Why I Should Win Nintendo World Championships

I'm jamming this little nibbit inappropriately into the dead non-updated version of my ol' Blog. Isn't that nice? Surely many will consider it a great service to various people such as the select few who pray to God for an update here.

Anyway, this goofily rushed blog post is for entering to win a NWC, as you can see
Now, why do I think I should win one?
Well, the answer is to find an answer - not to that, but to some technical things about my Famicom setup. Yep. Famicom.

Now, I have a Famicom. And I recall reading on ol' www.retrousb.com that their repro carts wouldn't work on a Famicom due to the built-in 2P controller lacking a start button.
However, what isn't answered is - what if I have a third-party controller? Y'see, I got this;



Now, has anyone tested to see if the 2P Start button here would get the thing to run? Does anyone really care? Well, I apparently do. Why else would I enter this contest?

Oh, and if you're gonna ask why I don't just buy the repro cart? I'm just that cheap.

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Moved!

This blogspace is no longer going to be updated. Please click into the new blog location at superfamicom.org. Nintendo Wii Black Video Game System Bundle - WIIRVKSKAAU (Google Affiliate Ad)

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BS Zelda ROM hacks update.

Please excuse me for posting here -after- I announced moving plans, but I figured I'd put this up to make sure everyone knows.

Obviously I plug here often.
Now, though, I'd like to say that somewhere between the Music Hack and the Save Menu hack, the Sekiban ROMs can now boot on my ROM copier - real hardware compatibility ahoy!

I assume most of you folks who are used to playing these on emulators anyway won't find this too exciting, but a nerd like me just loves it when he can pop his favorite ROM hack on the actual system. I could rant more about this, but this is not the place.

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Note on the blog's status: Moving plans.

I'm planning to have the blog moved to a new space and domain by the 20th, the blog's first birthday.

I have a few reasons for this - first off, my sloppiness is starting to get more and more apparent as I've updated this blog. I'm hoping moving things around will also help me reorganize the content.

The second issue I got is webspace - I'll need more of it, as lately I've been struggling to clean my old webspace out due to how much content I have. (Or at least, how large the content is.)

I hope to have most of the old content moved (Nothing that has been rendered obsolete, though.)
Stay tuned for any more tidbits.

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Looking more into St. Giga.

As a Satellaview researcher I've wondered about the nature of St. Giga - and how they got involved in an ambitous Nintendo project - for a while. Even as I've looked up Satellaview content, I've also looked into researching St. Giga as a whole.

For a while I've tried entering search terms with their title on NicoNicoDouga - and recently I've been getting results. You can check some of them after the snip.

More importantly though, the English Wikipedia has been doing articles based on translations of the Japanese Wikipedia.
I'd like to thank anyone who helped on that. :)
It's very helpful, and it gives me context into some of my search results, too.

Whether it be the experimental New-Age music, or the just-as-experimental yet radically different Satellaview, St. Giga's history was innovation in the music business - which may have been why Nintendo sought them out for this project.

Apparently Nintendo invested stock in them in 93? Funny, wasn't that around the year the Super Famicom CD projects fell under?

Anyway, here are the most recent NicoNicoDouga uploads, an episode of "RADIO STAR" which is very ambient in nature, and some episode's of Yuuki Nae's show, "Tomorrow, If..."

(Oh, yeah, hit that "Read More" button now.)










セント・ギガ　裕木奈江 『明日になれば』
裕木奈江　『明日になれば』（1996年3月）
裕木奈江　『明日になれば』（平成８年）
from St.GIGA 「RADIO STAR」～「ORGANIC-STEPS」

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Nintendo's finally feeding. :)

I'd like to give thanks to Serenes Forest once again for the heads-up that inspired this update.

Nintendo has been putting up audio snippets of their Fire Emblem games on their site.

You might ask, "What's so special about that?"

Well, check out that last Monsho song - "WIND". It's a BS Fire Emblem-exclusive song (Apparently the song called "WIND" which was used in the Thracia albums is not the same...? BS F-Zero was confusing enough!)

This is the closest Nintendo has gone yet to re-release anything Satellaview-related since the add-on device's demise in mid-2000.

