Category: General Information

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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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.

Actually posting this because it seems the ZSNES forum is down and so I can’t track these down there. I believe posted there was also a picture of the Satellaview base’s internals, but I seemingly lost track of it. Blast!

I’m not nearly as technically knowledged on these kind of things as Callis, d4s, and many other 16-bit experts are, but I’d like to believe whatever info I supply on here is as good as their word anyhow. ^^;

Of note are two chips in the back, the “4M PSRAM” chip and the “256K SRAM” chip.
I forgot how much of this is speculation and how much of it is actually tested/verified, but the 4M PSRAM is believed to be the extra memory space the Satellaview uses, where many key “Portions” of Soundlink Game content disappeared to – including that BS Fire Emblem CG Art and BS Zelda: Inishie no Sekiban dungeon tiles. As far as I know, there are no PSRAM dumps going around.

The “256K SRAM”… I’m guessing this is the standard SRAM with more traditional “Game save” content. I do know that many BS-X Cartridges going around, even today, have save data about the world of BS-X inside them. This data has the ability to store things such as the last season the BS-X was played in as well as various seemingly-BS-X-related “items” you can use in the item menu.
I’ve wanted to see some of these SRAMs dumped so I could investigate this a bit more deeply, but there does not seem to be any BS-X SRAM dumping tools around. Rather unfortunate. 🙁

Since I can’t think of a good way to close this post, here’s a picture of the internals of an 8M Memory Pack which I wandered across on Google Image search.

Ah, this dreaded screen.
Why so dreaded?
This screen says you got no data in your Memory Pack, that’s why.
Wait, what’s that? “I just HAD a game in this 5 minutes ago!”?
Unfortunately, a common realization people don’t tend to have have when purchasing Satellaview 8M Memory Packs that have game data in them is that many of the games are designed to expire. Callis lost the chance to play a Zelda no Densetsu: Kamigami no Triforce pack to this. Poor guy. 🙁

This post was more or less inspired by me talking about this a bit before in a DigitPress thread. Let me repeat a bit of what I said there, and then add some more to it from some additional research.

I’ll start off by repeating this; many Satellaview downloads are designed to expire.
Nintendo and St.GIGA had to think of -something- to prevent people from keeping free games forever; this system is probably one of the earliest examples of DRM in console gaming, and also among the most brutal.
The games expire through a method where, in the end, the data is “locked” in the memory pack, sitting there fully intact, yet being unable to be read.

What games are set to expire? A fairly high amount of them! If it was released at retail, expect any Satellaview download counterpart that doesn’t have any alterations to be expire-able. If it’s Kaizo Choujin Shubibinman Zero, same. If it’s a Soundlink title? Wait, those weren’t designed to boot up to begin with, so these games were already “locked” befroe you even got your hands on them.

What games don’t expire? For some reason, many Nintendo 1st Party downloads, like the BS Kirby no Omachahako line, Special Tee Shot, and special editions of their titles. Also, Squaresoft’s games.

“How” does a game expire? The BS-X checks the header for a value (xFD5) that states how many boot-ups the game has left; This amount seems to be between 1 (0x84) and 5 (0xFC) for every download that can expire (data that doesn’t expire have 0x00 in the header value). If it boots up a game, it’ll subtract from that value. When there’s nothing left (0x80)? The game is “locked”. The BS-X will refuse to read the game, acting as though it’s not even in the Memory Pack. Other data can theoretically be written over it. However, if you believe your data is valuable – which is likely the case – then you’ll probably want to know if you can do something about this.
A ROM Dump of an 8M Pack with “locked” data will allow you to see the contents – Emulators like SNESGT and SNES9Xpp XE will even bypass the lock and boot it up (BSNES, however, won’t – such is the downside of highly accurate emulation, needing to emulate the un-desirable parts.)
If you want a way to un-do the lock in the Memory Pack itself, though… well, good luck to you there. I got nothing to help you with.

Took long enough for a (relevant) update, huh?

Today NicoNicoDouga got a nice upload of RPG Tsukuru 2 Custom Data. As I explained earlier (I hope), RPG Tsukuru 2 took 8M Memory Packs as “data carts” where save data could be read and written upon. Many times, St.GIGA would have custom data up for download on the Satellaview, where you’d download it using the BS-X cartridge and then check out the data on RPG Tsukuru 2.

The video I have obtained apparently has footage from a Satellaview-exclusive RPG Tsukuru 2 download, called “Go By Ryoma”.

【RPGツクール2】「龍馬でゆく」(サテラビュー配信作品) 前編少しだけ

There hasn’t been many updates this month, hasn’t there?

Sorry folks, Satellaview progress has been slow. I’d gladly post some more info as it comes along, but quite frankly, there isn’t much I can recall at the moment. In the meantime, since you guys already know that I tend to look at other bits of obscure gaming, I’ll fill up time by posting some things.

Let me start with the Sega Pico. Yes, -that- Sega Pico, if you already are familiar with it in the USA. The “Edutainment” gaming system Sega released in their days of oversaturating the market with Genesis upgrades and derivatives, it seems the Sega Pico actually had a much more startling success story in Japan than in what I believe to be the country of it’s birth…

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