of a controversial thing to distribute. I can easily make something like that for any retail game I can spot on a schedule, but while I’ve tinkered with the idea in private (mostly to test to see how accurately I can get it done), I’ve never distributed results like that on here because I didn’t want to flood the databases with modified ROMs.

For that reason I’m making sure this is clearly labeled in the filename, and to request that no one remove that label. There’s always the chance an actual 8M dump will come along and it may end up looking different from what I got (VERY SMALL CHANCE considering how the data is so similar between episodes, but I digress).

Anyway, one more ROM to distribute.

And I bet you guys will like this one above all the “official” ROMs and “Official” replicas.

Modified Super Famicom Wars BS Ban ROM – all Maps unlocked
ROM Download

This one has the scrolling map, so you can play any map!

Since there’s now a bunch of Super Famicom Wars ROMs I’ve put them all in a set so they are easier to sort.
Download it here!