A Satellaview research blog.

Category: General Information

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…


ROM dumps by ChronoMoogle.

After getting Ikari’s help in getting some 8M Packs ROM-dumped, ChronoMoogle sent me these Memory Pack ROM dumps to take a look at.

The first is a redump of BS Fire Emblem Akaneia Senki Hen Dai-1-Wa: Palace Kanryaku.
In comparison with the previous dump, the -only- difference is the date, which is marked (as ucon64 detects it) 9/29 instead of the previous dump’s 4/4. Otherwise, it is completely identical, even down to the checksum.
As unfortunate as it is that I didn’t find something awesome like the missing CG Art (aw, well. I got scans of that anniversary book, anyway), the fact that these two different dumps are the same down to the checksum basically means the ROM data is as close to “verified good” as it can possibly be, which is pretty good for a Soundlink game!
Likewise, compatibility is also identical to the previous ROM dump.

The second ROM… uhhhhhh…..
….
Checking the hex mentions something about “ASCII Music Data”, so it may be intended to be Ongaku Tsukuru Kanaderu data, but… it doesn’t seem to show in BS-X or anything. Is it a corrupt or deleted data? This is confusing….

Both of these ROM dumps can be downloaded here.