don't click here

More Sega Channel prototypes dumped.

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by Kiddo Cabbusses, Jul 20, 2011.

  1. LocalH

    LocalH

    roxoring your soxors Tech Member
    Oh good, I get to ask you two questions, and both are related to the content of this thread with that last post :P

    1) In the April 1994 issue of Game Players, there is a small picture that purports to be the "Japanese version of the Sega Channel hardware". Have you ever seen this picture? It appears to look almost like a hybrid inbetween the short and tall US adapters, and the label simply has the standard S1-style Sonic artwork on the right, with the standard blue SEGA logo to the left and what appears to be a button directly below the bottom-right hand corner of the label. It also looks like there's a couple of demo screenshots (which appear like they might be from demo #4 cart, which I really really really need to send back to Skrybe, I've been so busy and without a vehicle at the moment it's a pain in the ass to get to the post office).

    2) In the April 1995 issue of Game Players, there is an interesting shot of what possibly appears to be early Satellaview hardware. It shows a Data Pak that looks like it has 6 pins coming out the bottom (and the shape looks sort of like a PS1 memory card, with the curved portion being at the connector end), a BS-X BIOS cart that looks absolutely nothing like the final hardware (in fact, I don't even see the little "slot" that SNES and SFC carts have, that the power switch slides a piece of plastic into to "lock" the cart in). The Satellaview hardware itself looks really weird, it doesn't have an EXT port connector on top, it appears to have a raise "Nintendo SATELLAVIEW" badge on the left, and two completely different looking lights where the Power and Access lights are. These look like rescans by GP, so the quality isn't that great (there are also pictures of the final hardware, and they are heavily halftoned on top of the magazine's "native" halftone screen). Have you seen anything like these pics?

    If neither of these pics have been seen, I will be happy in the next few days to dig out my flatbed and scan them.
     
  2. I don't think we have any scans from "Game Players". Please send them my way. I know a few other magazines have something akin to a prototype Satellaview piece but the way you describe your's sounds unique.

    EDIT: Just to clarify, most of our current magazine scans are in this thread;

    http://z9.invisionfree.com/bszelda/index.php?showtopic=981&st=0

    There's also this thread which has, specifically, some Famitsu stuff;

    http://z9.invisionfree.com/bszelda/index.php?showtopic=1294

    The most recent really interesting scan implies Satellaview content related to Seiken Densetsu 3.
     
  3. LocalH

    LocalH

    roxoring your soxors Tech Member
    Just to give you a better idea, I'm gonna take a quickie shot with my iPod digital camera to show you what I mean, until I can properly scan them.

    Watch this space.

    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]

    Don't worry about adding those to your collection just yet, of course, as I will scan them properly if you need them.

    Edit: Shit, I just realized I clipped the Data Pak out of the Satellaview pic. Still, that pic is enough for you to know if you have seen it before or not.
     
  4. Ok, Satellaview scan is -definitely- want. The Sega Channel JP BIOs there appears ismilar to the pictures going around beside s it being a mag scan at first glance, but perhaps with a better picture I can study more.
     
  5. LocalH

    LocalH

    roxoring your soxors Tech Member
    It might take me a few days, I run Win7 x64 and my scanner is so old that I have to use Vuescan, and it's being a severe bitch.
     
  6. I have a friend who's got a mint boxed Satellaview, but as he buys and sells for a living, I'm sure he's not looking to let it go for a low sum. Are they particularly rare, and is there anything that needs to be scanned/dumped from an actual system?
     
  7. Andlabs

    Andlabs

    「いっきまーす」 Wiki Sysop
    2,175
    1
    0
    Writing my own MD/Genesis sound driver :D
    Satellaviews aren't particularly rare but they are overpriced, and yeah they need to be dumped. Unlike the Sega Channel, Satellaview has non-volatile RAM, so we can recover games, usually in part (though there are whole games restored). I believe Kiddo runs that operation, or if not has a high part in that. If your friend has sealed ones I don't think they would have anything on them though they would be interesting from a technical standpoint, since there is a small group of people researching the firmware.

    Do we have scans of the packaging and manual?
     
  8. Is there anything in the 8M Memory Pack? Recently Seru-kun told me of a way to check even for a Soundlink game that involves going into the "delete" menu in RPG Tsukuru 2 (this sounds highly risky, though....)
    Does the SRAM appear to have anything in the save data like items?

    These are the two things I tend to look for for dumping purposes.

    EDIT: Also, to give some ideas of what in particular to look for, here's my ever-gorwing undumped list;

    http://forums.no-intro.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1491

    Note that it's -far- from complete and I've repeatedly ran across Satellaview data with absolutely no prior internet documentation.

    There's also been Satellaview games which have been restored from "Corrupt" memory pack data, such as this;
    http://superfamicom.org/blog/2011/12/a-christmas-satellaview-rom-story/

    As for scans of the boxes and manual, there's been a few pictures but nothing too high quality IIRC.
    (And in terms of how I operate in relation to the Satellaview, I tend to be a mixture of the spokesperson and the general researcher. I honestly think I'm a lot less important now than I was - Seru-kun's been doing fascinating things with BS-X Project, Callis and the snesfreaks community supplied great ROM dumps, and MadHatter's been great at obtaining Japanese magazines, even including the infamous BS Zelda Magazine ad. Somehow, though, I'm still considered important, because they all tend to approach me with the Satellaview stuff. Or I approach them with Satellaview stuff. Heheh.)
     
