BS The Legend of Zelda: Inishie no Sekiban/Emulation

The original game was divided into four episodes, and each was available for exactly one hour on one single day. The game was played live with live voiceovers, so you COULD NOT play it outside of the broadcast hours. We have gotten confirmation from Japanese players that the game's flash-cart backup was rendered unplayable outside of this time.

Therefore, Nintendo is in no way losing any profits through the emulation of this game and the distribution of its ROMs. The first and last "rerelease" was merely a rebroadcast in the following year.

If one day Nintendo does rerelease it, all ROM information here will be removed and visitors will be expected to have purchased Nintendo's infinitely superior and fully working version. Until such time, emulation is unfortunately the only way for anyone to play this game. Read the BS Zelda Homepage's full emulation policy for more.

Where to get the ROMs
Because the game no longer exists even on its original media, the ONLY way to play is via emulation. Sadly this is not very accurate, but the game is less broken than it used to be even a few months ago, and together with this guide you can easily finish the game.

Download the four ROMs here and SNES9x from here. Don't worry about the other files and patches on that page, you only need the four ROMs plus SNES9x. The others are not necessary for gameplay and merely allow other customisations and further experimentation.

Note that while the original game was in Japanese the English translation is now fully complete, and you are now able to play from beginning to end without seeing a single word of Japanese.

Which emulator to use
At the moment, SNES9x 1.42 or 1.43 gives the most accurate experience. The WIP versions of SNES9x will also work but they have unnecessary slowdown issues that complicate gameplay. You can get SNES9x from its official website.

The most recent SNES9x version, 1.502 will make the clock start at 85:85 labeling the game unplayable. This can however be fixed by using the clock-altering cheats. Note that the cheat saving is broken in SNES9x 1.502 and it will always leave the last number from the adress. To use cheats correctly with 1.502, you must create a .cht file with the time cheats using an older SNES9x version (like 1.43). Then manually move the file so that SNES9x 1.502 will find it.

As SNES9x 1.502 offers no noticeable improvements when playing BS Zelda: Kodai No Sekiban, it is still recommended that you use 1.43 because of the overly complicated process required in order to make the game running on 1.502.

Changing Weeks
When you download the game, you will find four ROMs. Each episode, originally one a Week, must be played separately. However in order to carry across your data from one Week to another you must rename the .srm file.

You will find the SRM file in the same folder you put the ROMs in. For example, say your Week 1 ROM was "Week1.smc" and the next is "Week2.smc", that means you rename "Week1.srm" to "Week2.srm" and so forth for each Week. If you have file extensions hidden or are using Mac OS X one or more of these files may appear without an extension. If this is the case make sure you keep the filenames the same by NOT adding .srm if it's already there.