For ease of the English speaker, I've pulled said MP3 from their site and put it up on my blog. (actually I did it more for my collection - the uploading's just me being nice. But aw, well!)

BS Fire Emblem - WIND


Yeah, so it's just some cheesy J-Pop - but first, J-Pop, tomorrow a full game remake!... hopefully!

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The obligatory April Fool's Gag.

Or at least I... THINK It's an April Fool's gag...



NicoNiocDouga seems to be down - but that matters not since I think this video's been lost anyway.

If by some ungodly miracle someone actually is running Windows on a SFC+Satellaview combo, be sure to give me a holler.

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belated note.

If you guys upgraded before to BSNES .041 and are wondering why the Satellaview ROM loading isn't working, Get .042.

That should fix your problem.

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Artcles from elsewhere!

If you guys see my links portion start to grow soon, it's because I've been looking around again.

Lately it seems like the international attention on the Satellaview has been growing - in a particularly sweet finding, The English Wikipedia article on the Satellaview has developed from being poo to actually being a very good starting base for research.

And now I finally have a grasp on how well the Satellaview did. It has SLIGHTLY more fans than the PC-FX! Whoopeee!... Wait, that means I need to do some PC-FX work if I still plan to be niche! Don't worry, Rising Stuff, the Battle Heat guide will be done soon!

Also of note is this recent article. I've never seen this guy's blog before, but he seems pretty excited, so I'm gonna be sure to check it out more. :D

This article also seems interesting - although I will note that on Kameb's Satellaview History Museum, the schedule seems to actually go from Noon to 2AM. Can anyone here clear this up? I also don't know much on whether the Satellaview could upload, and... arg, BS F-Zero still confuses me.

GiantBomb pulled up a Satellaview article, it seems.

Oh, and who's been putting this up on MarioWiki?... Oh, wait, that's me. Durrr. :D

Right, more to come down the line.

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Satellaview dojin projects?

The Satellaview seems to still have a cult following in Japan even today. Fan demand for a remake of BS Fire Emblem: Akanea Senki Hen was enough for Intsys to actually have a comment about it - an awesome change from the usual Nintendo practice of pretending they don't know what we're talking about. (Unfortunately serensforest is down. I can't find the link. D: )

But while Intsys is considering such an action, fans are already taking it. Ah, it's always grand to see fans go above and beyond!

First let me start with something I found a while ago - this file right here.
What is it? Seems like a retelling of BS Fire Emblem, done in SRPG Maker 95. There's apparently also a patch for this, while I have been unable to locate. (This only works properly if your Windows is set to run in Japanese OS mode.)
I've played a bit of it, and was kinda irked at how unlike the actual game this is, but I was still shocked, as this was the first of it's kind I noted.

Then a recent NicoNicoDouga upload threw me for a loop.



【再現】ファイアーエムブレム アカネイア戦記１【映像】

I've been trying to look for things besides BSFE stuff as well.
For example, here's a BS Zelda-themed Zelda Classic mod.

Any others? I'd like to know. O:

(EDIT: I've been trying to look up something called "PROJECT GAM" which I've been led to assume is related to BS Tantei Club.
Any info on this would be appreciated.)

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On the proper naming of certain game titles.

The reason for the lack of updates is due to slow developments.
The reason for -this- update is also due to slow developments. This is a small little rant about the naming conventions of key Satellaview titles - how a few of these have confusing titles, and a few had been mis-named for a while due to to the emulation scene not having quite fact-checked.

On "Kodai no Sekiban", "Kodai no Ishiiban", and "Inishie no Sekiban"

The proper title of this specific BS Zelda is apparently a ridiculously confusing play on words that is difficult to properly romanize because how you -read- the title is not the same as how you pronounce it. Here's a few quotes from the BS Zelda forums to help with this.

"Going back to something a bit earlier, I've looked into matters with the Inishie no Sekiban vs Kodai no Sekiban issue. From what I gather, "Kodai" and "Inishie" are synonyms meaning "ancient."

Apparently just as Ishi (石) and Ban (盤) together counterintuitively make Sekiban (石盤), Ko (古) alone can be counterintuitively pronounced "Inishie". This is why the recent PS3 RPG, "白騎士物語 -古の鼓動-", translates to "Shirokishi Monogatari -Inishie no Kodō-" or "White Knight Story -Ancient Heartbeat-" instead of "Shirokishi Monogatari -Ko no Kodō-".

