F-Zero courses from a dead Nintendo satellite service restored using VHS and AI

My world is richer for reading this. I absolutely can see it. Like Redline meets Cowboy Bebop. Both can be b-side vignettes in a larger futuristic SNES world. Not so sure about Star Fox being in the mix, but not entirely out of the question either. But F-Zero & Metroid is a wonderful pairing.

Huh, that is an interesting take.

Also laughed at Samus Aaron.

Good thinking. Like how Portal and Half-Life are in the same universe. I'm also pretty sure most Rockstar games (Max Payne, Midnight Club, GTA, Red Dead Redemption) all happen in the same universe as well.

Samus Aran retired from bounty hunting and joined Captain Falcon on the racing circuit; this is mostly kinda sorta canon.

This can only be true if the owners of these universes say so. Because there is no authority otherwise.

according to the Anime Captain falcon gets his power from Jesus Christ. Im not even joking.

DidYouKnowGaming has been on such a tear for the past few years, ever since Dr. Lava joined them. They've gone from aggregator to legitimate researchers, making substantial contributions to the video game history & preservation scene, putting in the work to translate materials previously unknown outside of Japan and track down & interview game devs. I realize I sound like a shill, I'm just really impressed at how far they've come from the old tumblr blog posting fun facts back in the day.

That's amazing, and I want that for every speedrun now.

I love how you can visually see the effect of the frame rule clumping players together in each new level.

The latter. According to this wiki I found [1] the audio was muxed in with the program data, and then separated by the Satellaview satellite box. This audio would then get mixed in with the Super Famicom's audio output and sent to the TV.

[1] https://wiki.superfamicom.org/satellaview-soundlink

The Satellaview service was a cartridge plus service combo that gave access to small games you could play on the SNES.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview#/media/File%3ASa...

There are ROMS available online for some games that existed and there are lists of all games, from the above I think the person found VHS footage from people playing the SNES with some specific f-zero tracks and from knowledge of the existing ROMs of f-zero used the VHS footage to reconstruct the track data, which I think is mostly tile positions, at least afaik the Satellaview games that were additions to existing games usually didn't add graphics only remixed what the game content was.

I think I remember playing a Zelda that was just the map from the NES one with different objectives, so I am going from that.

Game data would be downloaded ahead of time; the Satellaview came with a game cartridge[0] that gave you a system menu in the form of a JRPG town that looked a bit like EarthBound's Onett. It also had a second slot on the BS-X cartridge that accepted a memory card for storing game downloads onto.

For SoundLink games, the voiceovers would be streamed from a satellite radio channel while the game ran, and they could also issue game commands. Obviously this also meant you could only play a SoundLink game while it was being broadcast. There were periodic reruns in case you missed a game. The closest modern example I could think of would actually be something like 1 vs 100 on the Xbox 360, which only lasted for like a year if I remember.

Other downloadable Satellaview games worked almost exactly like a modern digital download system. You'd have to download the game while it was being broadcast, but could play it later. Except some of them would also have a start-up limit (like 3DS demos) after which the game would expire and refuse to start. Those are easier to preserve than the SoundLink games, assuming you can find an old Satellaview memory pack with the game data still on it.

Some of the 'games' were actually just magazines or text. There's some really odd ones we've discovered over the years. After Nintendo stopped supporting Satellaview[1], St.GIGA tried to repurpose the Satellaview as a program guide for their own satellite radio service using this feature.

Interestingly, there's a handful of SNES games with the same Satellaview memory slot on them that BS-X does - for example, RPG Maker 2[2]. I'm imagining that they distributed RPG Maker games using Satellaview, but Wikipedia also says RPG Maker 2 was available as both a cartridge and a Satellaview download, which seems like it defeats the purpose of having the cartridge also accept Satellaview memory cards.

BTW, if you think this is crazy, wait until you learn about the SEGA Channel, a cable modem that plugged into your Genesis[3].

[0] BS-X: The Story Of The Town Whose Name Was Stolen

[1] Because, among other things, they wanted to build the N64 DD around RANDNet

[2] Not to be confused with RPG Maker 2 on the PlayStation 2, which is actually RPG Maker 5, because international numbering.

[3] Or Mega Drive. I didn't even know Europe had this until I checked Wikipedia!

It mostly acted like a digital storefront, or more an xbox gamepass of the 90s.

Except instead of down games over an internet connection, it only had one-way communication. The satellite would just continually retransmit the same games every few min. When you selected a game to download, the Satellaview would wait for the next transmission to come around and save it to the 1MB flash card.

You could then play the downloaded game more or less like any other cartridge. Many releases were just games that had previously been on retail cartridge.

But some games (these soundlink games) were more of an event. Instead of simply downloading the game, there was a scheduled hour to tune in, and everyone would play the same game in parallel, with roughly the same progression. New game data would beamed down from the satellite continually, bypassing the 1MB limit. Most of this streaming data was CD quality audio, either narration (often live preformed narration) or music, but it could also stream code or graphics too.

I understand it did have some ability to handle multiple tracks of audio, but most of the time the game was designed to work with only one track of audio, hence forcing the players down the same progression based on time.

I think you are refering to the [0] "rubberband effect". I also played this game a lot. Great memories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_banding

At least that much could have gone into the effort to find the seed for the Minecraft splash screen world.

there' s already a $500 bounty for an early roblox client.

https://robloxopolis.com/2006-roblox-bounty/

> What content is being produced today that we will offer a $25k dollar bounty for in 50 years?

Take your pick from any game that requires an online service to exist. 30 years ago that was mostly unheard of, but today it's a growing trend. Content is locked behind DRM, proprietary launchers, game stores, licensing agreements, subscription services, etc. Even single player content is not safe. It's absolutely insidious.

I bought a digital copy of Max Payne 3 a mere 10 years ago, and can no longer play it because Rockstar's launcher has somehow been unlinked from my Steam account, and refuses to start the game. I spent 3 months in a back and forth with their "support" team, and after automated messages telling me to upload everything from receipts, CD keys, and Steam screenshots, and still failing to verify that I'm a legitimate customer who wants to access the content I paid for, I just gave up.

The only way to preserve these games is via piracy. And sometimes even that can't save a game with heavily embedded DRM or reliance on servers.

And also served as the inspiration for the "true" sequel, Chrono Cross. I have fond memories of emulating Radical Dreamers on my Pentium 1.

This was the Nintendo Gateway System, and it looks like there really was SNES hardware at each seat (actually physically combined for each group of two or three seats, but installed at the seats, not some central location): http://videogamekraken.com/nintendo-gateway-system

Also related to the LodgeNet system that showed up on hotels around the same time, although that did use a centralized set of SNES cards rather than SNES hardware for each room.

If you're on PC and want to scratch the high-speed hovercraft racing itch, Redout is worth consideration.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/517710/Redout_Enhanced_Ed...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1799930/Redout_2/

"Humanses"? Even if it weren't mistranscribed that's not a particularly useful excerpt.

F-Zero is a futuristic racing game series from Nintendo.

Odd excerpt… ai summary bot?

This is what many retrogamers say. It's because CRT was more forgiving and generally fuzzier in its presentation, so gave softer/higher-def feeling visuals.

Watching on a pixel-perfect LCD quickly reveals all of the flaws.