Thread by @LuigiBlood

There's some interest about #Satellaview lately so quick thread.
Satellaview preservation for the past 21 years is basically this: Buying Memory Packs at random and hope it has something interesting by dumping it.
We don't check the contents because it's not reliable.

I made a post about Satellaview dumping here if you wanna know:
luigiblood.tumblr.com/post/166294029…

When it comes to dump data analysis, there's no secrets, I'm mostly the guy checking the data manually through a hex editor, graphics viewer and tools. If you have made a dump, chances are you go through me to figure it out lol

I worked on Satellaview preservation and also server emulation and reverse engineering since around 2009, I'm very familiar with it. We're even busy trying to make the actual hardware work for documentation reasons.

And about #Satellaview preservation itself:
It's doomed. We are just scraping what we can get and a lot of money is needed.
We never get clean soundlink audio, we never get server data, even for something as simple as BS Zelda, we don't have everything.

And I don't even mean like, we just got BS Zelda Map 1 Week 1... but even if we get every Memory Pack dump of it, we will never get the intro and ending data, which were downloaded to BS-X cartridge's RAM only and gone on power off. That's how sad it gets.

For BS Zelda Ancient Stone Tablets (the ALTTP one): We have all the ROMs.
...except it's only fully playable if we have the PSRAM data. The game will crash if you play the unmodified ROMs.

If it wasn't for the hard work of fans who recreated this data, it wouldn't be playable.

Even if Nintendo was down to rerelease Satellaview games, we don't know to what extent their archive is like, and even if they did rerelease, a lot of the Satellaview experience would be ignored anyway...
And chances are, the rereleases would be altered for licensing issues.

So I still call to Nintendo to do whatever they can to make them playable, but it shouldn't stop our plan to continue preserving as much as we can in our own terms.

Also I think summing up Satellaview to its games would be doing a disservice: Satellaview had addons to games that supported it, but also magazines of a lot of kinds, the service was ambitious, I dare say it almost wanted to be replacing the TV channels but to be more interactive

Satellaview compatible games were also comprised of RPG Maker 2, Sound Novel Maker and Music Maker.
You could save user content to Memory Packs... and those were responsible for A LOT OF LOST CONTENT.

To this very day: Only one Satellaview title got an official rerelease, BS Fire Emblem had a complete remake on DS as part of Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem as bonus content (Japan only).

Columbus Circle in Japan has produced cartridges of Kaizou Choujin Schbibinman Zero (prequel of Shockman on PC Engine), and Square-Enix has remembered Dynami Tracer by putting the main theme to one of its discs during Tokyo Game Show.

This thread went on for a bit too long but, Satellaview is basically, in my opinion, the worst preserved Nintendo thing, alongside Famicom Network System cards.

Thankfully there are many VHS recordings of Satellaview games, which provides us context for many things. No thanks to Content ID on YouTube however.

Also yes, Satellaview games weren't always games with radio narration over them, there were also perfectly playable SNES games without bells and whistles like Special Tee Shot or Sutte Hakkun. There were a lot of them.

https://twitter.com/sfc_moogle/status/1461471391853723648

See how I easily get lost in thoughts when I talk about Satellaview lol