I'm writing this one down in light of the fact that many people may not know how to properly emulate Satellaview content. In particular, Broadcast games have difficulty running.
The standard emulators of choice for many people - SNES9X and ZSNES - are not necessarily the optimal choice for Satellaview emulation. In fact, I do not know how to boot many of the ROMs on them properly. Therefore, I use alternative emulators.
The easiest option to use is apparently a modification of SNES9X called "SNES9X SE". It was written in part for improved Satellaview support.
SNES9X SE
Most ROMs will boot on it, although emulation is not perfected. It is the easiest to use because it can fake Bios emulation, so you do not need the Bios ROM and setup is easier than the others.
My personal preference, however, is SNESGT. It's homepage is here;
SNESGT Homepage
This requires a bit of work to get working. I have written a tutorial here;
BS Zelda Forums - Broadcast Game emulation tutorial
I'm moving the tutorial here in this post edit. :)
Compatibility is more or less the same as SNES9XSE, but there's less notable glitches on SNESGT, and the ability to modify the game's real-time clock as you wish is a great touch that'll let you go quicklly to segments of a game you may wish to re-view.
Before loading a BS-X ROM, you go to Options - > Settings. It should pop up a settings screen. Look to the left of it.
There, click on "BS" and you'll see this menu. This is specifically for BS-X games.
The most important things to do here are to check "Use BSX-ROM" and have a BS-X BIOs linked to in the "BSX-ROM file". The BS-X BIOs can be found a various BIOS-hosting sites and the BS Zelda Shrine, likely under the name "BS-X BIOS" or "SATELLAVIEW BIOS". If this BIOs does not work for you, you may have to remove it's ROM header, but since I do not know if it's necessary for SNESGT (it -IS- for BSNES), I'll wait for my BSNES ROM load tutorial for more on that. Another possibility is that your ROM may still be in compressed formats like .zip - find an extractor to get the .SMC or .SFC file within.
The other settings are to customize your experience. Out of preference, set the clock to the beginning of the hour, so that you see the entirety of the game's Live Broadcast. 7 minutes in may work for BS Zelda, but for BS Tantei Club and BS F-Zero, segments will be skipped.
"Boot from BS-X ROM" is for Download games and Magazines, as opposed to Live broadcast games. Note that some download games will not boot in this mode, and need to play without it.
"Save BSX Sram separately" makes individual sram saves for each BS-X game, as opposed to lumping them in a single file. For episodic live broadcast games, you might want this UN-checked so that data can more seamlessly transfer over.
After all these settings are configured, load a BS-X ROM as if it was a standard ROM file, and it should boot. Double check these instructions if it doesn't. If you still have questions, ask me them here, and I'll consider them when revising this.
My next article on emulation will likely be about Data Expansions. It will use BSNES.
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7 comments:
Hello.
Your post was very useful to me as I was just getting into investigating how to run BS games and information is rather sparse on the web about this SNES gadget.
Do you know if SNESGT can be run from the command line skipping the GUI?
I downloaded it but the only command line argument shown on the readme.txt is f for full screen.
Thanks.
Sadly I don't know much about using command lines in SNESGT. If anything for that comes up that's related to this in particular, I'll be sure to post on it though.
Oh, and since this came up in a forum: a Quote from myself.
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On the note of Treasure Conflix - Try running it in SNESGT (The version currently uploaded on the site should work) with the settings I have up on my guide for emulating Broadcast/Soundlink games. Apparently Treasure Conflix reads it's fonts off the BIOs (On BSNES, these fonts glitch, but in SNESGT they seem to be legible) and I've played it a bit and have been able to clear a single stage before getting stuck on what to do next. How far did it go before crashing in other emulators?"
Basically, some of the standard "download" titles may also need to load with the BIOs, Treasure Conflix in particular. I'll look into the other titles going around to see what else used these, although they're mostly non-game Books or News Bulletins/Magazines.
Thanks for your reply.
I'll contact the developer and let you know if I come up with something interesting.
The devver of SNESGT?
I should probably contact him too, but I'd need to ask someone else about that first...
People of the BS-X:
Is there a collection of patches for BS Fero Grand Prix and Grand Prix 2 to enable playing them as a regular cartridge ROM on emulators such as SNES9X? I'm thinking something in the style of the BS Zelda patches at bszelda.zeldalegends.net
Thanks.
Manuel, please check out the new site location at http://bsx.superfamicom.org/
As for the answer to your question, I don't think there's anything I've noted like that.
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