  9. LocalH

    LocalH

    roxoring your soxors Tech Member
    Ok, finally got my scanner going (luckily I had a copy of x86 XP in a VM so I just used it with the original driver). There are a few vertical "streaks" in some of the dark areas that I can't help, I think my scanner's slowly dying. Here are the scans, including both pages of the Satellaview article (in case the second page is useful at all) and the whole Sega Channel article.

    Sega Channel JP hardware
    Satellaview article pg 1 (with weird hardware)
    Satellaview article pg 2
     
  10. I'll be OK with these scans in the meantime, as the pictures are clear enough to see and the text is legible. Thanks!

    The Satellaview article seems like a good read, although it seems like it's filled with hyperbole and wishful thinking (I don't think Donkey Kong Country can fit in the 8M Pack specifications) and bizarre romanization (Sento Giga?). I wonder why they posted those screens of what look like a prototype, when the next page has more traditional Satellaview mock-up art?

    It seems like the Sega Channel was pretty well finalized in Japan before it came out here. I wonder if there's any Japanese test carts?
     
  11. Rika Chou

    Rika Chou

    Tech Member
    5,276
    169
    43
    This topic made me feel nostalgic (again), so I was going to look up the sega channel video on youtube.

    Then I saw this wonderful infomercial that I've never seen before.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdkO-b_ey8g
     
  12. That one's been up on Youtube for a while, actually. A few other interesting results are a guy uploading music from a TV Sega Channel's downtime, and a Mega Man: The Wily Wars trailer that's from an obvious prototype.
     
  13. GenesisFan64

    GenesisFan64

    The bright side of the dark side. Member
    108
    0
    16
    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    I Finally fixed this, with the background and more

    If you have the ROM already (I used "Sega Channel (JUE).bin"), do this fix with a hex editor:

    Go to: 06612
    replace 10BA10C4 with: 0DBA0DBA

    And go to: 0D608
    replace 12C6000045B8 with: 0D620D620D62

    ...Or download the fixed ROM here. ("SegaChannel_Fixed.zip")

    NOTE: This is a dirty fix, it actually throws the error but I disabled it =P, again: this ROM doesn't work in Kega, use Regen or Gens
     
  14. Sik

    Sik

    Sik is pronounced as "seek", not as "sick". Tech Member
    6,718
    1
    0
    being an asshole =P
    Why would it work on Gens and Regen (the two accuracy extremes) but not Fusion?
     
  15. GenesisFan64

    GenesisFan64

    The bright side of the dark side. Member
    108
    0
    16
    I don't know, maybe is because how weirdly this rom works, or is emulator's fault
    IDB or ASM file later, if someone wants to check... (only by request)
     
  16. Has there been any hack of either Sega Channel BIOs that gets as far as loading something akin to a menu or a game?

    Also, how do these run on a hardware setup?

    Yeah, I know it'd be a bit silly just to basically simulate a menu, but I'd still like to see it happen.
     
  17. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

    no reverse gear Wiki Sysop
    8,544
    2,465
    93
    Northumberland, UK
    steamboat wiki
    I don't think it's outside the realms of possibility to see a "remade" Sega Channel service one day. I.e. one that connects to the internet and downloads stuff. At least one of the versions dumped has a menu, it just doesn't do anything.

    Retro Channel at least proves you can get Mega Drive ROMs to interface with the net after some heavy duty hacking. It's bound to lead to a "new" Sega Channel someday, even if we end up waiting decades for it.
     
  18. Sik

    Sik

    Sik is pronounced as "seek", not as "sick". Tech Member
    6,718
    1
    0
    being an asshole =P
    Not going to happen with just the ROM as-is. The menu code is there, but the graphics are missing, so you need to get them from somewhere else.

    I have tried hacking it before, but I didn't reach far, I didn't even find code for handling the cable hardware. It's so convulted it's nearly impossible to disassemble, it's almost entirely made out of function pointers, which render IDA nearly useless since about every jump or so it has to stop as it can't tell where to go next. It's a mess.

    The only thing I found is code for reading port 2 in serial mode... (and in the demos the code is there but it uses port 3 instead, huh?) It could have been potentially used to enable some sort of service mode, but then again, I couldn't find any code that made use of it (if it's there, it was probably still not disassembled, I really couldn't get even remotely far from the beginning, I didn't even make it to the start-up screen).
     
  19. Andlabs

    Andlabs

    「いっきまーす」 Wiki Sysop
    2,175
    1
    0
    Writing my own MD/Genesis sound driver :D
    Seru-kun from the SNES community has made bsnes mods that emulate both the Satellaview and XAND modems. I'm not sure oif those require ROM changes, though.
     
  20. Meat Miracle

    Meat Miracle

    Researcher
    1,664
    5
    18
    Yeah, but the SNES community was doing complete RPG translations while the Sonic community was still discussing whether Dust Hill Zone is fake or not.