BS F-Zero Series | F-ZEROグランプリ

Bounty Prize Check! We found BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1!

This is LuigiBlood. One day after Did You Know Gaming’s video about the Satellaview, which I do recommend a watch (but also definitely read the corrections in the comments because there were a few things I was bothered with), we were offered the first dump of BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1!

We partnered with the people who made BS F-Zero Deluxe to ensure the legitimacy of the data as well as additional analysis, and of course, updating BS F-Zero Deluxe as well, and yes, this person who dumped it received the bounty prize money ($2500 per week found) that was offered a while back. Unfortunately, this data does not contain the Week 2 data, which means we only get Forest I and Forest II. Who knows what would be the undertaking for Forest III and Metal Fort I and II. The bounty prize for Week 2 ($2500) is still up for grabs, so if you find it, definitely go to us and we’ll talk (see at the bottom for more information).

I also would like to take this moment to talk about what BS F-Zero is truly about. It’s not just bringing F-Zero to Satellaview, and as you may possibly know, it was also a soundlink game, making the use of the radio audio broadcast as you play the game.

It was an attempt to provide competitive gameplay, particularly focused on time attack, while having live commentary, giving precise information on how to be even more efficient on the track within a limited time, with even a demo example of how to play the track right before training and then Grand Prix. The machines are also different from the original game, which were in BS F-Zero Grand Prix 1 already, with their own stats, differing from the original game.

Two months before BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2’s premiere broadcast, a Practice version was broadcasted to be played as much as you wanted, with the 4 new tracks from previously broadcasted BS F-Zero Grand Prix 1 in one place, alongside the brand new Mute City IV. This was dumped and redumped so many times. If you played F-Zero 99 not too long ago, those are the same tracks as the newly added Ace League in that game, and honestly a major thing that happened with Satellaview content officially from Nintendo, worldwide this time, which is insane. Here’s hoping for more in the future.

But as I said earlier, BS F-Zero Grand Prix is not really just about the new tracks and new machines. They had ghost data from the staff to run against, while live commenters give you tips and tricks on how to beat them as you play, and in this installment, one of the commenters is Barbie Suzuki, which we believe is actually Toshiaki Suzuki, the director of this game, but also many other Satellaview projects and more. In response to the first Grand Prix, they tried to make it easier for new players, with Forest I for example, where the track is very simple and easy to manuver in. The ghost data for this one is even played by Bucky Koba, one of the commenters, who wasn’t necessarily a good player.

It is more experimental than you think it is, and a stark contrast from games like BS Legend of Zelda which used the soundlink audio more to bring more of a story mood on top of the game. Excitebike Bun Bun Mario Battle tried a similar thing too, a focus on competitive time attack, but BS F-Zero is more about to learn how to play, maybe trying to give everyone sort of an even playing field. Who knows if Nintendo tried to do a huge eSports-like focus on this one, but the potential presence of actual game staff on this one would definitely elevate this a little bit further. Remember this is Satellaview, everyone is playing at the same time as everyone else on their own system.

Danyl gave the broadcasts list of BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2:

1997/08/10～1997/08/16（第１週, Week 1）、1997/08/17～1997/08/23（第２週, Week 2）
1997/10/12～1997/10/18（第１週, Week 1）、1997/10/19～1997/10/25（第２週, Week 2）

The fact that until now, all we had was all 4 weeks of BS F-Zero Grand Prix 1 and the Practice version of BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 is just kind of insane. The hopes were so lost that we got the amazing recreation based on the uploads from VHS footage in BS F-Zero Deluxe. This is not the first time this kind of work has been done, the work done to make BS Legend of Zelda Ancient Stone Tablets playable is a similar kind of deal, where data was simply missing and had to recreated from footage.

In fact, if you miss it, you can find another blog post that contains a comparison between the recreation and original data here, you would be impressed:

BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1 – Reconstructed VS Original Data comparison

So, here it is; first the regular Satellaview dump, then GuyPerfect also made a standalone mod, that can be played no matter the setting, so you can just fast forward however you like.

And of course, BS F-Zero Deluxe has been updated to make use of the data of the new dump!

BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 – Dai-1-shuu (8/10)
ROM Download

BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 – Dai-1-shuu (Standalone Mod Pre-patched)
ROM Download

BS F-Zero Grand Prix 1 & 2 – Standalone Mod Patch v1.0
Patch Download Page

BS F-Zero Deluxe v1.1
Patch Download Page

A huge thanks to the anonymous benefactor for providing this dump, as well as GuyPerfect, Porthor and PowerPanda from BS F-Zero Deluxe team to help make this release possible.

