As you may already be aware, back in the mid-90s Japanese owners of the Super Famicom could buy an adaptor that would connect it to a... satellite receiver! Nintendo would periodically broadcast data to lucky owners, and they would then download selected games from space. Yep, Ninetendo were thinking beyond the cloud even in 1996!
This data was stored temporarily in the Satellaview 1MB cartridges and overwritten by subsequent broadcasts, making preservation difficult. For F-zero the tracks were broadcast between 1996 and 1997 and most were thought permanently lost. Until today, when fans of F-zero have recreated all of the tracks using a program originally built to analyse speedrunners.
The tracks have been meticulously recreated and patched alongside the original F-Zero tracks and vehicles. Previously some of the broadcasted data was recovered from a 1MB cartridge that was never overwritten with new broadcast data and so also in the wild, but I couldn't find confirmation if it had been used in this project.
Article here:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/02/ ... hs-and-ai/
Download here before Nintendo yeets it:
https://archive.org/details/bs_f-zero_deluxe_v1.0
Video of some gameplay:
Lost F-Zero Satellite broadcast tracks restored.
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ReleaseTheGeese
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