A Satellaview research blog.

Category: General Information

Refresher: Soundlink Vs. SPC (also, an excuse to post more NND videos.)

As I’ve been talking to Luigiblood, I’ve come upon the realization that folks don’t always tend to dig through the backlog of the blog…. perhaps I should mirror some of the things in a less blog-like form, for easier viewing. It might also help with organization, since the blog usually comes in a “as I figure it out” chronology.

In the meantime, though, some filler; a little reminder of how Soundlink should, well, “sound”… compared to the SNES’s standard SPC.

Well, actually, I just like mirroring up NicoNicoDouga uploads. But these should be educational, anyhow. Note to people who check the blog regularly: expect rehashville.

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Just a bit of advertising for a friend…

Luigiblood has started up a site for a new project he is working on.
Besides the name “Broadcast Satellaview” being questionable, the prospects of the project sound very interesting. I’m really hoping it gets somewhere.
For reference, Luigiblood was the guy who previously made a Satellaview “Hello World!” Homebrew, so he’s not just throwing stuff up out of no-where’s land.

A link to his project will also be in with the other links, since this won’t be on the front page forever…


A Side-note On Rarity/Non-Rarity; Yoshi’s all over the place.

Normally I focus the blog on the rare and obscure within the scope of the Satellaview, but I guess it didn’t dawn on me to post on the blog yet about what might be, well, not-so-rare.

Figuring out the exact rarity of Satellaview data is probably a daunting, perpetually-ongoing and perhaps not-truly-possible task, and info on such can change on the fly, but, as for right now…?

Yoshi no Panepon is currently all over the place on Yahoo Japan Auctions. Although with prices ranging from 7,000 to 10,000 yen, the quantity of Yoshi no Panepon on YJA both currently and in the past gives me the impression that it’s one of the most common Satellaview gets available.

Just take a look at some of the auctions;

Yoshi no Panepon with a 9,800 yen BIN, ending soon.

Yoshi no Panepon in a 8M Memory Pack box for an 8,000 yen BIN.

Yoshi no Panepon with a 6,300 Yen BIN

Callis himself has redumped Yoshi no Panepon various times. On top of that, the game has appeared on eBay frequently, including this auction.

Combined with the apparent lack of DRM the game has, it seems Yoshi no Panepon is one of the most common, non-rare games that has survived in the post-Satellaview era. Of course, this begs the question, why is there so much of this single title? It doesn’t seem like any other Memory Pack game has quite the level of “common” – I haven’t even seen quite as many auctions for Dr. Mario…

Is Yoshi no Panepon still worth it’s cost? Of course, I guess I can’t really say since I’m not much knowledgeable in how collector’s think…. Perhaps they even realized this before I did. Who knows?


ROM Release – Whats? Unsorted and Unplayable, how do these Data Packs work?

(EDIT: For some reason some issues came around with the filenames of these files before. I went and did a quick-fix for the time being.)
I remember quite a while a go posting a guide for how to boot the Same Game Koma data pack. Unfortunately, as Callis dumped more and more ROMs, I found that other data packs do not seem to work with same method – to the best of my knowledge, many of these simply will not work.

So I’ve decided to just put these up as is as see if other people can help analyze them. Because I have not been able to run these, I do not know of the contents of them.

A piece of data labeled “Nintendo 97 Race Data” or somesuch. The closest I can get to something that’d match up to this is a listing of a title called「ダビスタ９６」対応− ９７年度版, (Derby Stallion 96 Support, Version 1997.)

A Data Pack which has a header of “Same Game Koma Editor 4”

Some SD Gundam G-Next data.

sets of data labeled “Kanaderu Convert”. Are they all the same?

Some Sound Novel Tsukuru data

And finally, this assorted set of data packs, which seem to be RPG Tsukuru and Sound Novel Tsukuru data.

NicoNicoDouga plays Koi ha Balance.

I put up a short video of Koi ha Balance before, but this series of videos played by people who can actually read the game’s dang text is probably much better than mine.
As per what was not my usual method of writing this up but probably should be, NicoNicoDouga links first, then hit “Click here for more” to watch my reuploads:

恋はバランス　たとえばＫ君の多忙な一日編
恋はバランス　たとえばＫ君の多忙な一日編 その1
恋はバランス　たとえばＫ君の多忙な一日編 その2
恋はバランス　たとえばＫ君の多忙な一日編 その3

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Just how difficult is getting new stuff? A sorta-personal story.

To make up for the lack of updates on the latter half of May, I’ll tell a bit of a tale about it!

Y’see, on eBay there was this auction for a Satellaview 8M Pack – why, this one, in fact;

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=360253372584&ssPageName=ADME:L:OU:US:1123

I decided that, in the name of the research Callis and I do, I should try another 8M Pack purchase with my own money (Callis was bidding on other things at the time), and thus, you see, I snag the auction.
One thing that should be obvious but I’ll reiterate anyway, and one of the major problems with trying to snag Satellaview material – purchasing 8M Packs is a lot like gambling. Most of these carts are untested, and you literally have no idea if there’s any data in them at all until you either boot it in BS-X or ROM-dump the data inside. Of course, if by some chance the data IS identified, it probably wouldn’t even be selling on eBay – rather at YJA for a hefty pricetag.

So anyway, yeah, I order this pack

Of course, in typical “internet tragedy story” fashion, I spend the rest of the month waiting for it, because USPS pulled some BS on me (Pun entirely intentional) and had it sitting in their office for half a month without sending me a notice.
After a trip and a polite explaining to them of the going-ons, I get my memory pack, and put it in the BS-X set Callis gave me.
In typical “internet tragedy story” fashion yet again, it’s merely RPG Tsukuru 2 Data. Now, for reference, I currently have no research on how to tell a “Homemade” RPG Tsukuru 2 data from anything that was downloaded from St.GIGA’s servers, so it’s theoretically possible I still have something interesting. Theoretically.
It ain’t anything nearly as funky as a Kirby no Omachahako or Tamori no Picross, though, that’s for sure.
And so, there goes 60 bucks I could’ve spent on current-gen gaming instead. Aw, well!

In the meantime, other interesting things have happened – in particular, one memory pack on Yahoo Japan Auctions was listed as one with UNDAKE30 Same Game Daisakusen Mario Version, which solidifed something I all but confirmed before. Now, if only I could get archives of the UNDAKE30 Radio show…

Rom Release Rushing will continue at some point in this month, but I want to write some actual articles in the meantime, somehow.