But I want to take this opportunity to also talk about Satellaview preservation: It is hard, and quite frankly and I want to stress this part: very expensive.
It is not necessarily fun to get through Memory Packs, especially since BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 would actually not be visible in menus.
This is the kind of stuff you would only know if you dump the memory of it and not really before. Then count the fact that we release them in the wild, which is almost like throwing money away. There is a possibility that we would never be able to preserve BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 2. We dumped an not insignificant amount of Memory Packs to get this one, up to several hundreds. We got some nice stuff on the way to this one, but nothing that would necessarily bring as much attention as this one.

And, yes, I’ll repeat, the bounty prize ($2500) for Week 2 is still up for grabs! The person behind the dump for Week 1 has received the prize for that one. It’s real serious, if you needed some reassurance about that.
Just to really make sure: Finding BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 2 requires dumping regardless, soundlink games do NOT show up on the menu normally. Those BS-X menu screenshots earlier are from a hacked version of BS-X that removes protection that prevents those from showing up, but the data is still in the Memory Pack as is.

(That all said, if you have other stuff to share, we can talk too.)

BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1 – Reconstructed VS Original Data comparison

Alongside the release of BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1 dump, GuyPerfect, one of the creators of BS F-Zero Deluxe, wrote us a post doing the comparisons between the recreation and original data. You’d be impressed how extremely close they got to the real deal!

You can find the full release post here:

Bounty Prize Check! We found BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1!

When we first learned that BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1 had been found, our first thought was “no way!”, but our second thought was pretty consistently “darn, we only get the courses Forest I and Forest II?” After all, had we gotten Week 2 instead, we would have had three courses as well as the graphics for both Forest and Metal Fort, so in that sense it can feel like Week 2 holds more value. Once we started digging in, however, it became clear that the Metal Fort assets are only a drop in the bucket as far as value is concerned, and all the juiciest parts of BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 are present in Week 1 as well.

In context, Week 1 is actually the luckier find. Imagine yourself being there back in 1997, where you had enough interest in F-Zero to sit down for an hour for a radio show and game play combo presentation. You knew there would be another installment the following week, but instead you unplugged your Super Famicom and sold your Satellaview stuff without overwriting the memory pak. Of the two, it seems like Week 2 should be far more likely, so it’s fortuitous that we have Week 1 at all.

Of course it’s worth mentioning that a $2500 USD prize was awarded for finding Week 1, and an additional $2500 USD is available for Week 2. If Week 1 was out there, Week 2 may be as well.

BS F-Zero Deluxe is a mod of F-Zero that expands the game to incorporate the content from BS F-Zero Grand Prix and BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2. It was in development years before Week 1 ever surfaced, so including Forest and Metal Fort required some innovation and a lot of man-hours. The courses were reconstructed from old video recordings that weren’t of particularly great quality, but BS F-Zero Deluxe is said to be very accurate nonetheless. Now that we have Week 1, we can see just how accurate it was, at least for Forest I and Forest II.

Courses are positioned within a canvas of sorts that is 1,024 tiles wide and 512 tiles tall. A course can appear anywhere within this canvas, provided it doesn’t spill over the edge. BS F-Zero Deluxe approximated course positioning based on the little dot on the minimap: the dot will move 1 pixel for every 16 tiles traveled. Some assumptions had to be made regarding the layout of the minimap graphic itself, but in the end, BS F-Zero Deluxe happened to position the Forest courses in exactly the right spots.

As for the minimaps themselves, the video recordings didn’t clearly show where all the black pixels were, but BS F-Zero Deluxe got all but one the white pixels right.

The level of Mode 7 magnification made it reasonably clear what was nearby when the player in the video recordings drove around each course. However, not every single region of every course is clearly shown in those videos. The Forest courses in particular tend to be rather wide, and the player stuck somewhat close to the inside walls of each curve, so those outside walls are just barely visible way off on the edges of the screen. BS F-Zero Deluxe had to make a few guesses regarding the exact layout of those outside walls, to varying degrees of accuracy.

Full-size maps are provided below. The solid red squares show the tiles that BS F-Zero Deluxe got wrong.

The exterior scenery for the Forest courses is a repeating square pattern 64 tiles on a side. The graphics themselves are accurate because they appear in the graphics for Port Town, just with different colors. The differences between the real deal and what BS F-Zero Deluxe worked out are minor enough that they’re hard to spot even with the aid of a computer program pointing them out.

