History

Before Zelda Classic

1986-87
Nintendo released an innovative new game, "The Legend of Zelda".

1988
A friend introduced me to the game and I was hooked.

December 1988
Got my first NES system and Zelda game cart.

1992-93
I began a Zelda clone in GWBASIC on a monochrome monitor (but with an EGA card, so there were 4 shades of green). I had to draw the tiles pixel by pixel because we didn't have emulators and ROMs in those days. Made the map system and a little more, then gave up on the project.

Zelda Classic

April 1999
I began programming the then-untitled Zelda clone using SPHINX C--. I got the tiles from the Zelda ROM using an emulator called NES4PC (0.30). I joined Armageddon Games and War Lord started working on the maps.

May 1999
Made a lot of progress, even started the enemies (after much prodding by War Lord). The game was limited in many ways though: no sound, no joystick, and a 64KB code size barrier that was quickly becoming an issue. I thought of some sneaky ways around that, but it was still obvious that C-- wasn't going to cut it.

June 1999
Downloaded DJGPP and Allegro. After running through a quick tutorial, I began porting some of my C-- tile routines and doing some simple graphics. Within a week, I had officially bagged the C-- version and was hard at work converting the code to C++. I also had to make a new editor, which took as much time as coding the game. Decided to call the game Zelda DX because it's a deluxe version of Zelda.

July 1999
Finally got the DJGPP version caught up to the C-- version, but with sound and joystick support. We held the first Armageddon Games contest to let someone design the title screen. ZerO won with his animated pool and spiffy logo.

August 1999
Major progress. Changed the name to Zelda Classic to avoid confusion with the Color Gameboy Zelda game.

September 1999
Nada. Too busy with school.

October 1999
Finally got back to work on the game and the editor. Finished the conversion from 8x8 to 16x16 tiles. That will make it easier to do the graphics for the new quests. I also launched this web site.

October 1999 - Present
What's the difference between recent history and old news? Whatever you want to call it, you can read it in the News Archives.