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How about a BS-X player?

 
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Videogamer555



Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 102

PostPosted: Sun Jan 23, 2011 8:02 am    Post subject: How about a BS-X player? Reply with quote

It should have an EPROM with the Satellaview BS-X bios burned onto it, and a Compact Flash / SD card reader on top where one who had some BS-X ROMS on it could then put their card into the reader and run the machine, select their game and play it. A separate options menu would allow you to enter initially (and later edit) the BS-X bios parameters (your name and gender, which actually effects how some BS-X games display your character or show your name), which would be stored on an internal flash chip. There would be a time circuit replacing the live satellite feed based time signal (you ain't gonna be receiving a time signal from that sat without a real Satellaview unit and going to Japan and somehow going back in time to the 1990s, thus the need for an internal time signal generator on my proposed device). It would be manually set for an initial time and then once the game started it would change by real time ([initial manually set time] + [number of minutes passing] = [in game "current" time]). This time feature is used in some games (think BS-Zelda) to determine when the game should end.

If it detects the game has "timed out," the device I propose should then load the next game in the sequence (games in a set should be labeled as basename1.smc, basename2.smc, basename3.smc, etc). One good set of raw dumps for BS-X game (The Legend of Zelda: The Ancient Stone Tablets) can be found here:
Code:
http://bszelda.zeldalegends.net/sekibanzips/sekiban(1).zip
http://bszelda.zeldalegends.net/sekibanzips/sekiban(2).zip
http://bszelda.zeldalegends.net/sekibanzips/sekiban(3).zip
http://bszelda.zeldalegends.net/sekibanzips/sekiban(4).zip


Developers of my proposed device (if anyone wants to take up my idea) can use these files for testing such a device.

Yes some of these games were "sound link" games that used live audio feed from the satellite for characters speaking, and for the background music, and that can't be reproduced. Therefore any games depending on that technology will not have voices and will not have background music. However these game should still be playable on my proposed device (just without the music and the voices).

This device would have to have a cartridge portion, but also a base-unit portion to attach under the SNES, as the data port there was used in the REAL Satellaview, and probably had some important data that was sent through that connection. Now originally the real Satellaview ONLY fit on the SFC (not American SNES) because of physical shape. So my proposed device to work on an American SNES would need to have a shape that would allow it to fit. Therefore if my suggested BS-X playing device also was to fit a Japanese SFC, a special converter/adapter would have to also be made for that.

Because it would be using REAL SNES/SFC hardware it should much more accurately handle games than even the best emulators (which don't have any way to emulate a hardware connector like the data connector under the SNES/SFC).
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MottZilla



Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 765

PostPosted: Wed Jan 26, 2011 6:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Not going to happen, not going to work, sorry. No matter how much you love the BS-X concept it is lost to the ages. BS-X packs have been dumped and can be hacked to play better and devices already exist to play them, flash carts like the SuperFlash 64M. The "base unit" has nothing of interest for playing BS-X cartridge dumps. The small amount of PSRAM also I think is in the Cartridge Adapter, not the base unit. Plus anything that was in PSRAM is lost forever anyway.

If you really want to see something happen with BS-X, you need alot of money and contacts in Japan to track down St. Giga's old BS-X equipment.

Also on your idea, this would be an extremely niche product that wouldn't sell many units at all. It isn't profitable and therefore will not happen unless someone sinks their own money into it.
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Videogamer555



Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 102

PostPosted: Fri Jan 28, 2011 6:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MottZilla wrote:
Not going to happen, not going to work, sorry. No matter how much you love the BS-X concept it is lost to the ages. BS-X packs have been dumped and can be hacked to play better and devices already exist to play them, flash carts like the SuperFlash 64M. The "base unit" has nothing of interest for playing BS-X cartridge dumps. The small amount of PSRAM also I think is in the Cartridge Adapter, not the base unit. Plus anything that was in PSRAM is lost forever anyway.

If you really want to see something happen with BS-X, you need alot of money and contacts in Japan to track down St. Giga's old BS-X equipment.

Also on your idea, this would be an extremely niche product that wouldn't sell many units at all. It isn't profitable and therefore will not happen unless someone sinks their own money into it.