When it’s all said and done, here’s how close BS F-Zero Deluxe got to the actual assets for BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1…

Minimaps, counting only the pixels that are not transparent in both versions:
* Forest I – 422 correct out of 433 = 97.460% accuracy
* Forest II – 477 correct out of 528 = 90.341% accuracy

Track maps, counting only the tiles that are not scenery in both versions:
* Forest I – 56,770 correct out of 57,859 = 98.118% accuracy
* Forest II – 72,134 correct out of 73,503 = 98.137% accuracy

Scenery repeating pattern
* 4,019 tiles correct out of 4,096 = 98.120% accuracy

For over a year, we boasted that BS F-Zero Deluxe was over 99% accurate, but objective comparisons for Forest I and Forest II show that it is between 98% and 99% accurate.

It isn’t really possible to precisely quantify how accurate BS F-Zero Deluxe was regarding the sky/horizon graphics. It’s clear that there are some significant discrepancies, but it’s important to emphasize that the clarity of the reference videos was not sufficient for this task.

Original and then Reconstruction for each sky/horizon graphics:

Likewise, putting a singular number on course paths is challenging to define. In the images below, the solid blue path is the actual path in Week 1, and the dashed red path is BS F-Zero Deluxe’s best guess.

Find the full release post here:

Bounty Prize Check! We found BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1!

Wario’s First Event and Pirates that beeps

Hey, LuigiBlood here, and happy new year, because I got a nice batch of redumps but also a bunch of new stuff.

I’ll just put the redumps out of the way from an anonymous person, first.

These are all identical to what was dumped in the past so I won’t really explain much, just rely on the included txt file to help you figure out.

BS Marvelous – Time Athletic Course 1 | BSマーヴェラス　タイムアスレチック　コース1 (Redump + “Fixed” header)
ROM Download

F-Zero (Retail, Redump)
ROM Download

Super Bomberman (Retail, Redump)
ROM Download

Now, the cooler stuff:

From Ballz who got us a nice Memory Pack with a new version of WaiWai Check, dumped by our nice Matthew Callis 🙂

It’s basically a series of spot the difference under a time limit game, which can be played up to players, and of course you can have a password to send via postcard.

These have gotten different versions dumped in the past, but this one is from a different date, and names itself a rerun, so this seems interesting. It’s a pretty fun game, actually.

The Memory Pack also contains Kouryaku Casino Bar Nichiyoubi – Roulette but it’s actually corrupted.

WaiWai Check! 11/15 Rerun | わいわいチェック！ 11/15 再放送
ROM Download

Now all the rest are from people who prefers to stay anonymous:

This is Jissen! Pachi-Slot Hisshouhou! Yamasa Densetsu. This is just the exact same data as the retail game, but it is technically new because we had never found this one on Satellaview before. The music actually impressed me a lot when I tried it (and then didn’t understand how to even play).

There’s really a lot of casino and pachislot games, aren’t there?

Jissen! Pachi-Slot Hisshouhou! Yamasa Densetsu | 実戦パチスロ必勝法！山佐伝説
ROM Download

This one scared me. The file name is actually different, but it’s STILL BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Practice. But it’s… weirdly different in the data itself that I thought it deserved a bit of attention because of the Password screen actually showing up this time, according to TCRF this screen does not really show up normally, but I played this and it does show up here.

I couldn’t tell any other difference otherwise, but I’m sure some F-Zero fans could maybe check.

BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Practice (6/7)
ROM Download

I asked ChronoMoogle to help me figure out this new magazine, and he wrote a nice summary:

Zubari Sangatsu Gou (Concise March Issue) is a month-themed magazine by St. Giga.

It features the following sections:
1. A section looking at cultural customs, dishes, events and such of March
2. Holidays of the month – Vernal Equinox Day (Shunbun no Hi) in this case
3. Advertisement for the flower store Shimojima with related present raffle
4. Music Charts – Consisting of the “current” Top 20 most sold CDs in Japan and a International Top 20 curated by St. Giga
5. New book recommendations, advertising Kodansha
6. Advertisement for seasonal sweets from Toraya
7. Horoscopes of the month

The magazine uses fonts from the BS-X BIOS, but the graphics (mostly backgrounds and pixelated photos) and more importantly, the music appears to be stored in the ROM, so there might be some original BGMs in there.

