What's new in 0.5.2
This release fixes the bugs reported after 0.5.1. Most of them show up with an HD pack.
Link no longer stays crouched after a sword swing
With an HD pack, Link kept his crouching pose after a standing stab. He stood, walked and jumped normally, but the pack drew him on his knees until you did a crouching stab, which looked like he was sliding around on his knees. The game sets a flag on every standing stab that only a crouching stab clears, and z2rs read that flag as "ducking". z2rs now takes the pose from the frame the game draws. The game also draws its duck frame while a jump rises, so rising jumps showed the crouch pose too. They now use the pack's jump frames.
Gameplay was never affected, only the HD pose.
Dialogue no longer hides behind houses
The town houses in the HD pack are drawn as layers over the background. The game writes its dialogue boxes, signs and pause menu into the background, so the house art covered them. Layers are no longer drawn inside those windows, and the full text shows.
Enemies keep their HD art when hit
When you hit an enemy, the game makes it flash by cycling it through all four sprite palettes. The HD pack only has art for each enemy's normal colours, so three frames out of four fell back to the original sprite. z2rs now borrows the enemy's HD art from one of the other palettes and recolours it, so the enemy stays in HD and still flashes.
HD packs in the browser
The browser build accepted at most 256 files in a pack. The packs with the animated Link have about 2,500, one PNG per frame, so the browser rejected them and kept the pack it had loaded before. The limit is now 16,384 files. The 96 MiB size limit is unchanged. Picking a folder that holds two packs side by side is now refused with a message, instead of the browser picking whichever name sorted first. Paths written with backslashes in a pack's frame list now load too.
If the new Link still doesn't show on desktop, check two things. You need 0.5.1 or newer, because 0.5.0 ignores the animation frames. And unpack each pack into an empty folder: unpacking the new pack over the old v0.1 folder can leave the old pack.json in charge. The launcher now warns when a pack folder has an old pack.json next to new frames, or a newer pack one level down.
z2rs.com
Loading a ROM on z2rs.com did nothing in any browser, because the site was serving an older engine than its page expected. That is fixed. If a ROM fails to load, the error now shows on the screen instead of only in the Status box below it.
Desktop and Android builds of z2rs. Download the archive for your system and unpack
it. Double-click z2rs-launcher (z2rs.app on macOS), pick your ROM,
and press Play. The game remembers the ROM, so later you can also start
z2rs directly. HOW-TO-PLAY.txt in the archive lists the controls and
where settings and saves are kept.
No ROM is included and none is uploaded anywhere. You need your own
Zelda II (USA) .nes file.
From a terminal, run the game directly:
./z2rs --rom /path/to/zelda2.nes [--scale 3] [--fullscreen]
./z2rs --help lists every flag. z2-signal is the signalling server
for online co-op, and you only need it if you host your own instead of
using the public one the launcher points at.
These builds are not code signed, so each system warns the first time:
- macOS: right-click
z2rs.appand choose Open. On newer macOS, if
that does not offer Open, try once, then go to System Settings >
Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. If macOS still refuses, run
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine z2rs.appin the unpacked folder. - Windows: SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Click More
info, then Run anyway. - Linux: if the files do not start, run
chmod +x z2rs z2rs-launcher z2-signal.
On Android 8.0 or newer, download z2rs-0.5.2-android.apk on the
phone and open it. Android asks once to allow installs from your
browser or file manager. Open z2rs, pick your ROM and press Play. An
on-screen gamepad is shown until you connect a controller.
guide/android.md has the details.
SHA256SUMS lists the checksum of every archive and the APK.