Great Palace Map from Zelda II: New Adventure of Link
I’ve been trying to keep myself amused during the COVID-19 shutdown, and as such have been trying a number of new things. One new thing I decided to look into is playing hacked NES ROMs. It turns out there are a great number of ROM hacks out there, with the website ROMhacking.net listing over 4,600 hacked ROMs as of this writing.
While looking into hacked ROMs, I quickly learned that ROM hacks fall into one of 3 main categories: “really good”, “really bad”, and “joke”. I spent some time looking around, and found one particular ROM which I found in the “really good” category: Zelda II: New Adventure of Link, created by someone named HollowShadow. So I downloaded OpenEmu, grabbed the ROM hack, bought a USB NES controller, and got to playing!
Being a big fan of Zelda 2, I had no problem playing through the vast majority of the ROM. It’s when I got to the final palace is when the game became quite difficult, and quickly got lost.
What I needed was a map, but because this was a ROM hack, there wasn’t a whole lot available to me in the way of resources.
So I decided to make a map.
I have never made a map before.
I’ve used draw.io for other projects in the past, and thought it might be a good fit for making a map based on a video game level where there were a series of interconnecting rooms.
Turns out I was right, and I came up with quite a map. Here it is:
Chances are, what’s shown above is too small to be useful. You will need to click on it and then download the original file, which is a 2606 × 2231 PNG.
There is also an HTML version of the Great Palace Map which may be helpful.
Hope the map helps, and that you enjoy the ROM hack, I know I did!
Special thanks to Fleck Cat for assistance in ROM hack research.
