A Satellaview research blog.

Category: Downloads

The ability to download programs from a Satellite was one of the Satellaview’s majorly advertised features.

Downloads were put up on a schedule for people to play, with programming being shuffled and recycled regularly.
Each download had it’s own set of restrictions – for example, select games could not be executed more than a set number of times. In spite of this, many of the games are cult classics.

DOUBLE ROM Release – Kouryaku Casino Bar Roulette + Game Tora no Ooana Special 2/24 (edited 12/4/09)

Horray! 2 releases in one Blog post!

Unfortunately, it’s not because I’m being generous. This release has some peculiarities.

To start off, “Kouryaku Casino Bar” might be a somewhat familiar name to someone who has a full ROM set of some sort..
You might’ve even seen this title screen before!

KCB Title screen

Now, this specific ROM dump, what’s so different about it? Well, it seems that all I can do with it is play the Roulette game.

Roulette surree is borring around heree

There’s also an option which returns you to the BIOs, and some… other option. I forget.

Anyway, yeah. Before I was able to do all that, I had to try to boot up the ROM. And there’s where I had my problems.

On SNES9X, this game will boot up without sound, and for some reason will not let you play the actual Roulette part (wtf?) so I tried booting the ROM up in BSNES… to no avail. Huh?

Callis told me he dumped it from a memory pack which also had “Game Tora no Ooana Special 2/24” on it. I requested he send me the “full” dump with both their data, and after I got it, I was able to have BSNES boot the data from both the games up successfully.

DOUBLE Huh?

No, I don’t know why. I don’t think it makes any sense, either. It just happens! Is there some grand mystery of the Satellaview only Byuu knows? Ah, but I can’t be speculating. ^^; Gotta keep moving.

Now, as for that “Special”… It’s possible you may have problems booting the individual ROM of this up automatically in BSNES, but now that there’s a manual load option, I don’t think that should be a problem. That being said, I didn’t test it. 😛

Aren't you excited now? :P

It’s a new magazine! No worries though, gamers, this one isn’t about music this time, I swear! It’s actually related to videogames, and seems to feature some Q&A, and a pretty long article on a Pro Yakyuu game which I can’t quite identify…

Actually, I was just too lazy to look it up. The 3 should be a giveaway.

You might recognize the name of the magazine as matching a radio program I showed on the blog before. :3

So, yeah, for this double release, the RAR file has both the original dump with the merged ROMs, and the split ROMs. I’d recommend running the merged ROM in BSNES if you actually want to play anything.

Kouryaku Caisno Bar Roulette + Game Tora no Ooana Special 2/24
攻略カジノバー ルーレット + ゲーム虎の大穴スペシャル 2/24
ROM DOWNLOAD
CLICK HERE

EDIT/UPDATE:
Madhatter has shown to me a bit of a revelation about the nature of the Kouryaku Casino Bar downloads! They’re apparently quite a bit more special than I initally anticipated!

“Also the Nichibutsu Casino has always fascinated me to just due to the BS Zelda connection. To quote from the September 19, 1995 News Wall:

☆発覚！ 秘密クラブ建設計画
“街”の中で鍵がかかって入れない、謎の民家。
１０月１日から、ここが秘密クラブとしてオープンする。
カジノバー（カジノ・ニチブツ）になるのだ。
ただし、ここに入れるのは秘密クラブ入館証を買った人か、「ＢＳゼルダの伝説」でトライフォースを８個手に入れた人だけだ。
ワクワクするね！

☆Secret Club construction plans revealed!
A previously locked house of mystery within the “City” opens as a secret club on October 1.
Casino Bar (Casino Nichibutsu).
However, the only people that may be admitted are those who have obtained eight pieces of Triforce and who gained the secret club entrance certificate from “BS The Legend of Zelda”.
How exciting!
(rough translation)”

… Man, have I been given a swerve! I have quite a few questions about how a “Secret Club” would be handled on the BS-X, but regardless, it seems I’ve just released a BS Zelda prize. O_O;

ROM RELEASE – AK LIVE Hit Gang

My apologies if people waiting to enthusiastically play games find my current ROM releasings boring. As I’ve said before, I’m throwing up the stranger oddities of the ROM Dumps first.

So, you’re probably gonna ask me what makes this one strange.

Basically, one day among a few other ROMs Callis wanted me to sort through, he found a bit of what looked like bootable data in one of them and showed this to me..

Onos, the text!

Obviously, you can't read this.

He asked me if the text data was corrupt, but having seen a few cases like this before, I proposed to him that for some reason the emulator he was using could not detect it as a BS-X BIOs compatible ROM, and therefore would not do a font call, which led to the corrupt fonts.

After obtaining the ROM myself, I tried popping it in every emulator I got only to get the same result.
Realizing that it might need it’s header hacked to boot up, I decided to pop it open in a Hex editor and-

This is seriously wrong.

