How do "BS" ROMs work?

Envergure · Post by **Envergure** » Thu Nov 19, 2009 5:34 pm

Hi,

I found a few ROMs which have something to do with "Stellarcast" or "Stellarview" or something. They're all marked "BS". I can't figure out how to play them. All I can do is flip through a series of Japanese instruction screens, and nothing I do will start the game.

Anyone know how these games work?

I have a SNES at my house, and we actually have one cartridge which does the same thing; We never figured out how to play it and we might have thrown it out.

Thanks
- Chris

Post by **badinsults** » Thu Nov 19, 2009 6:50 pm

http://www.snescentral.com/article.php?id=0800

Most Satellaview games won't work because they required instructions from the satellite broadcast, and the fact that the emulation is incomplete. Some games have been hacked to work, and I'm sure you could find out about them if you search.

nintendo_nerd · Post by **nintendo_nerd** » Thu Nov 19, 2009 9:20 pm

SnesGT and Bsnes can run BS games I thought.

Post by **badinsults** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 12:06 am

nintendo_nerd wrote:SnesGT and Bsnes can run BS games I thought.

Some BS games work, others don't because they were designed to be used with broadcasts. And even then, no emulator exists with perfect BS emulation.

byuu · Post by **byuu** » Fri Nov 20, 2009 3:37 am

When it comes to BS-X: limit it to SNESGT, uosnes and then Snes9X in that order.

SNESGT goes pretty far, and even has database-style information to automatically seek past those 14-minute wait loops and such. It patches either the BIOS or games to allow even "deleted" BS-X packs (the majority of images out there) to show up and play. And it even fakes some of the communication protocols to get in-game in many broadcast titles.

uosnes is hack city. He goes as far as to inject entirely new font sets into the game to work around bugs, but as a result it plays quite a bit.

Snes9X also recently got a big boost thanks to zones and co.

Nothing else comes close. I may never have great BS-X support, as I'm not going to use hacks or false satellite communication signals to get past certain points. Basically if the real game cannot be played anymore (due to St. GIGA's demise), then I won't work on getting it playable under emulation.

Personally, I feel that UPS soft patches to the game code are the way to go; not faking a satellite receiver in every emulator. But we'll see. I usually don't get my way with these sorts of things :P

KingMike · Post by **KingMike** » Sat Nov 21, 2009 3:48 am

I would think the only way you could even possibly run BS games content would be to somehow detect and play recordings of the original broadcast.

(getting those might be a problem. Not sure how much is on youtube, but the last time I tried, nico-video seemed to be pretty good at blocking VideoDownloader in Firefox.
Too bad I upgraded past IE6. I could easily grab them off the cache. Not so well with later versions.)

paulguy · Post by **paulguy** » Sat Nov 21, 2009 4:54 am

I doubt the actual audio matters much, and if it did, the bitstream would need to be exact, which you won't get from a YouTube video.

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Sat Nov 21, 2009 8:18 am

paulguy wrote:I doubt the actual audio matters much, and if it did, the bitstream would need to be exact, which you won't get from a YouTube video.

I'd expect any critical information to be in the VBlank period, actually. And that would get clipped as garbage data for most digital encodings.

Ironic that an nth-generation VHS rip would be more useful than even a clean YouTube upload, but... there ya have it.