Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Satellaview Content, Part 1: Live Broadcasts

With the Satellaview, various kinds of content distribution was performed. I'll try to explain these here. Let me start with this one:

The most creative and gimmicky kind of content was "Live Broadcast" games. These games were an experiment in limited-time speedrun game contests, live audio broadcast, and episodic content, among other things.



This Youtube video, uploaded my makuchan, shows how such a game was downloaded. This specific example is BS Zelda, which was the first Live Broadcast game released.



koitetsu213 uploaded this video, which originally appeared on NicoNicoDouga, which has some of the gameplay, as it was originally played, via the live broadcast. NicoNicoDouga also has various other videos, which I will talk about later.

Note that nowadays, when you try to play these on an emulator...



There is no music. The reason should be readily apparant: Live audio was not saved into the ROM data. As far as I know, clean versions of the original audio are not available anywhere, and very few of the musical pieces are around.

(thanks to SobmicSSBB for the BS Fire Emblem video)

Playing these games, you will notice a clock. These games ran in tune with the BS-X's internal clock, and played in real-time. The majority of the games had a time limit of slightly less than an hour. They would also use the clock to cue various in-game events.

The games could ONLY be played when permitted as such by the service. Between "broadcast dates" and after the Satellaview service ended, none of the Live Broadcast games could be played anymore, and save data from them was useless on the actual Super Famicom Hardware. To make this situation more problematic, little of the content was re-released in any form officially. ROM dumps, a few musical pieces, and video uploads are currently the only known remnants of the Satellaview Live Broadcast games going around the internet - and they are far, far from a complete set in any form.

Currently, the only way to try to play "Live Broadcast" games is from a ROM Dump. However, very few emulators properly support BS-X games. I will post a guide on what I know here later on, but for now, I'll state that for Live Broadcast games, the emulator called SNESGT is the most likely to play any of them.

6 comments:

Robert Seddon said...

As I've just told GlitterBerri, your current template has a main column slightly too narrow to display the whole of a YouTube video, but that can be fixed by editing the template CSS.

Given the type of isometric perspective used in the middle section, the person at the desk reminded me of both LttP's fortune teller and this chap from SMRPG; I wonder whether they're related.

Kiddo said...

Ah, sorry. I didn't note this comment for a few days.

I forgot when I first tried modifying the template. It might've been that very day you noted it to me? I realized some stuff didn't display right so I tried some sloppy HTML editing. Does it look better now?

The person at the desk in the BS Zelda video is probably meant to be the Fortune Teller. Dunno why he's hiding Zelda monsters out of the mascot's view, though...

Robert Seddon said...

If 'better' encompasses 'wider than my ~1024px viewport' then it's fine; otherwise you'll want to rein it in a bit again. But there's certainly enough space for embedded videos now.

Kiddo said...

Ah, sorry. The page doesn't need any Horizontal scrolling on my browser... I should've checked to see how it looks on some others, I guess.

If there's enough demand to tighten things up again, I'll experiement some more.

Summer's Captions said...

Grreat reading your blog post

Summer's Captions said...

Great readinng this

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