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

This is a great use of AI tools to preserve content that was lost due to the ephemeral nature of Satellaview. Anybody else who finds video game preservation important will enjoy this story.

“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.”

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/02/f-zero-courses-from-a-dead-nintendo-satellite-service-restored-using-vhs-and-ai/?comments=1&comments-page=1