What's new in 0.6.0
This release adds optional areas to explore, HD animation support for enemies and townspeople, camera zoom, and fixes for HD sprite placement and save states. These are the changes since 0.5.2.
New areas
The launcher and the in-game options menu now have a "New areas (ZALiA-inspired)" group. Enable its master switch, then choose which areas to add:
- Parapa Annex: a seven-room wing off the entrance to Palace 1, with an outdoor back door, a key and locked door, and extra rewards.
- Five challenge areas: Skyward Stair, Ember Run, Rubble Maze, Lizalfos Pit, and Crumbling Causeway.
- Target Gallery in Mido: hit 12 targets before time runs out to earn a heart piece.
- Pogo Tower in Darunia: climb by bouncing off enemies with the downward thrust and collect the prize at the top.
- Six hidden caves with heart and magic pieces, a P-bag, and a 1-up. Four pieces make a container; the caves and minigames together supply one heart container and one magic container.
- Dark Isle: a new island in southeastern East Hyrule, reached through caves. Visit Grimhollow, a town of monsters with dialogue and healers, and climb Thornspire, a ten-room eighth palace.
These are original layouts and dialogue inspired by the kinds of additions in ZALiA. The ZALiA preset now enables the Annex, challenge rooms, minigames, and caves. Dark Isle has its own toggle and stays off in that preset. All new areas stay off with the original-game settings.
Collected items, opened doors, and minigame rewards persist in battery saves with the original ROM. New entrances and terrain appear while their options are enabled. With a randomized ROM, an area is skipped if its reserved map slot is already occupied. If a seed occupies an area's progress storage, that progress survives in save states but not battery saves. Online co-op checks that both players have matching area options and data.
The new content still has a few unfinished details: minigame introduction and rules dialogue does not appear, the Target Gallery's ledges are decorative, and Old Barrow has a normal cave entrance rather than the planned hammer boulder. The challenge rooms have automated checks for their entrances, exits, enemies, and rewards; completing every trial by hand has not been checked.
HD characters and scenery
HD packs can now animate whole enemies, bosses, and townspeople, as well as Link. Packs can select animations for individual enemy states and NPC types. Characters drawn in the widescreen margins use their HD animations too.
Several placement and pose fixes keep the replacement art aligned with the original game:
- Link's side-view ground position now lines up with his original collision geometry, including when he faces left.
- Overworld Link is centered on the map sprite.
- Link returns to walking after the item pickup animation finishes.
- Surfaced Zoras have their own animation clips.
- Helmethead's detached helmets are matched to their own sprites.
- Loading a save state or rewinding no longer leaves old HD animation frames occupying the character cache indefinitely.
Pack authors can give scenery layers their own horizontal or vertical drift and animate them from PNG frames. The animation follows emulated time, so it pauses with the game and returns to the same frame after a seek or state load. Layers can also target individual new rooms. The pack checker validates layer frame sizes, animation rates, and drift settings.
The native debug overlays now show the collision geometry used by the game. Actor and collision dumps help pack authors compare their art with the original sprite positions.
Camera zoom
The native launcher and in-game display options now include camera zoom. It follows Link, keeps the status bar and boss meter at their normal size, and zooms back out for dialogue and menus. In local co-op it follows the midpoint of both players while they fit in view.
From a terminal, use --camera-zoom 2 for 2x zoom. Values from 1 to 4 are accepted; 1 turns it off. --present-size 2560x1440 sets an exact output size. Camera zoom changes the view only.
Save states
New desktop and browser save states store the complete game state, including the CPU, graphics memory, mapper, and frame counter. Loading a state from a different scene now restores that scene's tiles and graphics banks along with its RAM. Older desktop and browser state files still load.
Android and controllers
Android now presents HD packs at their full resolution instead of reducing them to the original game's resolution first.
Desktop players can override controller bindings for one run with --pad-map. For example, --pad-map South=A,East=B,Start=none maps the bottom face button to A, the right face button to B, and unbinds Start. Unlisted buttons keep their existing bindings.
Downloads and setup
Download the archive for Windows, Linux, Apple Silicon macOS, or Intel macOS and unpack it. Open z2rs-launcher (z2rs.app on macOS), choose your own Zelda II (USA) .nes file, and press Play. No ROM is included or uploaded. The Android APK supports Android 8.0 and newer.
HD graphics packs are separate downloads. Unpack each pack into its own empty folder, then select that folder in the launcher. Use this release for packs that need enemy animations or animated scenery layers.
On macOS, right-click the app and choose Open. If it is blocked, use System Settings > Privacy & Security > Open Anyway. On Windows, SmartScreen may require More info > Run anyway. On Linux, run chmod +x z2rs z2rs-launcher z2-signal if the unpacked programs are not executable.
HOW-TO-PLAY.txt in the desktop archives lists the controls and save locations. SHA256SUMS contains checksums for the archives and APK. The source code for these builds is available under this release's tag.