Documents: A Complete Disassembly of The Legend of Zelda

[RHDNBot]

Update By: CrimsonMagus

Version 1.0 of The Legend of Zelda disassembly has been completed! This project contains assembly language source code that can be assembled with ca65. The code has been fully labeled and commented.

This project started with an effort to remake the game in C++. The remake was completed in 2017. But the related reverse engineering effort was poorly documented. It was in October 2020 that the attempt at a complete disassembly began.

Version 1.0 is on the RHDN project page. Up-to-date source code of the disassembly and the remake can be found at the link below.

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[Rudy]

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[CrimsonMagus]

I decided to migrate my repositories to github:

https://github.com/aldonunez

There, in addition to the Zelda disassembly and remake, you will also find a Final Fantasy remake that I wrote based on Disch's disassembly.

[KevvyLava]

Man, every time I go to Github on a re-direct, I don't know what the hell I'm looking at. It's sort of like 4chan, where I feel like it's deliberately hard to follow what's going on so only certain people can make sense of what's happening. You go to Github, I'm out. Anyone else with me on this or am I the only idjiot?

[tc]

Source code and legal documents are alien languages.

[CrimsonMagus]

Yes. Github's UI is busier than Bitbucket's.

[ANESCoder]

What an insane amount of work this must have been! How many hours did it take to figure this all out?

[CrimsonMagus]

An opportunity presented itself last fall. So, I was able to study all the code mostly full-time for about 3 months. The tools I wrote took about a month.

I pretty much started from scratch this time, and used very little of my work on the C++ remake.

I probably spent more time on the conversion tool than expected, because I wanted to avoid manual editing of the assembly code. I wanted one input and one output: I edit labels and comments in Mesen, and the conversion tool processes it all and turns it into .asm files.

[Mattiac]

Konichiwa, Crimson-san.

Thank you so very much for the complete
disassembly of The Legend of Zelda!

Will you do Zelda 2 next?

May Japan bless you!

[ANESCoder]

An opportunity presented itself last fall. So, I was able to study all the code mostly full-time for about 3 months. The tools I wrote took about a month.

I pretty much started from scratch this time, and used very little of my work on the C++ remake.

I probably spent more time on the conversion tool than expected, because I wanted to avoid manual editing of the assembly code. I wanted one input and one output: I edit labels and comments in Mesen, and the conversion tool processes it all and turns it into .asm files.

Some "behind-the-scenes" would be cool to read as inspiration on how you organized/figured things out etc.