So even thought "古の鼓動" literally breaks down to:
古 - Ko
の - No
鼓 - Tsudumi
動 - Dou
when taken together it becomes Inishie (古) no (の) Kodō (鼓動).

What this means is that "Inishie no Sekiban" (BSゼルダの伝説 古の石盤) seems to have been an alternate name for "Kodai no Sekiban" (BSゼルダの伝説 古代の石盤). The only difference being the character Dai (代). Under this theory I ran a Google search on "BSゼルダの伝説 古の石盤" and lo and behold, the Berriblue blog and one other site both refer to it by this name. It's not a perfect explanation, but I for one feel comfortable letting it go at that."

I myself go by the theory that the game should be romanized based on how it's pronounced, because while Japan can be confusing with it's writing, it's pronunciation doesn't change that much.

(BTW, "BS Zelda REMIX" doesn't really exist as a Satellaview broadcast - it was a misnaming for the MAP 1 Dai-3-wa ROM which has since taken on a life of it's own.)

On "BS Tantei Club".

The proper title for the game is BS 探偵倶楽部 雪に消えた過去 (BS Tantei Kurabu Yuki ni Kieta Kako)

Some ROM download sites refer to it as "BS Tantei Club Saihousou" or something like that. I do not know where this name came from. Any help figuring that out would be helpful.

On the "BS" Prefix.

Although ROM sites will put the "BS" prefix in front of every game title, whether or not they were on the actual game title is much less consistent.
For example, "BS F-Zero Grand Prix", and "BS Super Mario USA" both have the "BS" prefix - note how they're both special soundlink versions of a standard release... but there's no "BS" in "Tamori's Picross", "All Japan Super Bombliss Cup 95", or "Kodomo Chousadan Mighty Pockets", or most "plain" SFC rereleases.
This can be a bit of confusion in and of itself.

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On the Prizes the Satellaview gave out.

Recently on this BS Zelda thread we've been trying to figure out info on the prizes St. Giga distributed as rewards for Satellaview players. I decided to put up some of the info here as well for reference.

Most the information comes from the Satellaview History Museum, SFC MANIA, and Satellaview Heaven which I linked on the right.

From what I read, a lot of the games had certificates of victory for the high-scoring players. I haven't seen any of them with my own eyes but the SFC MANIA article on BS Fuurai no Shiren seems to have a low-res picture of it's specific one. These are likely highly collectible.

On the note of non-certificate prizes, Calling cards were common. For those who don't remember the days before the cell phone boom, calling cards were cards that were used to pay for phone calls. Satellaview Heaven has up a picture of a BS Shin Onigashima one, and on Yahoo Japan Auctions I saw descriptors for a Satellaview Tsushin calling card and a Samurai Spirits calling card.

St. Giga also gave out a lot of self-branded items. A watch and a purse were featured on Satellaview Heaven and descriptions of a purse were noted. The "Pin Badge" is also likely such.

Other than that, though, I am uncertain of what the others would be... either way, these prizes seem like little trinkets produced on the cheap. No trips to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, sorry.

(pictures are linked in the forum thread.)

EDITING THIS due to updates, thanks MadHatter:
First off, on Yahoo Japan Auctions (last I saw it) is a Satellaview Tsushin Parka. Anyone wanna buy it for me? ;)
But besides that, Madhatter's been translating the list of news articles from "Ge-mu Toranoana" (I'll need to update the articles I have that previously referenced this for the proper name - it's apparently based on Comic Toranoana.) listings on Kameb's Satellaview History Museum.

Along with what I mentioned, he's noted some of the more interesting items that were being given - apparently Golden Mario Statues, the imfamous Nintendo collectible prize, were distributed at some point - likely for BS Super Mario USA.
Game Paks were also distributed - nothing too collectible mind you, but Super Mario RPG and Kirby Super Deluxe were good games, don't you think? Already the prizes sounds a lot more interesting.

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Koi ha Balance - Battle of Lovers

Squaresoft seemed to like treating the Satellaview like a little playground. Games like Treasure Conflix and Dynamitracer seemed to throw around a different atmosphere than their typical "Final Fantasy" work.