For anyone wondering what I’m trying to point out, basically the header is somehow, well, messed up;
1) The byte for filesize is not one that’s functional with the BS-X (it’s 4mb according to ucon64 – an impossible filesize.)
2) There is NO checksum or inverse checksum
3) Not highlighted on here, but the “Maker” value is -blank-.

to summarize, if you’ve read this a long time ago, you’d kinda have an idea what’s wrong here.

After Callis assured me that was how the ROM was dumped, I went to making a header hack. The hack shall be included in with the ROM upload, as an IPS Patch. Then, after applying it, you should get -this-…

Yay!

All better!

instead of corruptness over there. Indeed, my initial hunch was correct, although the circumstances a bit more bizarre than I expected.

Now, that may leave you wondering, is there anything important in this ROM?

Um...

Well… not really. Besides the state of the dump, the ROM’s a AK LIVE Magazine, made to promote the band and their music. Of course, this still makes one wonder how the ROM ended up the way it was – many “locked” ROMs simply have the “Number of tries” value set to the “lock”. Was it really necessary to remove the checksum…?

Click around here to download!
AK LIVE Hit Gang
AK LIVEヒットギャング
ROM & IPS


Dynamitracer – … I don’t know. (ALSO: On technical difficulties)

First off, apologizes for earlier – no video, picture, or music links were working for a while. This problem has since been resolved. Don’t want to elaborate on the technical details, but aye.

Following up on Treasure Conflix – there were also some NND uploads for Dynamitracer. These include some gameplay and the ending, but I don’t know if they comprise the whole game… it’s a very weird game, after all.

スクウェア幻の名作　ダイナマイ・トレーサー　part1

スクウェア幻の名作　ダイナマイ・トレーサー　part2

ダイナマイトレーサーＥＤ（キャプテンアーリー）

Read More…Read More…

Treasure Conflix – played all the way through in 4 videos.

Treasure Conflix is a peculiar aerial-dogfighting/RPG hybrid by Squaresoft. I’ve posted a bit of footage from it before, but this particular post features footage that emcompasses a whole game playthrough.

Anyone who may be wondering how to play this game or what to do next may like to refer to this.

スクウェア　［トレジャーコンフリクス］　ダイジェスト_01
スクウェア　［トレジャーコンフリクス］　ダイジェスト_02
スクウェア　［トレジャーコンフリクス］　ダイジェスト_03
スクウェア　［トレジャーコンフリクス］　ダイジェスト_04

Read More…Read More…

Satellaview Soundtracks – Konae-chan no DokiDoki Pengin Kazoku

The music for Konae-chan no DokiDoki Pengin Kazoku has been posted on SNESMusic.org.
I ripped this SPC set myself using a variant of BSNES that supports SPC dumping. Fairly impressive, 😀

I’m posting streaming MP3s up for you guys who don’t use SPC players. The music is short and repetitive, but has a bit of a nice retro-arcade feel to go along with the, well, retro-arcade feel of the game itself.

Title Screen

Round Start

Level Gameplay

Round Clear

Round Results

Everyone’s Together

Ending

Game Over

Final Score


Sutte Hakkun – NP vs. BS

When I tried to look up on “Sutte Hakkun”, I was guided to Wikipedia.

For once, an article with a lot of useful info on a game.
But, are all these differences that notable between versions?
Since I couldn’t find any of the games going around on sale, I once again took the cheap-way-out of emulating… but unlike most people who go straight to the NP Version, I started with the “BS Event Version”.

Read More…Read More…

Koi ha Balance – Battle of Lovers

Squaresoft seemed to like treating the Satellaview like a little playground. Games like Treasure Conflix and Dynamitracer seemed to throw around a different atmosphere than their typical “Final Fantasy” work.

And then this came along and pushed it a bit over the edge.

Koi Ha Balance – Battle of Lovers is a board game. Yes, a board game.
It’s about scoring with lots of girls. Literally (although not sexually).
It goes hilariously over the top in nearly everything it does.

Read More…Read More…

Listen to some strange-sounding SPC rips.

A few weeks ago I’ve tried making a go at ripping music from Satellaview ROM SPCs looking for some songs that aren’t going around in common sets.

I’m still mastering the ripping art at the moment. You can see some of my results here.

http://kiddocabbusses.tryhappy.net/BSSPCRips/

For you guys who don’t have SPC Players but want to take a listen to some of the rips, I’ve Chun-Yu’d them to MP3 form for your listening torture – er, pleasure.

BS SUTTE HAKKUN – STORY INTRO

BDASH


BUSTERS – DIGITAL MAGAZINE

DO-RE-MI NO. 2

A few notes to the other SPC rippers out there – these are my first real attempts at ripping these, so I’m sorry if there’s any grave errors.
for the ones in which I just have the name of the ROM.spc, those songs are the only songs I could access. Most of the song names for ROMs with more than one song were made up based on some text that was on the page along with the music.

(EDIT: I’ve had a problem with these MP3s sounding weird on the embed, but not on Winamp. Therefore I’m direct-linking the Mp3s on top of the embeds, in case other people also have this problem.)