A Satellaview research blog.

So, what’s up with the BS Dragon Quest ROM anyway?

EDITED: Now with some stuff I remembered from years ago which may or may not be relevant. Scroll down for more.

Sorry, folks, I have yet to be able to find a video of BS Dragon Quest Dai-4-wa proper, so I thought instead to try recording the one “BS Dragon Quest” ROM dump to see what that’s like….

and it’s a bit peculiar.

Starting from that menu, I can apparently choose which week I want to start in – I picked the 4th one, conveniently enough. In that one the player seems to merely go through the last castle and fight the Dracolord.

Question is – what’s up with that menu? Why are all four weeks easily playable in this single ROM file like that? The Satellaview game surely didn’t originally work like that – being able to play the episodes in any order would desync with the Soundlink audio quite easily.

Some folks would say it’s just a hacked ROM. However, most hacked Satellaview ROMs are hacked for emulator compatibility, while this one is not. Also, apparently it’s got a valid BS-X checksum, which is highly improbable of a ROM hack.

Unfortunately I can’t investigate it any further. My own assumption, though, is that it’s a leaked Debug ROM of some sort.

EDITED IN PART STARTS HERE (I also posted this at the BS Zelda forums)

Since it’s been a while since I was told this story anyhow, I guess I’ll put this up here:

I recall a long time ago, Pachuka (Pachuka is a rather… imfamous person in the Sonic the Hedgehog community and in internet emulation communities) told me a bit of a story about how he “stole” the first Satellaview ROMs from a guy who’s alias was apparently “ROMar” and leaked them across the internet, which would probably be the origin of the BS Zelda ROMs and whatnot. Trying to verify this thing myself, I tried digging around internet archive and whatnot, and found a few scattered references to Pachuka hosting a “BS-X Cult” in the late 1990s, with no listing of the contents.
Unfortunately, I have not gotten anyone else to confirm/deny this story, couldn’t track down this ROMar guy, and I couldn’t even get Pach to remember the specifics of any of the ROMs he “leaked” (He even got basic info on the nature of BS Zelda ROMs wrong. I felt like I was talking to a complete idiot.)

I do suspect the BS Dragon Quest ROM was among the leaked ones, but when I asked Pach about it he threw at me a “I don’t give two shits about JRPGs” response (in other words, he’s really not being any helpful.) I was hoping sometime to track this ROMar guy down, ask him which are the ROMs that can be traced back to him, and if the BS Dragon Quest ROM is among them, ask him for some info about the nature of that one. Until then…
*shrug*

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.


Rom Release Rush Tsuu

Oh, after finding this one, that pun just could not be avoided…

“Puyo Puyo Tsuu BS Ban”.
When Callis first handed me this ROM, neither of us were sure how it was different from the standard game. As it turns out, it appears to be a demo – my gameplay and these translations provided by Sonic Retro forum member Insalubrious support the idea;


Puyo Puyo Tsuu Test Version
Choose how you want to play.
#1: Play alone (right side is computer)
#2: Play with two people

(Header) Please select the rules
(Bottom) Normal rules

(Bottom) Cannot play

(Bottom) Erase 6


Another thing of note is that Callis told me that, with this ROM header date and his info on the release of the cartridge version, that this was likely broadcast on the week of the download in 1995. After all, no sense in waiting a year to release a demo, eh?

Anyway, download time!


Puyo Puyo Tsuu BS Ban | ぷよぷよ通ＢＳ版
ROM Download

And now back to your regularly scheduled magazines…

Oh, yay! Is that some Famitsu I see there?
Dated 4/27, this Famitsu “Karara Ban” issue (whatsits?) covers such things as…


Tamagotchi!
And…

Game Boy Pockets…. I think. It could be Game Boy Light, but… yeah.


A lot of this is vaguely similar to the Famitsu listing that is on the SFC Mania Blog.



BS Famitsu Magazine Karara Ban 4/27 | BS ファミ通マガジン かわら版 4/27号
ROM Download

(PS. Excuse the Famitsu ROM’s name. Callis gave that one and I’m being a lazy bum right now.)

ROM Release Rush, featuring Tamori no Picross.

Hey folks. Today I plan to put out a few more ROMs than usual.

Most of these ROMs are apparently Magazines based on the Satellaview’s radio content, but I’ll start with one that’s a game rather than just a magazine..

