Zelda Starring Zelda Patch

Kids, we are GO!

I just finished a quick play-through on god mode to make sure that all of the sprites look right. Earlier, I had discovered that Link's head "tile" had been copied over a mountain "tile". Yikes. Everything looks good now and I was able to get some footage and screen shots. Even in god-mode, this game was HARD. It took me around 8 hours to finish. @.@
But it felt really good to play as Zelda. Not just "accomplishment" good, but "there was a rock in my shoe and it's gone now" good. I remember when I was a kid, I felt really cheated when I found out that I couldn't play as Zelda in her own game. I was a little surprised how much of that old emotion I'd held onto. But it's fixed now. :)

Here's the patch.

Yes, just a patch. Unfortunately, I can't just hand you my edited ROM. It's a copyright thing. So instead you'll need to:
1) Find your own unedited Legend of Zelda NES ROM
2) Download my patch
3) Download an NES emulator (I like Nestopia)
4) Place the patch and the ROM in the same folder
5) "Open" the PATCH in Nestopia
6) Follow the Nestopia prompts and select the unedited ROM

Nestopia will combine the two. Have fun storming the castle!

Click the image for a comparison from the original. In the original, Zelda is in the black square, not Link and it's the only time in the entire game that we see her.

Here's some more screen shots. I'll update later with my in-game footage. I'm also considering doing a few releases of the patch for different dress colors. I have several purples, a pink, a blue, and even some greens picked out. Also, if you're code-inclined, I could use some help tracking down the bit of code that regulates the in-game dress changes.

Special thanks to the people at The Legend of Zelda page of the Data Crystal wiki
and to the people behind The Legend of Zelda page at Computer Archeology. Without those resources, this project would have taken weeks, not 3 days. You guys are amazing.