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.