Tamori no Picross is, from what I can understand, a long series of weekly installments of Picross puzzles. According to the Japanese Wikipedia, it was broadcast to coincide with a radio show called 『サバチーチカレッジ タモロス博士のサンデーゼミナール』 (“Sunday Seminar with Dr. Tamorosu Sabachichikarejji”).
The header has a specific broadcast date of June 13th in the title of the game, whereas the download was, IIRC, just a few days later.

As you can see, the one in this ROM has a lot of resemblance to “Mario no Super Picross”. However, it doesn’t look a thing like the one featured in the ads, which was much closer to the original/first season of the program. Did the game somehow “Change format” at some point? I may never know without finding a premire ROM, but… aw, well.

Tamori no Picross 6/13 | タモリのピクロス 6/13
ROM DL

The second ROM…

When I initially found this, I was hoping it’d be the elusive Soundlink game “Bakusho Mondai no Totsugeki! Star Pirates”. Instead, I seem to have obtained something else with their name tagged on it.

“Bakusho Mondai no Shirikon Chounaikai” is apparently a magazine meant to have articles based on the radio show of the same name which was also on the Satellaview…

Stuff like… Star Wars parodies. Very odd.

Bakusho Mondai apparently described the show themselves on their website.



Bakusho Mondai no Shirikon Chounaikai 6/22 | 爆笑問題のシリコン町内会 6/22
ROM DL

And last one for now…

Yuuki Nae no Ge-mu no Tsubo. Yuuki’s name is one I keep seeing repeatedly throughout the Satellaview’s history. This particular magazine seems to be about… I dunno. But it’s probably also related to her other stuff.

…. It’s got some REALLY FUCKED UP PICTURES.



Yuuki Nae no Ge-mu no Tsubo | 裕木奈江のGE-MUの壷
ROM DL

Expect some more soon!

Internals of a BS-X Cartridge.

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!

BS-X Internals 1
BS-X Internals 2

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.


Redumps. Because sometimes identical ROMs happen, except for the times they aren’t -that- identical.

I posted an upload of these before in various ROM sites, but now I’ve checked them out in slightly more detail than before.

These are some redumps of previous dumps. Although most of these redumps – much like the new dumps – were pure chance dumps (with the exception of the Panel De Pon 98′ Redump, which I bought with my own cash), there’s quite a bit of good and/or interesting to take note of nonetheless.

Due to the nature of these being redumps and many of them being hard to tell from the initial releases, I’ve taken into marking the Month/Day values in the ROM Headers as part of the ROM filename – similar to how GoodTools and No-Intro manage multiple similar-appearing ROM dumps.

Currently these redumps are being hosted elsewhere – chalk it up to mere laziness.

I’ll start with this one. Should be familiar if you checked out the blog just a bit ago –

Gambler Jiko Chuushinsha 2 – Dorapon Quest.
Marked December 20th as opposed to the previous dump’s December 19th. It is otherwise identical down to the checksum.

Let’s Panchinko Nate Gindama 4.
Date is set as November 24th. The dump previously floating around is dated March 21st.

Panel De Pon ’98 Event Version.
Dated December 28th – the previous dump is marked January 11th.

Zelda no Densetsu Kamigami no Triforce.
Dated November 30th. The previous dump was dated May 21st. This dump is “locked” (It was apparently played to it’s 5-bootup limit), so you can’t run it on BSNES, even though the previous dump runs fine on it last I checked. It otherwise appears to be the same game, of course.

Cu On Pa SFC.
This dump is dated June 15th. The previous was dated May 31st. This also has had it’s boot-ups exhausted and is marked as “locked”.

A bad BS F-Zero 2 Practice dump. The title screen graphics are corrupted. It otherwise seems to play fine. Weird…….

Multple Yoshi no Panepon – BS Ban dumps.
Marked January 2nd, June 14th, and July 5th. I think this is ample evidence to say that this data is fairly common and easy to find.

Peculiar Sutte Hakkun BS Version 2 dumps.
These seem to be a similar case as what the “AK Live Hit Gang” dump was – checksum and maker values were zero’d out. Due to this BSNES and SNESGT won’t run them. They are dated October 19th and November 25th, respectively.


Kirby no Omachahako – Hoshi Kuzushi.
Dated Feb. 26th. THIS DUMP WORKS FOLKS. YOU CAN PLAY IT. IT RUNS ON NEARLY ANYTHING. IT’S A KIRBY GAME. C’MON ALREADY.

Explaining BS-X “lockout” – why your Zelda pack won’t play anymore. (sorry dude.)


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.