ZeldaClassic is a PC-based emulator and editor for the NES 8-bit classic game The Legend of Zelda. I’ve been thinking for some time about a way to get my hands on the data that constitutes the Overworld map of this game for use in a couple of art projects (covered by fair use, I promise, Nintendo lawyer type folks), and I thought the ZeldaClassic project might be just the ticket. After all, they’ve done all the work of reverse engineering the original data format used in the original Zelda ROM and converting it into a sensible, easily-edited “quest” file. Unfortunately, Zelda Classic is a closed-source project for some reason, and without the source it was going to be pretty hard to figure out what’s going on in those quest files.
Enter Breaking Eggs and Making Omelettes, where Mike Melanson posted a great document detailing the format of the quest files in great detail.
Armed with that information, I banged out a Python “reader” for ZeldaClassic quest files (the unencoded kind - files ending in ‘.qsu’) that, given a quest file, can spit out the tiles that make up the map, and optionally an image of the full map of each level.
A Sourceforge project is hopefully on the way
I’ve tested this on Python 2.4 on Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows XP SP2. See the README for some more information about requirements, installation, running, etc.
September 14th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
I love it when you post stuff that my puny human brain cannot comprehend. Sounds cool, whatever it is.
October 28th, 2006 at 10:41 am
I used to play the first Zelda on Super Nintendo a long long time ago. I didn’t know they were still making new versions of the game?
December 12th, 2006 at 7:54 am
They’re using MD5 for the quest password protection now…
Also, there’s a new version - 2.5 - out later this month.
March 2nd, 2008 at 8:33 pm
apparently some ppl know how to crack the passwords for custom quests, how is that done? how do they do it?