zelda1-disassembly

HaltedPlayableNES

Image of the original game, Legend of Zelda. This project has no screenshots of its own yet.

Legend of Zelda (original game, not this project) — Image of the original game, Legend of Zelda. This project has no screenshots of its own yet.

About

The Legend of Zelda is a video game series created by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, primarily developed and published by Nintendo. zelda1-disassembly is a complete, well-documented disassembly of the original NES Legend of Zelda, produced with the Mesen emulator's labeling and comment tools and a custom tool that converts Mesen's label file and the ROM into a ca65-compatible assembly listing. The project follows an earlier, less polished ad hoc disassembly the author made years prior for a from-scratch remake of the game.

Getting started

The source can be assembled into a working ROM using the ca65 assembler; the build process automatically compares its output against a user-supplied original ROM copy (specifically the US 'PRG0' revision) to verify byte-for-byte correctness, a step that can optionally be skipped.

History

The author originally reverse-engineered The Legend of Zelda ad hoc years earlier to build a from-scratch remake in a high-level language, but felt that disassembly was incomplete and poorly documented; this project, started in October 2020 and inspired by other well-known NES disassembly projects, aims to produce a complete, well-documented version instead.

Requires original assets. Requires the original Legend of Zelda ROM file (PRG0 version) to extract game resources and build.