A Satellaview research blog.

Category: General Information

Blow your Leap Year Gambling.

Alright, since it’s Feb. 29 and Feb. 29th isn’t gonna happen too often, let me put this up!


I’ve got this dump by ikari which has -two- Kouryaku Casino bars in it. But, before I begin to describe them I need to make sure I got something clarified, partly for my own head’s sake;

Read More…Read More…

No$ SNES/SFC Dev document.

LuigiBlood linked this over at byuu’s forum.

Although I can’t necessarily make it all out, since LuigiBlood said it has more Satellaview technical documentation than anything prior, it sounds important, so I’m linking it here.

Updates to bsnes-sx2 probably won’t be too far behind, now.


How much would you pay for BS-X Shooting?

So, a while back I was linked to Solaris Japan, an import store, basically. Nice places, folks. Import video games can be fun, take it from someone who has a PC-FX, and a Satellaview. 😛

Ah, yes. First thing I ran a search on? Satellaview stuff.

The results? “Boy, this is really expensive.”

Well, Radical Dreamers and Treasure Conflix, being from Square’s line of games, tend to go for that price anyhow, sometimes on an unlucky-for-me-bid-day even higher on YJA. I’m not so sure about the F-Zero 2 one, though…

The big thing to see here, though, is the entry for BS-X Shooting.

Check it out. 49,800 yen. Same as the Square games.

Now, here’s the thing. Is it a fair price to ask?… I don’t know!
You see, this is the very first time I’ve ever seen this game listed as for sale.

Yes, the ROM dump was released here.
To pad a bit more to the story behind it, though, ChronoMoogle was supplied it’s 8M Pack without any prior knowledge of what it’s contents were – and was pleasantly surprised when he first booted it up. His BS-X Shooting is the first one I’ve known to still be in existence (Since it’d be hard to say if the old video recording of the game came from someone who had the cart or not.).

He might be even more surprised now if he’s reading this. SolarisJapan has stated BS-X Shooting’s value to be equal to the rarest and most demanded of Satellaview 8M Pack software. If someone actually forks over that money, then it’ll set the precedent, and he’ll kinda have a small fortune in his hands.

Question is… well, would anyone buy it? It may be one of the rarest games, but with the ROM dump in circulation (and fairly easy to emulate) it doesn’t have the air of exclusivity that I’d suppose Radical Dreamers and Treasure Conflix have…
I guess only time will tell, though…

SolarisJapan’s “Contact” section says you can request them to search for something if they don’t have it shown on the site. I’m wondering whether I should ask if they have anything shown in the Undumped Satellaview list…

EDIT: Updating. I figured after I wrote this I’d contact SolarisJapan with their reasoning. I got a pretty interesting answer.

The price for BSX shooting derived from the price Japanese stores would pay if you sold it to them. They pay about the same amount as for RD or TC, even though I have never seen it in any store before.
I doubt anyone is going to buy any of the higher priced titles anyways, but figured it would be a nice thing to have them listed in the shop as a rarity. 😉

So, this pretty much confirms that at least someone -will- pay that much for BS-X Shooting, at least if they’re the owner of said Japanese stores.


Buried in the depths of the ROMs: Satellaview music

As ROMs have been being dumped, so have their music contents been ripped into small and easy-to-store SPC forms, thanks to nensondubois over at snesmusic.org.

He’s ripped a lot of SPCs from the Satellaview magazines in the past few months, which I didn’t think was a very bright idea at first, quite honestly.

Silly me, I should’ve suspected they’d have a buncha unused sound effects and music, but, hey, sometimes being proven wrong actually feels good!

Read More…Read More…

Watch out for potential YJA scammers! (False ID’d 8M packs)

This is a heads-up to people willing to risk money on 8M Packs on YJA. Matthew Callis (and I by association) ended up falling for a misleading YJA Item.

It was an 8M Pack with a sticker saying “RADICAL DREAMERS” written on the back. While the seller stressed the cart wasn’t tested, we at least assumed that, if it had it written, then there must be some history of the game being on the cart, even if it was overwritten, no? And no one would’ve overwritten the data for a rare game like RD with some measly ASCII data….

Here is the auction in question. Strangely enough, the pictures are gone, though the descriptions are still up.

Callis got the cart just today, and told me it had a measly Kanaderu data.
Now, it’d have been easy to assume that for some audacious reason some fool decided to overwrite Radical Dreamers, but the thing that made this particularly seem like a scam was this; The ROM dump of the 8M Pack showed no trace that there was even any data besides Kanaderu written on it in the first place.
All the other banks were FF. No sign of writing!
If Radical Dreamers was deleted off the pack, there’d have been data from it remaining… but it appeared -there was none to begin with-.
Someone slapped a Radical Dreamers sticker on an 8M Pack falsely to get it to sell for a large amount of money.

It’d be difficult to figure out whether the seller was behind this, a fellow victim, or simply a proxy-esque middleman.

The unfortunate side of this is that we probably wouldn’t have minded if it wasn’t Radical Dreamers, if it had any new ROM data whatsoever… I would’ve been happy if it was Pikopiko Pairetsu or Wario no Mori Bakusho ban, y’know? And when it comes to 8M Packs where the data isn’t known, we have to make a gamble like this in order to have any chance of obtaining the missing Soundlink titles…

The life of a Satellaview archivist is tough.