General Information | Satellablog

Another UNRELATED BUT STILL COOL STORY BRO – on the Japanese Sega Channel

I’ve been having relatively slow progress with finding new Satellaview material lately, but I was kinda tided over by some other stuff. Y’see, I recently learned (thanks to This Hidden Palace Zone Thread) that Japan actually got the Sega Channel. As in, the actual thing.

Yeah, I was kinda behind on that. And apparently I wasn’t the only one. I quickly ran through researching and came across a few articles…

Like this one.

And this one.

And was like “woaaahhmmggg”. I’d like to see the Japanese BIOs cart dumped at some point, now.
Anyway, I continued onward and eventually I came across this – The Japanese webpage for “Dyna Brothers 2 Special” on the Virtual Console

I went into immediate action to try to obtain this game, asking around various communities to see if someone could rip a VC WAD of it for me to extract the ROM from. Eventually, I got help for that thanks mostly to Geno and paul from #acmlm on irc.djbouche.net. Long story short, I got a new Megadrive ROM!

“Dyna Brothers 2” was a standard Megadrive game, but you’re probably wondering what’s in the “Special” edition…. here’s where Youtube comes in handy!

I’m putting the ROM download up here, for anyone who’s interested!

I’m hoping that starting with this, I can learn a lot more about the Japanese version of the Sega Channel.

For info on the US Sega Channel, this article is probably the most immediately informative one.

I would also highly recommend checking out this Sega Channel “Demo Cartridge #4” ROM.

St.GIGA at last.FM?

MadHatter at the BS Zelda forums linked me this the other day;

A profile for “St.GIGA” at last.fm

I don’t really know how this site works, but I have checked out the various listings. In particular, the “tracks” listing has an entry for “BS Tantei Club ending theme”. Hmm…!

There is also a “St.GIGA Radio” option. The musical selection in this is a very bizarre mixed lot of Middle Eastern, Americana, and Japanese.

If this is the same St.GIGA from the old times, I wonder if this would mean well for the archival of Satellaview data…

Explaining; The meaning of “BS” in Japan.

Since I’ve kinda tired of having to explain this every time someone asks, I’m now making a nice, hopefully somewhat big post on it.

“BS”, in Japan, is a term which predates the Satellaview, and came around during the origins of/early times of Satellite-Transferred programming in Japan.

There doesn’t necessarily have to be any particular rule for what could have “BS” tagged on it, except that it must have been “Broadcasted” from a Satellite. The term, after all, is an abbreviation for “Broadcasting Satellite”.

Wikipedia should have some highly educational articles on the history of Japanese Broadcasting Satellites as well as service providers and the like.

To bring the point in further, quite a LOT of content in Japan has “BS” versions. I’ve picked out a bit of something which may give a bit of a chuckle, but also some insight into what was shown, and how long these services have been around…

… Yeah, I picked a segment of a 1988 Ninja Turtles episode.

旧BS版タートルズ「助っ人，ケーシー登場」　1/3

Surely the overseas visitors are LOLing now. No more of this, I’m already looking rather goofy.

… ah, I miss this show. 🙁