A Satellaview research blog.

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…


DOUBLE ROM Release – Kouryaku Casino Bar Roulette + Game Tora no Ooana Special 2/24 (edited 12/4/09)

Horray! 2 releases in one Blog post!

Unfortunately, it’s not because I’m being generous. This release has some peculiarities.

To start off, “Kouryaku Casino Bar” might be a somewhat familiar name to someone who has a full ROM set of some sort..
You might’ve even seen this title screen before!

KCB Title screen

Now, this specific ROM dump, what’s so different about it? Well, it seems that all I can do with it is play the Roulette game.

Roulette surree is borring around heree

There’s also an option which returns you to the BIOs, and some… other option. I forget.

Anyway, yeah. Before I was able to do all that, I had to try to boot up the ROM. And there’s where I had my problems.

On SNES9X, this game will boot up without sound, and for some reason will not let you play the actual Roulette part (wtf?) so I tried booting the ROM up in BSNES… to no avail. Huh?

Callis told me he dumped it from a memory pack which also had “Game Tora no Ooana Special 2/24” on it. I requested he send me the “full” dump with both their data, and after I got it, I was able to have BSNES boot the data from both the games up successfully.

DOUBLE Huh?

No, I don’t know why. I don’t think it makes any sense, either. It just happens! Is there some grand mystery of the Satellaview only Byuu knows? Ah, but I can’t be speculating. ^^; Gotta keep moving.

Now, as for that “Special”… It’s possible you may have problems booting the individual ROM of this up automatically in BSNES, but now that there’s a manual load option, I don’t think that should be a problem. That being said, I didn’t test it. 😛

Aren't you excited now? :P

It’s a new magazine! No worries though, gamers, this one isn’t about music this time, I swear! It’s actually related to videogames, and seems to feature some Q&A, and a pretty long article on a Pro Yakyuu game which I can’t quite identify…

Actually, I was just too lazy to look it up. The 3 should be a giveaway.

You might recognize the name of the magazine as matching a radio program I showed on the blog before. :3

So, yeah, for this double release, the RAR file has both the original dump with the merged ROMs, and the split ROMs. I’d recommend running the merged ROM in BSNES if you actually want to play anything.

Kouryaku Caisno Bar Roulette + Game Tora no Ooana Special 2/24
攻略カジノバー ルーレット + ゲーム虎の大穴スペシャル 2/24
ROM DOWNLOAD
CLICK HERE

EDIT/UPDATE:
Madhatter has shown to me a bit of a revelation about the nature of the Kouryaku Casino Bar downloads! They’re apparently quite a bit more special than I initally anticipated!

“Also the Nichibutsu Casino has always fascinated me to just due to the BS Zelda connection. To quote from the September 19, 1995 News Wall:

☆発覚！ 秘密クラブ建設計画
“街”の中で鍵がかかって入れない、謎の民家。
１０月１日から、ここが秘密クラブとしてオープンする。
カジノバー（カジノ・ニチブツ）になるのだ。
ただし、ここに入れるのは秘密クラブ入館証を買った人か、「ＢＳゼルダの伝説」でトライフォースを８個手に入れた人だけだ。
ワクワクするね！

☆Secret Club construction plans revealed!
A previously locked house of mystery within the “City” opens as a secret club on October 1.
Casino Bar (Casino Nichibutsu).
However, the only people that may be admitted are those who have obtained eight pieces of Triforce and who gained the secret club entrance certificate from “BS The Legend of Zelda”.
How exciting!
(rough translation)”

… Man, have I been given a swerve! I have quite a few questions about how a “Secret Club” would be handled on the BS-X, but regardless, it seems I’ve just released a BS Zelda prize. O_O;

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. 🙁

ROM RELEASE – AK LIVE Hit Gang

My apologies if people waiting to enthusiastically play games find my current ROM releasings boring. As I’ve said before, I’m throwing up the stranger oddities of the ROM Dumps first.

So, you’re probably gonna ask me what makes this one strange.

Basically, one day among a few other ROMs Callis wanted me to sort through, he found a bit of what looked like bootable data in one of them and showed this to me..

Onos, the text!

Obviously, you can't read this.

He asked me if the text data was corrupt, but having seen a few cases like this before, I proposed to him that for some reason the emulator he was using could not detect it as a BS-X BIOs compatible ROM, and therefore would not do a font call, which led to the corrupt fonts.

After obtaining the ROM myself, I tried popping it in every emulator I got only to get the same result.
Realizing that it might need it’s header hacked to boot up, I decided to pop it open in a Hex editor and-

This is seriously wrong.

For anyone wondering what I’m trying to point out, basically the header is somehow, well, messed up;
1) The byte for filesize is not one that’s functional with the BS-X (it’s 4mb according to ucon64 – an impossible filesize.)
2) There is NO checksum or inverse checksum
3) Not highlighted on here, but the “Maker” value is -blank-.

to summarize, if you’ve read this a long time ago, you’d kinda have an idea what’s wrong here.

After Callis assured me that was how the ROM was dumped, I went to making a header hack. The hack shall be included in with the ROM upload, as an IPS Patch. Then, after applying it, you should get -this-…

Yay!