And then this came along and pushed it a bit over the edge.

Koi Ha Balance - Battle of Lovers is a board game. Yes, a board game.
It's about scoring with lots of girls. Literally (although not sexually).
It goes hilariously over the top in nearly everything it does.

This gameplay video I put up (recorded off emulating. Yes I am a cheap butt) shows only a fraction of gameplay, and already you see things like men emoing over being single, battles with muscle-bound homosexual stereotypes, and men stealing other guys' girls by the ultimate superpower of materialism!

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Magazine Articles.

Excuse the long absence. This time, an actual crisis came up. I'm not gonna babble my personal stories here though. Instead, I shall thank MadHatter at the BS Zelda forum for picking up my pace in researching. I'm gonna have a few interesting articles to put up now. Let me start with this one.

For a while now I've been trying to nab old documents on the Satellaview - thanks to Madhatter I actually have some excellent little articles. I unfortunately am not the Master of French, but I can already see some news. :D

These have all been thumbnail'd so they don't actually clutter up the page too much...
(Mirrored on my own webspace for convenience.)
















Also, I decided to throw up here a really large scan of a Satellaview promo poster, and a scan of a certain Nintendo Power Article...







The BS Zelda page has the most BS Zelda-related articles. Be sure to take a trip there (Again!) to check those out.

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Listen to some strange-sounding SPC rips.

A few weeks ago I've tried making a go at ripping music from Satellaview ROM SPCs looking for some songs that aren't going around in common sets.

I'm still mastering the ripping art at the moment. You can see some of my results here.

http://kiddocabbusses.tryhappy.net/BSSPCRips/

For you guys who don't have SPC Players but want to take a listen to some of the rips, I've Chun-Yu'd them to MP3 form for your listening torture - er, pleasure.

BS SUTTE HAKKUN - STORY INTRO


BDASH



BUSTERS - DIGITAL MAGAZINE


DO-RE-MI NO. 2



A few notes to the other SPC rippers out there - these are my first real attempts at ripping these, so I'm sorry if there's any grave errors.
for the ones in which I just have the name of the ROM.spc, those songs are the only songs I could access. Most of the song names for ROMs with more than one song were made up based on some text that was on the page along with the music.

(EDIT: I've had a problem with these MP3s sounding weird on the embed, but not on Winamp. Therefore I'm direct-linking the Mp3s on top of the embeds, in case other people also have this problem.)

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I forgot Poland. Also Joushou Mahjong Tenpai.

Sometimes I search diligently for things that I just can't seem to obtain. Other times I miss something obvious that's been trying to fly into my face like a Danmaku Bullet.

This is the case of the latter. I should've thrown this in with the rest of the slotted cart games, but alas, I've been looking for the BS F-Zero 2 Dai-2 stuff that I've faild. (Bonus points for anyone who gets "faild")

So yeah, the thing I forgot about was Joushou Mahjong Tenpai. Now, since this is a mediocre Mahjong game, I'd guess to a Westerner like myself I shouldn't be expected to really thinkg for this game. But alas, I'm a perfectionist who is obsessed with completion.

So, to start off with, Square-Enix still has a page up for this game. How interesting! I should see if Dynamitracer, Treasure Conflix and Koi Ha Balance are here as well.

The game was credited to Game Arts (highly prestige-filled devvers to make the least of it. BTW, I'm totally psyched for that new TMNT Game being made by them and Team Ninja. Yes I go off topic a lot on this post.) and published by Enix.

It's difficult to get a good picture of the game's cartridge scan. I had to dig around Yahoo Japan Auctions to find this picture

Cartridge pic

And as for in-game screenshots I'll leave this link. Yes. It's a ridiculously plain Mahjong game. No wacky Mario Party cheating or Anime Girl stripping to distract you. and here I was kinda hoping that dragon on the box art would burninate the loser. But enough being corny out of me.

As the cartridge top suggests, this had some level of Satellaview compatibility - exactly what, I dunno. Data packs are likely but this is one of the few where I don't recall Data Packs for the game being mentioned in any undumped lists or schedules. Kinda confusing. (Any help on this, native Japanese folks? *sad puppy eyes* )

One notable thing I tried to do loading the game is open the second option (going down from the top-left, as opposed to the second one going right from the top-left), only to get a screen that looks like a message that forces me back to the previous menu. I wonder....