Two things:

1.
Wait are you the same Mottzilla over at the BS-Zelda website?


2.
I think it MIGHT be of importance to be able to have hardware that
1 plays BS-X games on a REAL SNES
2 can swap ROMs in a set at the correct times when the time runs out on a given rom
3 plays BS-X bios without denying entry into to the various buildings and allowing item gathering or other normally locked features (probably would be enabled if it detects real Satellaview, or my suggested device)
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MottZilla



Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 765

PostPosted: Fri Jan 28, 2011 6:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes I am the same person.

You can play BS-X games on a real SNES with a Flash Cart right now.

When time runs out like on the games you suggested, you are going to have to power off and switch ROM images, which can already be simulated with Flash Carts and Copiers by taking the save data from one and loading it with a different ROM.

The BS-X BIOS could be hacked to enable certain features you suggest.

I know what you want, and while it's possible through various methods to get some of it, your proposed device is not going to happen commercially. The BS-X is and always was a niche product. In its death it only has gotten smaller. The best options for expanding playability of existing ROM images is emulation and hacking of images.

No one that isn't invested in it themselves would try to develop hardware to simulate it, particularly when you are still going to be missing broadcast data.
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Videogamer555



Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 102

PostPosted: Fri Jan 28, 2011 10:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MottZilla wrote:
Yes I am the same person.

You can play BS-X games on a real SNES with a Flash Cart right now.

When time runs out like on the games you suggested, you are going to have to power off and switch ROM images, which can already be simulated with Flash Carts and Copiers by taking the save data from one and loading it with a different ROM.

The BS-X BIOS could be hacked to enable certain features you suggest.

I know what you want, and while it's possible through various methods to get some of it, your proposed device is not going to happen commercially. The BS-X is and always was a niche product. In its death it only has gotten smaller. The best options for expanding playability of existing ROM images is emulation and hacking of images.

No one that isn't invested in it themselves would try to develop hardware to simulate it, particularly when you are still going to be missing broadcast data.


Couldn't you have the device just have an external device port so it could interface with a specially built CD player with a CD for the given game, and then it would actually command the CD player to play a specific CD track at a certain point in the game? There are YouTube and NicoVideo videos with ORIGINAL audio on them. Just burn them to a CD and use in the specially built CD player that's hooked up to my suggested Satellaview simulator? If the nature of the satellite signal is ever discovered and decoded, then broadcast data could be stored into a broadcast-data-image file (sort of like rom-image files contain an exact copy of SNES game data). Then using special software on a computer one could stream the satellite data to my proposed Satellaview hardware emulator using a USB cable. Using such a technique might even unlock certain aspects of the Satellaview that weren't even known to the best hackers among western Satellaview enthusiasts (only known to those in Japan who actually used a real Satellaview), and using this technique could be discovered.


It could use rom-bank-switching to load each game consecutively after the end of the previous game rom. This is NOT something you can do with just flash carts, or SNES game copiers. It would indeed require special hardware with special computer chips dedicated to rom-bank-switching. Thus my proposed device WOULD have at least one very practical use.
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MottZilla



Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 765

PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2011 7:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Two things, the audio of VCR/Beta tape recordings of play will have SNES audio mixed in over the broadcast audio. Also if there is any point where you are supposed to watch a video feed, there is no simple way to overlay that. Also you could just play the audio yourself on a CD player already.

Second, again any PSRAM data is lost forever unless you get the broadcast data.

Again with this switching of ROMs. What is the advantage of having it somewhat automatic? The ROMs would need to be hacked for this to work. And you could already switch them manually on existing hardware.

I don't disagree that it would be cool, I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation.
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Videogamer555



Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 102

PostPosted: Sat Jan 29, 2011 7:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

MottZilla wrote:
Two things, the audio of VCR/Beta tape recordings of play will have SNES audio mixed in over the broadcast audio. Also if there is any point where you are supposed to watch a video feed, there is no simple way to overlay that. Also you could just play the audio yourself on a CD player already.

Second, again any PSRAM data is lost forever unless you get the broadcast data.

Again with this switching of ROMs. What is the advantage of having it somewhat automatic? The ROMs would need to be hacked for this to work. And you could already switch them manually on existing hardware.

I don't disagree that it would be cool, I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation.



I don't get how the video data was sent differently than the rest. From my understanding there are too streams sent from the satellite. One is audio and one is the game data itself. So how is the intro video stream separate from the game data? If it was dumped correctly wouldn't the rom have included the video?

What's PSRAM?

There are NOT game sounds in the video recordings of game play when it came to SoundLink data. Remember the game is paused during narrations (you can't attack or cause other actions resulting in sounds during pause) and durring the intro there are ONLY Soundlink sounds. The ONLY problem would be getting the in-game CD-quality music which would be obscured by in-game sounds.