All better!

instead of corruptness over there. Indeed, my initial hunch was correct, although the circumstances a bit more bizarre than I expected.

Now, that may leave you wondering, is there anything important in this ROM?

Um...

Well… not really. Besides the state of the dump, the ROM’s a AK LIVE Magazine, made to promote the band and their music. Of course, this still makes one wonder how the ROM ended up the way it was – many “locked” ROMs simply have the “Number of tries” value set to the “lock”. Was it really necessary to remove the checksum…?

Click around here to download!
AK LIVE Hit Gang
AK LIVEヒットギャング
ROM & IPS


Satellaview Soundtracks – BS Zelda music, as from album sources.

Y’know, figuring this out was kinda what made me feel useful to the BS Zelda forums in the first place, isn’t it?
A few years ago they more or less had little idea if BS Zelda Map 1’s music was featured in any soundtracks, but I figured there had to have been something – particularly since certain songs were arranged from Kamigami no Triforce, and others “felt” old, if you catch my drift.

So, I went on a search to find Nintendo soundtracks. The bad news was that I didn’t find everything, and it’s sure as heck not in one soundtrack.
The good news, though? I found some of the more “creative” ones, so to speak. The ones that weren’t accounted for, I’ve attempted to try mixing with some interesting results

Read More…Read More…

ROM RELEASE: Sound Journal For Lovers Valentine’s Special Vol. 1

I’ve been given Matthew Callis’s blessing to release any of the ROMs he has handed me to check through. Since many of these ROMs are such that reveal new emulation issues, I feel I should prioritize releasing these first.

I’m gonna start with this Soundlink… Game? No, “game” does not accurately fit this description here…

Sound Journal for Lovers title screen

The “Sound Journal” series is, apparently, a set of text and images meant to smoothly accompany the music being played during that hour. Based on a similar-appearing “Sound Journal Since 1980” article in the SFC MANIA blog, these are all related and similar in style.

Girl

This ROM seems to choke when attempted to run through proper Satellaview emulation – my boot-up method was to switch to the “Old” ROM Loading method in SNES9Xpp XE. This was the only way I could run it (and thus, take these screencaps.)

This is what you'll see most of the game.

The majority of the contents are screens like this – an artist listing and lyrics scrolling upwards. The white Japanese text, thrown around frequently in the ROM, seems to be…. a placeholder graphic? The program might be trying to stream data into it even as it runs. O_O

I think it's turning Japanese, I really think so.

Among the little “interaction” you can have with the program is a toggle to change the lyrics from English to a Japanese translation…

What's this screen?

And pull out a screen like this, which likely shows artist info.

No lyrics

Some songs do not have a lyric listing for some reason – this appears instead. More blank spots!

Final Screen

When you reach the end of the program, you’ll know by spotting this screen.

For extra fun and lulz, I’ll list all the music/artists mentioned in the ROM. If any of these sound wrong, please note that this is directly pulled from the ROM and any errors must be attributed to St.GIGA;

– “Fallin’ in Love’ by Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds
– “I Just Called to Say I Love You” By Stevie Wonder
– “Killing me Softly with his Song” by Roberta Flack
– “La-La Means I Love You” by The Delfonics
– “You Make me Feel Brand New” by the Stylistics
– “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” by Paul Simon
– “Opposites Attract” By Paula Abdul
– “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul
– “Oh Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison
– “So Much in Love” by Timothy Schmit
– “My Girl” by The Temptations
– “Our Day will Come” by Ruby and the Romantics
– “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers
– “Against all odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” by Phil Collins
– “Coming Around Again” by Carly Simon
– “How Deep Is Your Love” by The Bee Gees
– “(I’ve Had) The Time of my Life” by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes.
– “Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers
– “Paradise” by Sade
– “Your Song” by Elton John

At the moment I will not stream these songs on the site. Don’t want the RIAA on my butt, after all.

The ROM, though? That should be A-OK!

Click somewhere around this area to start downloading!

Yo, Diggity! Micky Pockets n da hawze, dawg!…

When I went on my Satellaview research, I was kinda anticipating a couple of weird things.

BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 and BS Super Mario Collection had some strange picks of licensed music.
Radio Programs like the ones Hikaru Ijuin ran had some strange comedic skits.
Some of the playable games, like Dynamitracer and (assumedly this is referred to as playable) Sousa Sentai Wappers were the strange kind of thing you’d not normally see on a Super Famicom.

Kodomo Chousadan Mighty Pockets then decided to take all of the weirdness, put it in a single game, and crank it up to eleven.
The game itself seems to be a board game with a detective motif, a la Clue – that being said, the rules are different enough that I don’t really know what’s going on. Well, besides the fact that the guys are apparently rapping on top of Michael Jackson sound samples and remixes of 1950’s American Television.

Really, I’m not making that up. You can see below. This was uploaded on NicoNicoDouga seemingly last night – 22 minutes of gameplay of the third episode. No more has been uploaded yet. Will it be uploaded? Do I WANT it uploaded? I don’t know. This game just scares me now.

子供調査団Mighty Pockets 調査３（の初め）