Category: General Information

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…

Read More…Read More…

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.