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The Legend of Zelda prototype
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BFC



Joined: 25 Jan 2006
Posts: 32

PostPosted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 12:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is an insane find - congratulations from my side. Unfortunately I don't remember the game too well to discover any differences while playing - otherwise I'd give it a try immediately.
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dwade76



Joined: 28 Dec 2010
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2011 1:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've been playing the prototype using a walkthrough for the game (http://www.zeldadungeon.net/Zelda01-the-legend-of-zelda-walkthrough-01.php) to check out the differences.

At first there wasn't anything major, just small things here and there. But the further along you get in the game the more differences start to come up.

The Bait you need for "The Demon" Dungeon costs 160 rupees instead of 60 and the guy (Goriya) you have to feed it to isn't even in the dungeon, it's just an empty room.

And in "Death Mountain" the Red Ring was in a different place (I just stumbled upon it), it won't let me bomb the entrance to the room that is suppose to have the compass and the room that is suppose to have a secret entrance leading to the silver arrows is, again, just an empty room.

Now I'm just strolling around Death Mountain hoping to come across either of the items.....still an awesome game...
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Skrybe
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2011 10:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Cutting Room Floor shows where those items are in the prototype. The silver arrows are behind a walk-through wall, and it's a good thing that was changed in the final version, because it isn't intuitive at all.
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Xkeeper



Joined: 04 Nov 2005
Posts: 327
Location: Henderson, NV

PostPosted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 3:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Skrybe wrote:
The Cutting Room Floor shows where those items are in the prototype. The silver arrows are behind a walk-through wall, and it's a good thing that was changed in the final version, because it isn't intuitive at all.


Speaking of which, I'd really like to thank you guys for making this an incredible release. :) I've been trying to get TCRF out there a bit more and this sure helped.


I'd be really interested in helping with some other prototype/unreleased documentations; some people have bugged me for more stuff to go through, so if you have any suggestions, let me know!
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dwade76



Joined: 28 Dec 2010
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 12:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Skrybe wrote:
The Cutting Room Floor shows where those items are in the prototype. The silver arrows are behind a walk-through wall, and it's a good thing that was changed in the final version, because it isn't intuitive at all.


Trick Wall!
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Skrybe
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 06, 2011 12:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Xkeeper wrote:
Speaking of which, I'd really like to thank you guys for making this an incredible release. Smile I've been trying to get TCRF out there a bit more and this sure helped.

The release wouldn't have been nearly as good without the awesome writeup at TCRF. Thank you for helping! The documentation GoldS did was amazing, I've heard comments from several places on how extremely thorough the comparison to the final build was.

And I noticed how TCRF seemed to grind to a halt those first couple of days after the release, so I knew you were getting plenty of attention!
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Xkeeper



Joined: 04 Nov 2005
Posts: 327
Location: Henderson, NV

PostPosted: Thu Jan 06, 2011 1:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Skrybe wrote:
The release wouldn't have been nearly as good without the awesome writeup at TCRF. Thank you for helping! The documentation GoldS did was amazing, I've heard comments from several places on how extremely thorough the comparison to the final build was.

And I noticed how TCRF seemed to grind to a halt those first couple of days after the release, so I knew you were getting plenty of attention!


Yeah, which is why I've been trying to see if there's anything someone wants him to go through; he's pretty eager to check out something else.


As for the load, well, I'll let the graph speak for itself:


(12/10/10 highlighted to show the average daily visits before this)

I'm kind of surprised the server didn't just outright croak after that.
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Evan



Joined: 17 Mar 2004
Posts: 948

PostPosted: Thu Jan 06, 2011 8:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow, that is fairly impressive. I don't think I have ever come close to that many hits.
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gamegeezer



Joined: 08 Jan 2011
Posts: 18
Location: Spaced Out in Binary Land

PostPosted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 6:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Erilily wrote:
Ooh ooh best christmas ever.

