zelda3

About

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is a 1991 action-adventure game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the third entry in the Zelda series, released in Japan in 1991 and in North America and Europe in 1992. zelda3 is a from-scratch C reimplementation of the entire original game — roughly 70-80k lines of code — playable start to finish on Linux, macOS, Windows, and Nintendo Switch. A copy of the original ROM is needed once to extract game resources (levels, images), after which the ROM is no longer required to play; the project also supports running the original machine code alongside the reimplementation to automatically verify the C code's correctness frame by frame.

How it differs from the original

It adds several features absent from the 1991 original: pixel shader support, enhanced 16:9/16:10 aspect ratios, a higher-quality world map, MSU audio track support, a secondary item slot, and the ability to switch the current item with the L/R shoulder buttons.

Getting started

On Windows, a third-party launcher handles setup automatically; otherwise the project must be compiled from source (via TCC, Visual Studio, or make on Linux/macOS), which requires placing a copy of the US-region ROM (matching a specific checksum) in the project folder to extract game assets before building. The game supports save-state snapshots, including replaying recorded input history in turbo mode.

Credits & contributing

• The project credits spannerism's Zelda 3 Japanese disassembly and other community disassembly efforts for documenting many of the original game's function names and variables.