Pictures of the Satellaview: Hardware And Carts

(URLs fixed)

This post will have some pictures of Satellaview hardware, carts, memory packs, and whatnot.

Most of these pictures were taken from other sites, and for that I apologize. These are meant for educational purposes, but if you have any objections, send me a comment and I'll remove them.



I'll start with this box right here...



This is a Satellaview box. Open it up...



And here's what's inside! But how does this all go together? Let's go one piece at a time...



This looks like a Super Famicom cartridge, and it is! But it's not just any cartridge; it's the Satellaview's BIOs cartridge, "BS-X : Sore wa namae o nusumareta machi no monogatari".

You could pop this in as-is on top of a Super Famicom and play it, but without anything else, there isn't much of a point.

You might prefer trying to find a BS-X cart with...



A BS-X Memory Pack! Nowadays, since the Satellaview service does not work, you might prefer a used one with some data already in it compared to what seems to be this perhaps-not-so-touched-one which still has it's retail box.



The Memory Pack goes into the Bios cart like so. Now, when you load up the Bios, it will read the data from this memory pack.

So, yeah, that's great. Now what about that other thing..?



Oh, this Satellaview base? This is the actual hardware add-on which allowed you to use the Satellite services and whatnot.



They connected to a Super Famicom like so - Cartridge with Memory Pack on top, and the Satellaview base at the bottom, through a port that, up until that point, the Super Famicom did not use.

(All the other things are to assist in these connections. It'd be a bit ridiculous to go in-depth on the use of the L-Bracket to send power from the Super Famicom to the Satellaview base... although now I just realized I explained it's use already! Drat!)

Using these, and the St. Giga Satellite service, you could have the Satellaview download and stream data.

Oh, by the way, one more picture? These aren't included in the set, of course...



What are these? They have the shape of the bios cart and appear to take carts in the shape of Memory Packs.

These carts read data from Memory Packs for use in their own games. These uses were more restricted than the Bios itself (You could not load a game of Special Tee Shot from a Derby Stallion 96), and instead were more specialized; The data these games looked for was usually expansion data, which may have been downloaded from the Satellaview service onto the Memory Pack.

NOTE to ROM users:

I have the following expansion downloads in ROM format -

"Same Game Koma Data"
"KANADERU CONVERT"
"RPG Tsukuru Data", around 3 or 4 portions, need to double check.
"Sound Novel Tsukuru Data", around 4 or 5 portions, need to double check

Other dumps would be appreciated.

If you have these ROMs and don't know how to use them, I will put up a guide to loading them using BSNES shortly.