Purpose

Anyone who has hacked Zelda knows that it’s very difficult to gain any additional graphic space. This patch blows that limitation out of the water by freeing up to 96 column combos and 40 blocks (a block consists of 4 tiles). What does that mean? It means that your Zelda hacks can have more graphical variety.

Add new enemies, rivers, mazes, lakes, forests, rock outcroppings, etc. Anything you can think of.

Although the hack makes the column and block space available, it’s still up to you as the hacker to understand how the data is stored and how to create new columns. It is recommended that you read the document Understanding Zelda 1 Overworld Screens and Columns (also included in the download) before attempting to add new columns.

Several sample columns have been included which can be used in your hack or be replaced as needed.

Alternate Patches

The main patch in this hack is tilesncolumns.ips. This frees up the maximum number of graphical resources possible. If rom space is a limiting factor in your hack because you have a lot of custom code or other data, then two alternate patches are also provided:

The columns.ips patch makes the same column changes as the main patch but preserves column compression, therefore no additional space is required for the uncompressed columns required in the main patch. Of course any new columns still take up space.

The tiles.ips patch provides only 8 new blocks (4 of which are walkable, 4 of which not walkable) by leveraging existing data space, thereby taking up no additional free space in the rom. The tradeoff is far less tiles and blocks available for your hack.

Test Patches

Both the alternate and main patches come with the test patches add_test_column.ips and rem_test_column.ips. These add several test columns to the start screen which can be useful when developing new blocks - particularly the arbitrary 4-tile versions. You can apply the former patch, make your desired changes, and then apply the latter patch to restore the original columns.

Compatibility

This hack is mostly compatible with ZeldaTech. It will look glitchy but actually functions fine.

It is recommended that you also use Zelda Map Generator when working with column data.

Technical Info

More technical info on how to use the patch is available in README.txt.

Suggestions and corrections can be sent to gzip.

• Database match: Legend of Zelda, The (USA)
• Database: No-Intro: Nintendo Entertainment System (v. 20210216-231042)
• File SHA-1: DAB79C84934F9AA5DB4E7DAD390E5D0C12443FA2
• File CRC32: D7AE93DF
• ROM SHA-1: A12D74C73A0481599A5D832361D168F4737BBCF6
• ROM CRC32: 3FE272FB