How to lose a Satellaview game....

I was testing out all of my Satellaview games, just putting in one after the other on the old Super Famicom. I got into a ryhthm of pulling the cart and inserting the next one. I accidentally pulled out the cart with Zelda on it without turning off the console and *poof*....the game is gone now. It might still be on the memory card but it sure as hell isn't reading it.

The only good news is that it was just the US version of LTTP which isn't rare. But, still....

 

That sucks man.

 

...ouch. but there has to be some way to dump a rom of the game back onto the cart. It would also be fun if nintendo all the sudden just restarted the satallaview service for a week or so.

 

...says the man who sells highly overpriced satellaview games on ebay.
seriously, i just sold radical dreamers and treasure conflix in a bundle for $360: http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8284860214&rd=1&sspagename=STRK:MESO:IT&rd=1

i dont think the interest in satellaview flashcarts is that high anymore now that emulation gets better and better.

regarding your "deleted" zelda game:
from what i know, the retail games downloadable via the satellaview service all had a "feature" that deleted the game after a certain number of startups, so these would work more like a demo rather than a full game.
chances are thats what happened to your zelda.

pulling and plugging carts in and out with the power on doesnt hurt them, btw.
i do it all the time.

 

All of my games are listed as Best Offers...? I even say in the listing to use that option. The price is what I thought someone wouldn't pay for it. I wanted to see where the market was. That little for Racial Dreamers? You should have sold it on Yahoo Japan. The last one went for 80,000 yen a few weeks ago.

It's possible that it ran out of start ups, but way back before I knew what the downloaded games were the same thing happened to me.

I have a Pro Fighter disk system, but it won't read from the Satellaview carts. Just a blank screen....

 

yeah, i figured you were testing the waters. I have an eye on YJ, too, but havent seen a radical dreamers for ages.

imho, every effort should be made to preserve all the satellaview games while we still can.
when the bs-x bios cart deletes a game, it doesnt actually wipe the whole data on the memory cart, it just marks the game as deleted by setting a byte in the header and thus, the game doesnt show up in the selection menu anymore.
thats why even carts that dont seem to contain any game should always be dumped.


i do understand that resellers are sometimes worried about releasing roms of their previously unreleased satellaview games because it potentially devalues their originals.
you dont have to actually release them now, just back them up so they dont get lost and eventually release them at a later date.

dont know how big your satellaview collection is, but if you'd like to, i can send you a modified cartridge over for free that can be used to dump satellaview flashcarts using a normal backup unit.
it currently works fine with my game doctor 7.
also has the write pin disabled to prevent the eventual loss of data.

 

I cringed just a tad when I read the title of this thread. Sorry to hear that.

 

Hey there

Here's the link to the Radical Dreamers YJ auction:

http://page4.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/d60703145

Of course 80,002 yen is the auction ending price, doesn't always mean the deal was actually completed.

I almost didn't say anything about my mistake because I was pretty embarrassed to lose something so valuable to such a dumb mistake...heh. But in the end I thought maybe I could save someone else the heartache so I offered myself up on the idiot block.

I'm not a tech guy so it's hard for me to figure out these things. But yeah, if I can get something that will get the game for me then I'l like to give it a try. I've never researched this because I really didn't want to get into any kind of copying to protect the integrity of the market. I have 5 games now (7 if you include the 2 lost ones). If I can restore those two then it gets me back to even.

 

oh, alright, thats some serious money for such a cart.
its a shame gaijins cant sell on YJ.

with that dumping cartridge, you can only read the contents of the flashcart and play them on an emulator or distribute them on the net.
the bsx bios cart performs several integrity checks before actually starting a game and if any of these fail, the game is marked as deleted.
emulators dont care about any of that stuff, of course, and just run the game.

you cant actually rewrite the flashcarts, however.
i dont think anybody has yet found out how this works.
the prices would have dropped like a rock if somebody started to part out radical dreamers carts on a daily basis, which is probably going to happen once someone is able to copy carts.

no need to be embarrassed about the lost game, i think it happens to everybody who owns a sateallaview at least once.

 

I sell on Yahoo Japan all the time. Or were just saying that it's too difficult to seriously do for most people? I just sold my US XBOX for 17,500 en...pretty shocking price, I thought.

 

atleast it was one you arent too worried about, at first when you said you were in the habit of pulling em i was afraid they were ALL gonna be gone!

 

last time i checked, you need a japanese credit card to buy/sell on YJ and that is, well, a bit hard to obtain for people that dont live in japan.

 

theres a proxy site that will bid on yahoo jp auctions for you, the url escapes me though

 

http://www.celga.com/ ?

 

I have a Treasure Conflix cart, should I worry about the game erase itself after a certain number of startups ? I want to play and preserve it in the same time, so I was thinking about what d4s said - to disable the write pin. Could someone please provide more details regarding that mod ?

 

Ahhhh MAN! That has to suck.

 

now i understand what you meant when you wrote that pm.
that would certainly work for preservation purposes.
however, you wouldnt be able to play the game anymore with that pin disabled.

see, the flash memory used in these carts doesnt work exactly like normal ram, where you can directly rewrite a certain memory adress.
you first have to execute a certain security sequence before being able to change the content stored on the flash.(for example, such a sequence could consist of writing 6 certain bytes to certain adresses of the chip, which will in turn initiate the actual write command. after that, you supply the adress and data you want to write to the chip and wait until the write is complete)
that's why the chance of erasing or overwriting flash-roms accidentally is extremely slim.

the reason why you wouldnt be able to play the games anymore is that the bios checks certain registers of the flash-chip in the memory cart in order to determine type, maker and size of the connected memory chip(there are rom-based memory carts that can't be rewritten aswell).
in order to check this, it has to write to the flash-chips registers and that's why the write-pin has to be connected.

 

Hey, thanks for reply d4s.

Well, that certainly is bad...those carts should be given a new name " suicidal flash carts" or something similar

 

If you just dump the cart, you won't have to worry.

 

True in general, though this isn't exactly what I want to do.
I don't like playing on emus. No exception here.
The game isn't properly emulated anyways (from what I remember) is it ?


Have anyone of you thought about building a flash cart for the bs-x ?
I have got a spare same game cart and a couple of 29F080 flashes (in soic case, relatively easy to solder). The pcb of the same game doesn't look too sophisticated, inside there is only a mask rom, so it shouldn't be hard to replace it with the flash.
I'm just not entirely sure if that is worth the hassle. As d4s said, the bs-x does some checks before it actually runs the game, if one of them fails, the game will not boot. The thing is that it might not accept this type of flash memory (ID for example)... it has to be checked, or maybe you already know that stuff ?

PS Calpis, are you Kyuusaku on the other forums ?