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I love articles like these. To markchristian, I was wondering if you have any informatinon about the SNES Satellaview unit and how the experience of playing Satellaview games was different from playing cartridge games back in the day? Satellaview always seemed much ahead of its time and I feel like it hasn't gotten the recognition it deserves, though that's probably because it was Japan only.

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I’ve always wanted to write about it, but it’s never really fit into one of my monthly themes. Many of the games on the service are available online as ordinary ROMs, often with “BS” in the title (for Broadcast Satellite). I’m sure the experience of using the system and playing along to synchronized audio was pretty wonderful, but the games themselves just played like ordinary cartridges once they’d be downloaded. Unlike the Sega Channel, Satellaview games could be downloaded into special cartridges and kept around indefinitely.

Remember that Satellaview could download data but not upload it. That limitation led to some creative use cases for sure, but on the whole I think it was quite limiting.

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