[Trunks]

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?

[Andlabs]

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?

[Kiddo Cabbusses]

Trunks, on 15 February 2012 - 01:30 AM, said:

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?

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-int....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....view-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.)

This post has been edited by Kiddo Cabbusses: 15 February 2012 - 07:01 PM

[LocalH]

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

[Kiddo Cabbusses]

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?

This post has been edited by Kiddo Cabbusses: 16 February 2012 - 01:10 AM

[Rika Chou]

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.

This post has been edited by Rika Chou: 18 February 2012 - 02:19 AM

[Kiddo Cabbusses]

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.

[GenesisFan64]

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

[Sik]

GenesisFan64, on 23 February 2012 - 03:14 AM, said:

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

Why would it work on Gens and Regen (the two accuracy extremes) but not Fusion?

[GenesisFan64]

Sik, on 23 February 2012 - 03:37 AM, said:

Why would it work on Gens and Regen (the two accuracy extremes) but not Fusion?

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)

[Kiddo Cabbusses]

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.

[Black Squirrel]

Kiddo Cabbusses, on 23 February 2012 - 02:05 PM, said:

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

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.

[Sik]

Kiddo Cabbusses, on 23 February 2012 - 02:05 PM, said:

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

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).

[Andlabs]

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.

[Meat Miracle]

Andlabs, on 23 February 2012 - 08:04 PM, said:

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.

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.