F-Zero Courses From a Dead Nintendo Satellite Service Restored Using VHS and AI (arstechnica.com) 15
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo's Satellaview, a Japan-only satellite add-on for the Super Famicom, is a rich target for preservationists because it was the home to some of the most ephemeral games ever released. That includes a host of content for Nintendo's own games, including F-Zero. That influential Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in Japan) racing title was the subject of eight weekly broadcasts sent to subscribing Japanese homes in 1996 and 1997, some with live "Soundlink" CD-quality music and voiceovers. When live game broadcasts were finished, the memory cartridges used to store game data would report themselves as empty, even though they technically were not. Keeping that same 1MB memory cartridge in the system when another broadcast started would overwrite that data, and there were no rebroadcasts.
As reported by Matthew Green at Press the Buttons (along with Did You Know Gaming's informative video), data from some untouched memory cartridges was found and used to re-create some of the content. Some courses, part of a multi-week "Grand Prix 2" event, have never been found, despite a $5,000 bounty offering and extensive effort. And yet, remarkably, the 10 courses in those later broadcasts were reverse-engineered, using a VHS recording, machine learning tools, and some manual pixel-by-pixel re-creation. The results are "north of 99.9% accurate," according to those who crafted it and exist now as a mod you can patch onto an existing F-Zero ROM. [...] Their work means that, 25 years later, a moment in gaming that was nearly lost to time and various corporate currents has been, if not entirely restored, brought as close as is humanly (and machine-ably) possible to what it once was.
As reported by Matthew Green at Press the Buttons (along with Did You Know Gaming's informative video), data from some untouched memory cartridges was found and used to re-create some of the content. Some courses, part of a multi-week "Grand Prix 2" event, have never been found, despite a $5,000 bounty offering and extensive effort. And yet, remarkably, the 10 courses in those later broadcasts were reverse-engineered, using a VHS recording, machine learning tools, and some manual pixel-by-pixel re-creation. The results are "north of 99.9% accurate," according to those who crafted it and exist now as a mod you can patch onto an existing F-Zero ROM. [...] Their work means that, 25 years later, a moment in gaming that was nearly lost to time and various corporate currents has been, if not entirely restored, brought as close as is humanly (and machine-ably) possible to what it once was.
Wish we had some Atari GameLine images anymore (Score:2)
I wish we had some GameLine images for the Atari 2600 anymore.
I finally saw a real GameLine cartridge when I was working at AOL. It was more nostalgic than anything else to see the old cartridge with memory and a modem.
There was another one for Intellivision called PlayCable that used a cable-TV connection to download games.
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Since we're talking about satellite-delivered data, I subscribed to a USENET PageSat leaf node to get NNTP news via satellite for a while.
Unfortunately, PageSat isn't notable enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article. It was a Ku-band satellite dish and receiver that received broadcasted USENET NNTP data back when USENET was a thing in the early 1990s.
Amazing (Score:3)
I've been waiting to play those courses forever, and I totally thought they were lost permanently. This is quite a big deal!
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Re:Amazing (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty much explained by the summary, but I'll reword it for you: The Japanese version of the SNES had optional networking hardware available, and they released some content for that, only inside Japan, under terms today we would call "streaming-only." As in, they downloaded to RAM but were never intended to be permanently stored anywhere. Some clever and forward-thinking thieves managed to do so anyway; hooray for posterity!
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Quite a few consoles had similar systems in Japan. Either modem based or satellite TV based. Interestingly the original Famicom had a modem, but for the Super Famicom (SNES) they switched to the satellite system.
The major advance that lead to being able to recover this stuff is the ability to record the raw video or even RF waveform with a fast ADC. The technology was originally developed for preserving the BBC Domesday project which came on Laserdisc. A custom board with FPGA and ADC could read the RF modu
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Take a picture of the magnetic pattern, decode that.
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Mod parent up please. This is informative.
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How to F-Zero in a nutshell (Score:3)
Do not just turn. Instead turn + press the shoulder button on the same side, which causes your hovercar to tilt in that direction pressing that side against the track and rapidly rotate, much faster than actual turn rate of the direction you're going in, while losing much less airspeed than braking into turns normally.
Once it's facing the desired direction of travel, quickly tap the brake button. This resets your direction of travel towards one your hovercar is pointed at with minimal loss of airspeed.
Btw, excellent game. Original F-Zero was about learning what works, and F-Zero 2 was about insane tracks where you really needed to know how to control the vehicle to not just die because track had a lot of jumps which can kill you instantly.
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Do not just turn. Instead turn + press the shoulder button on the same side, which causes your hovercar to tilt in that direction pressing that side against the track and rapidly rotate, much faster than actual turn rate of the direction you're going in, while losing much less airspeed than braking into turns normally.
Once it's facing the desired direction of travel, quickly tap the brake button. This resets your direction of travel towards one your hovercar is pointed at with minimal loss of airspeed.
Btw, excellent game. Original F-Zero was about learning what works, and F-Zero 2 was about insane tracks where you really needed to know how to control the vehicle to not just die because track had a lot of jumps which can kill you instantly.
Thanks for the reminder! Been too long since I played so I actually needed those tips for when I fire this up.
I have fond memories of fighting F-Zero X tracks to finally get the gold on some of them. Good times.
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