CoCo Zelda Clone

The Coco Zelda Clone

by Bill Pierce

I was a BIG Nitendo "Legend of Zelda" fan for a long time... Actually, I still am. When I saw the first ads for "Thelda" for Coco 3, I was estatic! Then I bought a copy and was highly disappointed. It had nowhere near the excitement and action the original Zelda had. It wasn't long after then that I started working on my own Zelda clone. I was freezing the Nintendo screen and drawing (by hand) the characters and areas of the screen then trying to recreate them with Coco Max III, ColorMax 3 and MV Canvas in OS-9. Needless to say, I had a hard time and never got past a few characters and poor renditions at that. Now with the Nintendo Emulators and all the ROMs readily available on the internet, I've decided to renew my effort. I had actually started doing this a while back on the PC while trying to make a 3D version of the original Zelda and then moved to the Vcc Coco 3 emulator a little later. Now with VCC, MV Canvas and a load of Nintendo screenshots, I amassed a large amount of Zelda graphics. I hope to start working on my game engine soon. This is going to be a "long term" project and I will be working on it as I take breaks from other projects. A "back burner" effort more or less.

For now, here are some screenshots from Vcc of my Zelda graphics. All the graphics were done using MV Canvas in 320x192 16 color mode. Each graphic is an exact duplicate of the original, pixel for pixel. I've tried to get the colors as close as possible.

(click the images to view full size)

Most of the people and items Most of the Monsters

These are the far leftmost bottom screens on the map

The first Dungeon entrance All the Over-World terrain tiles

Two of the central map screens

These are just a few of many I've already created. With 128 Over-World rooms and countless Dungeon rooms, there's still plenty to do. Eventually I will start working on the game engine. I intend on using a lot of techniques I learned from using the Tomb Raider level editor a few years ago. The mapping techniquies used in Tomb Raider are really unique and I hope to incorperate what I've learned from them here on the Coco. I will first try to program this in C in NitrOS-9. If I see that it's lacking in speed, then I will move to EDTASM and RSDOS. I want to try some new tricks I've learned with interrupt driven sound. I doubt the game will have background music, but I hope to incorperate a lot of "action" sounds.

I hope to have more to "show & tell" soon...

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