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I AM ERROR.

I decided to try out the newest BSNES version and seeing some different behavior in the Derby Stallion 96 ROM inspired me to write this article - one with a bunch of pictures of things that can go wrong. :E

Before I get into the fun parts though, allow me to explain what I mean - on Derby Stallion 96, the menu has an option at the bottom called, what else? "Satellaview", in it's JP form.

Before, the old BSNES (And SNESGT which I took the screencap of) gave me this error when I would select it:

Error 01

Now what happens?

What is this? Did we restore it?

...

Oh blast it! It's another error!

Error 05? I wonder what this means?

I'm not done yet, though. :3 The BS-X Bios has a few more errors I can throw down on here as well.

Error 08 happens apparently on emulators that can't quite do the Satellaview

And Error 09 is the dreaded message that appears if the BS-X thinks your memory pack ROM data has corrupted.

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BS Super Famicom Wars, recorded poorly by... uh, myself.

I think I'm getting slightly better at the video recording. :D

Here's some BS Super Famicom Wars. Let me pull out the description I put on Youtube as well.

"This seems like a sort of little demo in comparison to the NP Version. Before you ask - these are the only characters, settings, and battle map I could select. There's also a lot of missing polishes compared to the NP Version - I can't seem to enable Battle and Fort Seizing animations for example."

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Needed to fill up space - more Radioness.

Bringing back the radio programming. :3

This is probably what I should've done on them slow news days. Durrr. I tend to be braindead too often.











Original NicoNiocDouga URLs
伊集院光の怪電波発信基地 96/5/18
伊集院光の怪電波発信基地 96/5/25
伊集院光の怪電波発信基地 96/6/1
伊集院光の怪電波発信基地 96/6/8

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BS Fire Emblem Script Translation Project.

Due to the absence of dedicated Satellaview translators I've decided to do the job I've employed myself in!

Serenesforest's forum shall be taking a look at me trying to translate the scripts for BS Fire Emblem. If anyone wants to volunteer some work on it as well, be my guest. I'm not necessarily the most talented translator, after all.

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Book video wave

Nevermind the Engrish-sounding title, I uploaded these on youtube.

I've (sloppily) recorded these myself. :3





Expect more shortly.

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Kiddo looks at them e-books.

I've decided I shall make videos of myself going through the Satellaview's "books", which apparently come in a ridiculous amount of varieties.

For anyone who's out of the loop here - quite an amount of the Satellaview ROMs going around are not "games" per se. Rather they are nicely-arranged rows of text and pictures, sometimes with music, for your pleasure.

To show you what I mean, I'm linking another Youtube video I found. Unfortunately I can't embed it, but considering... yeah, that's probably for the best anyway.

This one is an issue of "Nintendo HP". Nintendo HP apparently had news on all of Nintendo's latest stuff, from the N64 to the Super Famicom's "Nintendo Power" service.

Some of the ones I want to look at here are "Sousa Sentai Wappers", "Bdash" and "Busters Digital Magazine". There's a lot more too. Once I get a desktop camera working, stay tuned. :3

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Missed Christmas, New Years, but not much news. :(

When making a blog like this, sometimes new finds are difficult to come by. Or at least at a reportable form.

I'll leave this space as a sort of guideline for what I should be expecting of myself (and therefore what's expected to come from Satellablog) later on.

In terms of material I archived? I could put up some more videos of the downloadable games. DynamiTracer's ending was put up on NicoNicoDouga after all. Any requests? I'm running out of Soundlink program videos though. If only I could find R no Shosai's...

One idea I might have is to translate the Satellaview-related articles at SFC MANIA and SATELLAVIEW HEAVEN. That way, you can get some interesting reads on BS Wario no Mori, Pikopiko Pairetsu, SatellaQ, and BS Sim City, among others.

I also need to try to tidy the blog articles up - revise/remoxe some Tags, particularly. I got an excess amount of F-Zero and Zelda ones, and a lot of silly ones.

Last but not least, I haven't gone through my archived radio programs yet. I didn't figure those to be very popular, though.

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