And shouldn't require hacked roms to switch them. I don't have to hack a rom every single time I manually switch roms in an emu. An automatic switch would have the same effect but just be controled by the emulator itself (or in this case, my proposed hardware device) instead of by human hand.
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MottZilla



Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 765

PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2011 4:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Um.. how is a 1 megabyte ROM supposed to hold live TV Video? Anything that isn't SNES rendered is probably a regular TV broadcast. Next the "game data" is already loaded before you play the game. During the game the soundlink and video feed is available.

PSRAM is a I believe 512 kilobyte memory in the BS-X Cartridge that could be used for temporary game data storage. It is not battery backed, turn off the console and it's gone. BS Zelda 3 used this apparently to store dungeon data that didn't fit in the 1 megabyte BS-X gamepak.

PSRAM was used in other games as well. Anything stored in PSRAM is lost forever unless you get ahold of St. Giga broadcast materials.

Yes it would require hacked roms to switch. How would this "device" know when to switch? Quite simple, it can't know. The only way to do it automatically without user interaction would be to hack the image to have the SNES cpu control this device to switch ROM images and also maintain program flow.
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Videogamer555



Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 102

PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2011 9:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

MottZilla wrote:
Um.. how is a 1 megabyte ROM supposed to hold live TV Video? Anything that isn't SNES rendered is probably a regular TV broadcast. Next the "game data" is already loaded before you play the game. During the game the soundlink and video feed is available.

PSRAM is a I believe 512 kilobyte memory in the BS-X Cartridge that could be used for temporary game data storage. It is not battery backed, turn off the console and it's gone. BS Zelda 3 used this apparently to store dungeon data that didn't fit in the 1 megabyte BS-X gamepak.

PSRAM was used in other games as well. Anything stored in PSRAM is lost forever unless you get ahold of St. Giga broadcast materials.

Yes it would require hacked roms to switch. How would this "device" know when to switch? Quite simple, it can't know. The only way to do it automatically without user interaction would be to hack the image to have the SNES cpu control this device to switch ROM images and also maintain program flow.


What kind of dungeon data was stored in PSRAM? Because the game rom seems runable on an emulator without an original dump of any of the real PSRAM data.

And the video that shows the guy walking into the circus tent and down the hall and then zapped into the LoZ world, is that live TV broadcast? Or is it supposed to be in the game data somewhere or what? I mean it had the same quality as an SNES graphic, not something that would need a separate video stream for. And in my recollection St.GIGA was a satellite RADIO company and didn't have any video broadcast equipment that a TELEVISION company would have, nor was the receiver unit able to receive video data. So it couldn't be real video broadcast, which makes me wonder WHAT kind of data it was, and WHERE in the SNES did this data travel. Could it have been stored in PSRAM or what?
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MottZilla



Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 765

PostPosted: Sun Jan 30, 2011 5:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The sequence with SNES graphics was likely either in the BS-X BIOS or temporarily stored in PSRAM.

The Dungeon Data in PSRAM, don't you remember how before patching the dungeons were virtually void of any walls or floors?

I'm not sure if there was any live video with BS-X. But it's certainly possible they could have. It doesn't matter if they were a "radio" company. They broadcast a signal, it could have carried both audio and video as well as data.

Anyway, my point still stands that your idea of a device to emulate the BS-X is pointless without the original broadcast materials being found. Unless that happens, any copier or flash cart paired with ROM hacking will have to do.

Personally I don't find the BS-X that interesting. Some of the games on it are which thankfully many of those are playable.
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Videogamer555



Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 102

PostPosted: Sun Feb 06, 2011 7:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

MottZilla wrote:
The sequence with SNES graphics was likely either in the BS-X BIOS or temporarily stored in PSRAM.

If the zelda intro graphics were in the BIOS (a rom, and NOT deletable) then someone would have found them by now.

MottZilla wrote:
The Dungeon Data in PSRAM, don't you remember how before patching the dungeons were virtually void of any walls or floors?

That bug effected Zelda:AST but not the original BS Zelda. And yes I do remember it. I let me waltz right through dungeons without having to get keys, LOL. (but go the wrong way and the game glitches/crashes),
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MottZilla



Joined: 08 Sep 2004
Posts: 765

PostPosted: Mon Feb 07, 2011 3:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Again, they could be PSRAM related.
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