The other thing that the anonymous person made me pay attention on, this magazine released around the time when Nintendo would stop support for the Satellaview entirely, as they dropped around that time after a pretty complicated to explain debacle between Nintendo and St. GIGA’s future planning…

Again, thanks to ChronoMoogle to help us figure this out 🙂

Zubari Sangatsu Gou | ずばり３月号
ROM Download

Zubari Sangatsu Gou | ずばり３月号
SPC Download

Wario’s Woods on Satellaview is kinda weird, it had a lot of presence somehow, we got several versions of it, but I believe this is the last one to find: this is Wario’s Woods Event Version 1.

We had Version 2 before, and if you wonder who are these people, they’re part of Bakusho Mondai performers and they’re Satellaview personalities who show up on the radio on Satellaview.

There are changed menus and stuff, but the naming of the file is weird. “Event Wario 5/18 Version 2” which is… very unclear. I’m not entirely sure of the context here, but I’m glad that we have sort of completed the Wario’s Woods Satellaview collection.

Wario’s Woods – Event Version 1 | ワリオの森イベントバージョン Ver. 1
ROM Download

Now the real star of the show:

After many many years, we finally got Pico Pico Pirates! It was a game that we knew the existence of for a long time, but simply could never find it until today.

The developer is not really listed, there are rumors that it was made during a seminar, but there’s no definitive source for that. The game kinda feels like Super Scope 6 in some way, but make no mistake, it isn’t.

This is basically a game where you shoot pirates from a flying Super Nintendo controller, and of course, you have to press the buttons where they show up at. It gets really crazy after several stages of this, it is difficult to finish.

But this isn’t the only thing that we could find from this specific Memory Pack…

There’s another RPG Maker Super Dante game in it, which a portion of the data was overwritten by Pico Pico Pirates.

After comparing with other Satellaview Super Dante games, I found out that this is actually completely recoverable, and while we cannot confirm the full validity of the data, this meant this could be made playable, and lucky are we when I found out there’s a video of this specific RPG on YouTube:

The intro seems to fully correspond to what I have, so I made the header data correspond to the video. This is the first time that I have recovered something in this way, and I’m glad that it works.

This is called Sugoi RPG? (could be translated like “A Great RPG?”, this seems to be the second and final part of it, where visibly a lot of events happened and seems to be a game that doesn’t take itself seriously featuring Famitsu and its staff.

Here’s the download to get both:

Pico Pico Pirates | PICO PICO パイレーツ
“A Great RPG?” -Last Part- | 「すごいRPG？」ーこうへんー (Recovered)
ROM Download

And there you have it folks, I’m very glad that we got a bunch of previously undumped Satellaview content today, and here’s to have more of them in the future!

A huge thanks to everyone involved for these releases!

Satellaview Emulation – SNES9Xpp XE is SWEET.

For a long, long time now, I’ve been wondering by the BS F-Zero ROMs have a notable emulation issue where you can’t clear a lap.

Well, I finally found an emulator where this doesn’t happen! Behold! Xpp XE. I don’t know much on it – it’s apparently Japanese in origin and based of the “SNES9XWXE” I may have mentioned before, but it’s newer (well, 2004, but still), and better!

To set it up, mark your “Save” directory and make a folder called “BIOS” there. Take the (headerless) “BS-X” ROM, name it to “bsxbios.bin” and put it in that directory. Now set up a “BSXPSRM” directory and leave it blank.

Then load the beauty. You’ll kick into the BIOs – showing the emulator obviously use a hack-ish method to load the ROMs. You have to load Soundlink games as though they were downloads!

Still. It’s worth it. Just for this. Watch me crash and die, folks!

Satellaview Soundtracks – F-Zero (F-Zero Soundtrack, Super Famicom Game Music)

In the old blog, I used to upload Mp3s rather randomly.
This time, though, I hope to have this sorted out more by what game they appeared in.

Here, I will put up some examples from F-Zero.
The music from BS F-Zero seems to consist of –
a) Music pulled straight from “Super Famicom Game Music”.
b) Synthesized arrange based of the “F-Zero Soundtrack”, which was a set of jazz arranges.
c) All-new compositions, which I obviously lack clean rips of.

Category: BS F-Zero Series | F-ZEROグランプリ

Bounty Prize Check! We found BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1!

BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 Week 1 – Reconstructed VS Original Data comparison

Wario’s First Event and Pirates that beeps

Satellaview Emulation – SNES9Xpp XE is SWEET.

Satellaview Soundtracks – F-Zero (F-Zero Soundtrack, Super Famicom Game Music)

BS F-Zero Grand Prix Ace League

BS F-Zero King League.

BS F-Zero Queen League.