the cutting room mirror

The Legend of Zelda: San Shen Zhi Li

This article has a talk page!
view on tcrf.net

This page is rather stubbly and could use some expansion.
Are you a bad enough dude to rescue this article?

The Legend of Zelda: San Shen Zhi Li is a bootleg port of A Link to the Past to the NES.

The game's accuracy to its source material is inconsistent. Most notably, none of the original ALTTP music is present, some of the Dark World dungeons' locations are shuffled around for no apparent reason, there are no health or magic upgrades, and the original game's final two dungeons are nowhere to be found.

This needs some investigation.
Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page.
Specifically: This TAS description mentions several things:

  • "In the manual Link is green and there are several items that didn't make it into the game such as Roc's cape." Maybe the scrapped items are still in the ROM? If not, make a Prerelease page.
  • "The last two dungeons are cut from the game, perhaps due to time constraints as it appears that their areas were begun but not finished." Neither Turtle Rock nor Ganon's Tower are present, and the author's wording suggests that there may be some leftovers of both.
  • The fence maze features a sign which can't be interacted with because a piece of fence blocks it. Does it have any dialogue associated to it?

Unused Graphics#

A third and final animation frame for the Bomb. During normal gameplay, the first two frames simply repeat until the Bomb explodes.

In the original game, Link's uncle has two wounded sprites: one with his sword and shield, and one without. Both sprites are accounted for in this port, but the "armed" one is not used.

A stunned sprite for the Terrorpin enemy. In the original game it can be flipped on its back by using the Magic Hammer, but in this version doing so simply triggers the standard knock-back animation.

A second frame for this version's rather silly-looking Moldorm. It looks like the idea was to have its head bob up and down, though in the final game it's static.

An unused frame for Blind, which in the original game was used when his body crumples onto the floor and his head starts flying around. While this attack pattern also exists in this port, a different frame is used instead.

The first of two cut hazards, here the iron ball from the Eastern Palace. This port's Eastern Palace includes two rooms with the wall cavities from which these things normally spawn, but they never do.

The second cut hazard, this time a boulder. The original game has boulders tumble down (part of) Death Mountain, so that could be what this is for.

While the Bombos and Ether Medallions appear in this port, the Quake Medallion is nowhere to be found despite the inventory screen having an empty slot for it. It's possible the devs ran out of time to implement the original game's unique scenario where Quake is obtained, and it's probably not unrelated that Turtle Rock (which in the original game can only be accessed with Quake) is also absent.

On a side note, while Bombos and Quake had their icons mistakenly swapped in this version, the unused sprite seen here is different from the original game's Bombos Medallion.

Unused Text#

A number of Windows 98-related text strings are repeated several times throughout the ROM, likely garbage from the RAM of the computer the game was compiled on.

TMP=C:\WINDOWS\TEMP
TEMP=C:\WINDOWS\TEMP
PROMPT=$p$g
winbootdir=C:\WINDOWS
COMSPEC=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM
PATH=F:\BORLAND\DELPHI7\BIN;F:\BORLAND\DELPHI7\PROJECTS\BPL\;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND
windir=C:\WINDOWS
BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4 P300
D1 T4 P300
KERNEL32.DLL
USER32.DLL
GetEnvironmentStrings
DeleteFileA
ExitProcess
CloseHandle
GetConsoleMode
GetCurrentDirectoryA
GetCurrentThreadId
GetDriveTypeA
CreateFileA
GetEnvironmentVariableA
GetFileAttributesA
GetFileType
GetLastError
GetLocalTime
GetLogicalDrives
GetModuleFileNameA
GetModuleHandleA
GetNumberOfConsoleInputEvents
GetCommandLineA
GetStartupInfoA
GetStdHandle
GetTimeZoneInformation
GetVersion
PeekConsoleInputA
RaiseException
ReadConsoleInputA
ReadFile
RtlUnwind
SetConsoleCtrlHandler
SetConsoleMode
SetCurrentDirectoryA
SetEnvironmentVariableA
SetFilePointer
SetHandleCount
UnhandledExceptionFilter
VirtualAlloc.
VirtualFree
WriteFile
GetProcAddress
MessageBoxA
EnumThreadWindows
WINDOWS
MS-DOS Version 7 (C)Copyright 1981-1995 Microsoft Corp Licensed Material - Property of Microsoft All rights reserved 
[]|<>+=;
[]|<>+=;"
4.10.2222
D:\SARDAP~1\COMPIL~1.BAT