I wonder which build has the "Sword or Boomerang" choice that's in the American manual.


I've been trying to find a legit proto disk with the 'boomerang in the cave' option for over two decades: no dice. Mostly, I'm curious if the boomerang was more portent (e.g could kill octorock level enemies) at that time. (There are some websites out there, or at least there used to be dedicated to this topic.)

Purportedly, Shigeru Miyamoto San decided that the early release was too easy after nagging players started complaining about some of the puzzles, and decided to make it harder, so this is a prime example of the changes done to the game in the phase just prior to release. I don't recall if that was mentioned in this thread or not, so please pardon me if I'm repeating known-points.

I hope that if somebody interviews Miyamoto San they ask about that very early version and glean some information on if it would have been any different in use or power than what was formally released.

Tidbit: That image appears in the FDS manuals (normal and Disk Writer) as well. It's possible hat some early Disk Writer versions are closer to this Beta dump than the traditional release, but I've yet to come across one that is this distinct to be noticeable.

I still prefer the FDS version over the cart release: better sound, a little more varied gameplay with the mic input and a cleaner font. I never did understand why they switched fro the stylized font on the FDS version to the kludgy system-font on the cart...
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Tongueman



Joined: 27 Feb 2004
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 1:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

gamegeezer wrote:
I never did understand why they switched fro the stylized font on the FDS version to the kludgy system-font on the cart...

Conceivably the main reason is that the narrow font is difficult to read through RF and composite hookups. 1-pixel-wide lines on letters get obscured from blurring and NTSC encoding artifacts, especially for saturated colours like the red font in Zelda. Wider characters offer better protection against composite/RF smudging.
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BrYaN55



Joined: 18 Jan 2011
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2011 12:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi!

I think I found something interesting and I thought I'll post it here. I am very sorry if this is old news or something dejĂ  vu, but I couldn't find much info on this.

I was playing the prototype, I was in Level 9 and by mistake, I dropped a bomb in an undrground tunnel (shortcut), and it did make a hole in the ground. I was very suprised at fisrt, and I tried it in the original version. It did not work.



So I "bombed" everywhere in the tunnels of each levels of the prototype and the original game to see if maybe I can find something interesting. I had strange results in the prototype, while none worked in the final game.


Two walls can be break in Level 4 where the Ladder was.


You can pass through this wall in Level 7 where the Candle was. You can't go further than that tought!


Another pass-through wall in Level 9.

The more I think about it and the more I have this feeling I already saw that in the original Zelda... I'm am pretty sure you can bomb a wall like that somehwere in Zelda 1... Or maybe I am imagining things? Anyway, I posted it, so you'll be the judges!

I'm sure it's nothing very special, they are probably just uncorrected little glitches at that time.
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gilbert cheung



Joined: 25 Nov 2010
Posts: 33
Location: Hong Kong

PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2011 1:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just a guess. I thought these were not glitches and they added in intentional fake secret spots to make the game harder (so that players were like \o/ when they found a destructible tile, but then went /o\ after learning about its uselessness. This was possibly considered too harsh for the players and so they removed this feature.
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Tongueman



Joined: 27 Feb 2004
Posts: 631
Location: Japan

PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2011 2:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My guess is these underground passageways use the "bombable" wall settings of the rooms that the player has just come from.

Either that, or the underground passageways are part of another map set (??), all of whose rooms have random or "don't care" settings for bombing in the proto.
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MathUser2929



Joined: 20 Nov 2007
Posts: 203

PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2011 5:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bombable walls in underground sections? Awesome!
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Xkeeper



Joined: 04 Nov 2005
Posts: 327
Location: Henderson, NV

PostPosted: Tue Jan 18, 2011 7:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you look, the positions of the bombable walls are in the same spots as the top-down dungeon walls.

It's probably just a bizarre quirk; same thing for the niche you can enter in a later screenshot, there's probably a door there.

