Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 12:31 am Post subject: Satellaview ROM releases for this month (Now May 2010)
(EDIT: Topic change. Last post will have whatever news I got.)
Hey folks. Thought to post about these. Dumped by Matthew Callis and handed over to me to attempt to dissect, I write relatively long articles before doing releasing the ROMs. I've decided to make a thread about it here after putting up my most recent one, which might actually be interesting compared to the others.
The first one, from the "Sound Journal" series, takes the Soundlink technology and uses it for something seemingly different... for a hacker who might want to understand the Satellaview's ins-and-outs better, this could be gold.
The second one is not really that special, except for the odd thing about the header I spent most the article perplexed about... a neutered header in an otherwise good-appearing ROM is a strange thing to behold.
A ROM that highlights my confusion over having multiple ROMs in one Memory Pack, and issues with splitting these up possibly messing with their compatibility. Later on, someone told me something interesting about the nature of the Casino game's distribution, though... A BS Zelda prize? Hrm...
Here's the one that I think will be looked at the most - "BS Bokujo Monogatari dai-2-wa" is sort of like the final game with most of the featured neutered out. I can't tell whether it was meant to be a sort of demo, or the Soundlink was meant to convey a sort of storyline, but... either way, it breaks a bit from the Soundlink ROM mold. I wonder why...
... Also of note is this ROM I persued until I got it ripped from the Japanese Virtual Console - Dyna Brothers 2 Special, apparently from the Japanese Sega Channel, has some new features for those who are a fan of that.
Anyway, yes, you can extract the rom data from the WADs for VC games. I'm not entirely up-to-date on that front myself, but I believe there are tools for unpacking the WADs (worst case scenario, at least for smaller games, I guess one could always load them in an emulators and then extract the ROM data from system memory)
By the way, nice links there, Kiddo. Although I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at in the Dyna Brothers 2 Special video.
From what I heard, Nintendo had to change all mentions of Yo-yo into "Star" for the North America region, because some company in Canada apparently has a trademark on yo yos.
Also Nintendo was lazy in regards to the letter you have to dip, and just had it simply say "747" when you click the icon in the digital manual. The real letter actually had Mike's uncle say some additional dialog about being followed.
By the way, nice links there, Kiddo. Although I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at in the Dyna Brothers 2 Special video.
I compared the ROM to the original "Dyna Brothers 2" and, from what I can tell, neither the "Sega Channel Special" mode or the set of extra options below that one are in the standard edition.
I don't necessarily know how to play the game well, myself, but I noticed a lot of added maps, the "Anime Viewer" mode which shows all the character animations in a sorta debug-ish matter, and the "Dyna Fight" 2 player mode. The one above the "anime" mode seems to give the character profiles from the attract demo in order, and the rest of the options seem to be "bizarre" battle maps, like one shaped as a person's head called "Famits" (Famitsu?) and one in the shape of the Japanese Sega Channel Logo.
As to the contents about converting VC games to normal games on an emulator - yeah. From what I recall it works a bit differently depending on the format (This ROM, from the JP Megadrive VC, was in a compression format that I had difficulty extracting without help), but if it's emulated a ROM can be ripped of it. I recall the Virtual Console version of Super Mario RPG being ripped before, as well. You can rip the ROMs from the WADs going around, granted you have to trust your sources have "Genuine" rips and not "injects".
I ripped this one out of a quest to get some new Sega Channel content - especially since it was shortly after I actually first heard of the Japanese version of the Sega Channel existing, which seems to be a fact that was obscured for many years.
You can even get ROMs out of something as adjusted as Pokemon Snap (with the new picture-transferring stuff) or Pokemon Puzzle League (which actually changed it's video to be Wii-native, externally stored files). Of course, this would lead to obvious emulation issues (SNES games modified to have their PCM samples externally stored, for example, will sound horrific when emulated.)
I think it'd still be an interesting quest to get all the modified ROMs, though, as it seems there were a lot more of them than many people would expect, perhaps enough to warrant a sort of DATing.
(EDIT: Ah, nearly forgot a few other details.
Some VC ROMs actually have a sort of "Softpatch" applied to them when they run, rather than actually having the original code changed. I remember it being discussed about the Revenge of Shinobi VC Version, and I think Sin and Punishment as well. This seems to vary from game to game - there isn't much consistency at all, really.)
Some of the N64 roms have extra textures stored in the WAD which the emulator puts in place at runtime to replace / update some textures (billboards in waverace for example), rather than actually modifying the rom
Bumping this/updating the title with an update, hopefully this time this'll spark Satellaview discussion instead of the (albeit nice) drift from subject.
I upped these 5 new Satellaview ROM dumps; these are based on retail releases, and do not seem too different from the outside. However, ActRaiser and Super Nazo Puyo have some SRAM code modifications (likely) much like Zelda no Densetsu: Kamigami no Triforce on the Satellaview did. (Knowing it's SRAM code modification is more an experience thing, though - games which don't use SRAM tend to be much closer to being byte-to-byte identical - see The Firemen's Satellaview dump if you missed that to get what I mean.)
a few more. The latter two I put off releasing for a while due to lack of any research, but I figured I gathered as much info on them as I ever will now, so, yeah.
Nice! It's always interesting to see these early digital magazines, even if I can't speak Japanese. They tend to fall in the interesting gap of time between "multimedia" CDs (you know, usually edutainment stuff) and when it became feasible to start delivering high quality audio and video over the internet.
I threw the Puyo Puyo one up because I already had it going through Sonic Retro for a guy to help me analyze some info from it. The Famitsu magazine, though, should be new to everyone.
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