{"id":1134,"date":"2011-12-24T01:18:42","date_gmt":"2011-12-24T08:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2013-11-26T10:23:42","modified_gmt":"2013-11-26T17:23:42","slug":"a-christmas-satellaview-rom-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/a-christmas-satellaview-rom-story\/","title":{"rendered":"A Christmas Satellaview ROM Story."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It appears this year one of our more interesting ROM gets of the year is a tad last-second. My friends, let me tell you a story about true Christmas spirit, great ambitions, the hot-blooded determination of mankind, and hex editing! &#8230; Or possibly something resembling that. I&#8217;m not entirely sure.<\/p>\n<p>A bit earlier in the month, there was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ebay.com\/itm\/Nintendo-Super-Famicon-Satellaview-1995-\/170740233994?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&amp;hash=item27c0e9370a\">Satellaview set on eBay.<\/a> Noting that it seemed a tad cheaper than what most models recently sell for, I basically went up to Callis and was like &#8220;OMG GET IT PLZ KTHXBAI&#8221;. With enough pressure, he caved. Yes, I probably am a dick for doing that.<\/p>\n<p>Flash forward to just last Wednesday. Yep, the 21st.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Callis, in his typical Satellaview ROM dumping pattern, sends me a dump of both the 8M Pack ROM and the BS-X SRAM. It initially looked bad. Why? Well, see&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/bsx.superfamicom.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/pics\/Screenshot-XVI32%20-%20Star%20Soldier%202mins%20(B).bs.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Yeah, that&#8217;s why. I couldn&#8217;t get it to boot even in an attempt to fix the checksum at first. He was initially disappointed. I didn&#8217;t want to give up yet, though&#8230; I&#8217;m stubborn like that. I wanted to salvage as much as I could out of this.<\/p>\n<p>For reference, So far that salvaging hasn&#8217;t quite resulted in anything as dramatic as repairing that bad Kirby Guruguru Ball dump yet. Yes, I really did try that once&#8230; but anyway!<\/p>\n<p>First, I asked him to pull out the Romaji for the game&#8217;s header. It was &#8220;\u30b9\u30bf\u30fc\u30bd\u30eb\u30b8\u30e3\u30fc2MINS&#8221;.<br \/>\n&#8220;Hmm? 2MINS is a bit odd, but, that &#8220;Suta Soruja&#8221;&#8230; &#8216;Star Soldier?&#8217; That NES Game?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>When Callis told me he could spot 8-bit game tiles in the tile editor (along with partially-overwritten BS Zelda graphics. D&#8217;oh!), I figured this was something worth the attempt to save. In a search to find a ROM Hacker, I hopped into the IRC chatroom for <a href=\"http:\/\/tcrf.net\/The_Cutting_Room_Floor\">The Cutting Room Floor.<\/a><br \/>\nLinking the ROM to the folks, I was actually sort of surprised by the immediate interest.<br \/>\nOne person in particular was very eager to analyze the ROM; <a href=\"http:\/\/tcrf.net\/User:BMF54123\">BMF.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>After about an hour of digging and looking up various ROM aspects, he did a comparison between this game and the &#8220;Caravan Shooting Collection&#8221; retail cart and, somehow, this gave him a solution to get the ROM working&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Change the first byte.<\/p>\n<p><a><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/bsx.superfamicom.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/pics\/Screenshot-XVI32%20-%20Star%20Soldier%202mins%20(B).bs-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A single byte being the difference between working and non-working? Now, I will admit, <a href=\"http:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/the-strange-case-of-the-sutte-hakkun-redumps\/\">this sounded familiar<\/a>, so I should not have been taken off-guard. At least not completely. But I was pretty floored regardless. I decided to change that byte and pop in that ROM and see it play for myself.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/dmSkTPbGIDI\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Yes, I do still suck at vertical shmups, but that&#8217;s besides the point!<\/p>\n<p>And so, what at first seemed to be a letdown turned out to be one of the more interesting ROM finds of the year!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve tried looking up the specific title, but can&#8217;t find ANY documentation about a Satellaview-specific 2 Minute Star Soldier. (There&#8217;s a lot of entries for Caravan Shooting Collection, though..)<br \/>\nAll I have to go on here is that it&#8217;s download date is August 24th, and that it overwrote some BS Zelda data&#8230;. perhaps it was from the 1995 broadcast year?<br \/>\nEither way, in the meantime I&#8217;ll bring up this info which is probably similar enough for the time being;<br \/>\nThe ROM appears to be based on &#8220;Star Soldier Special Version&#8221; for Famicom, which featured 2-minute and 5-minute modes. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tovre9uNQsc\">Here&#8217;s some Youtube video of that for reference.<\/a><br \/>\nThe ROM code appears to have some 5-minute mode stuff in the hex data, but currently I do not know how to access it in-game. Perhaps another ROM hacker can look at it?<br \/>\nThe game&#8217;s code is obviously based on the &#8220;Caravan Shooting Collection&#8221; version of Star Soldier, so it has the same minor touch-ups.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s possible this ROM was released to promote a &#8220;Hudson Caravan&#8221; event.<br \/>\nI unfortunately can&#8217;t seem to find much info on the &#8220;Special Versions&#8221; of Star Soldier for Famicom, either.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, yes, enough talking about the ROM, let me supply it! But a few notes; The file I&#8217;m linking contains the ROM in it&#8217;s original dumped state, and an IPS patch that does the following:<br \/>\n1) Changes the first byte so it can boot.<br \/>\n2) Fixes the missing Maker\/Checksum info.<br \/>\n3) Removes the excess BS Zelda ROM data.<\/p>\n<p>This is all an attempt to restore it as close to it&#8217;s original broadcast state as possible.<\/p>\n<p>(NOTE: Anyone who I might&#8217;ve sent a patch to earlier &#8211; redownload if you want to run this on bsnes.)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/bsx.superfamicom.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/ROMs\/Star%20Soldier%202mins%20(B)%20+%20Repair%20Patch.zip\">STAR SOLDIER 2MINS (BS) | \u30b9\u30bf\u30fc\u30bd\u30eb\u30b8\u30e3\u30fc2MINS<br \/>\n(Bad dump with repair patch)<br \/>\nROM Download.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Oh, and because this one is actually -smaller- in filesize&#8230;<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/bsx.superfamicom.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/ROMs\/Star%20Soldier%202mins%20(Repair%20pre-patched).zip\">STAR SOLDIER 2MINS pre-patched w\/repair patch<br \/>\nROM Download.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Oh, and by the way, the BS Zelda forum folks are already analyzing the BS Zelda code portion.<\/p>\n<p>Whew, all that, and this wasn&#8217;t even my originally planned Christmas present!<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s more coming tomorrow, folks!<br \/>\nHo! Ho! Ho!<\/p>\n<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-5308582010420588\";\n\/* Sega Pico (Banner) *\/\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"4040450529\";\ngoogle_ad_width = 468;\ngoogle_ad_height = 60;\n\/\/-->\n<\/script><br \/>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\n<\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It appears this year one of our more interesting ROM gets of the year is a tad last-second. My friends, let me tell you a story about true Christmas spirit, great ambitions, the hot-blooded determination of mankind, and hex editing! &#8230; Or possibly something resembling that. I&#8217;m not entirely sure. A bit earlier in the<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-right\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Continue Reading&#8230; A Christmas Satellaview ROM Story.<\/span><a class=\"btn btn-secondary continue-reading\" href=\"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/a-christmas-satellaview-rom-story\/\">Continue Reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[148,169],"tags":[207],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3rnlg-ii","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2516,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions\/2516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}