An odd bug, though.
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gamegeezer



Joined: 08 Jan 2011
Posts: 18
Location: Spaced Out in Binary Land

PostPosted: Wed Jan 19, 2011 1:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

So the room settings exactly flow over to the 'underground view' for the position of doors? It would be interesting to examine the code that causes this, in order to enable it intentionally, allowing for multi-screen underground passages with extra secrets.

I wonder what is preventing passage through the 'doors caused by this. Obviously, there is some code that stops passage into the next logical screen.

It is possible that this was an idea on the plate (connecting rooms) at some point and they fiddled around to see how well it would work, and this was the end-result of such tests. We'd need an earlier beta or Miyamoto-san's input to know for sure. I'm pretty sure that every underground room is assigned its own space on the underworld map, so it may simply have been a matter of running out of space if they did try to implement this intentionally.

I give this 5 stars for 'bizarre-factor'. Cool
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Dark Linkaël



Joined: 31 Jan 2011
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Mon Jan 31, 2011 3:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hello, I’m the webmaster of a french Zelda website, Triforce Legend. I would like to ask you something about this marvel. But before I begin, I want to say that I don’t speak English and that a member of my website’s team translates my text.
My question are:
In a old topic of this forum, from 2008 (Beta Zelda for Nes), I’ve seen a picture of a white FDS disk who was looking like the prototype.



The same picture is here, too:
NES Warp Zone

There’s an inscription ZEL-A on it and the one published here is ZEL-B, is it to show the A-side and the B-side of the disk? So, the A-side tag is missing on this disk.

Is the “Zel-A” disk another Zelda 1 prototype? If it is, do you have any idea what has become of it?

Is it possible that such a version is discovered someday?

Family Computer Disc System

By the way, in this video, some places are similar to places on this concept-art from Nintendo, like the entry of the third dungeon:



Finally, I’ve made some very useful Game Genie codes for the FCE Ultra NES emulator:
To discover every secret (Excepted Armos and Graves)
AC0B E4
To walk everywhere on the screen (Overworld)
814B D0
To walk everywhere on the map 1 (Dungeon)
C3BB A5
To walk everywhere on the map 2 (Dungeon)
C35D 60
To position Link in the middle of the screen (If he doesn’t appear)
0084 90
Overworld and Dungeons
0010 0X
Level 3
0010 07-> 79 Entry of Level 3
Level 7
0010 03 -> 78 Entry of Level 7
(X -> 00 to 09)
Places and rooms in the dungeons
00EB XX
(XX -> 00 to 7F)
75 Entry of Level 1
77 Entry of Level 2
79 Entry of Level 3
72 Entry of Level 4
7D Entry of Level 5
73 Entry of Level 6
78 Entry of Level 7
7F Entry of Level 8
75 Entry of Level 9

So, this was everything! Thank you very much for reading this!

And thank you for finding this prototype of The Legend of Zelda, it’s a wonderful gift! I hope that someday, other Zelda prototypes will be found.
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Skrybe
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Joined: 28 Aug 2003
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 03, 2011 12:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That "ZEL-A" disk was auctioned on Yahoo Japan several years ago, around 2003 or so. I don't know exactly what happened to it, but it's probably still in the hands of some collector in Japan. I suspect that it's the same build as this one that we released, since I recall the auction saying that there was no prologue or title screen music.
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aeisner



Joined: 06 May 2011
Posts: 1

PostPosted: Fri May 06, 2011 10:27 pm    Post subject: amateur question Reply with quote

EDIT: reread the thread, problem solved. Had a similar problem as dwade. If stuck at title screen, EJECT, SWITCH, INSERT!

Very excited ladies and gentlemen, thanks for the find!
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DarkTetsuya



Joined: 05 Sep 2003
Posts: 80

PostPosted: Fri May 06, 2011 10:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I forget which F-key is it, but you have to switch the disk to side b. (I think F5/F7 but its been a while since I've played any disk games)
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