Legend of Zelda 2

[LinkMaster500]

The Zelda Collector's Edition Disk is extremely hard to find nowadays as it was only available through special offers (e.g. registering your GameCube). It was never available commercially in stores, although you can probably find it on eBay.

Even though there is no "Zelda 2 Classic," (at least up and running right now), most of the elements could be made in the current Zelda Classic with the right ZQuest techniques such as towns with people to talk to, side-scrolling levels, overworld maps with little icons representing towns, dungeons and other things. You could use the Raft and Raft paths in dungeons to handle those elevators we saw in the palaces in Zelda 2. Full-fledged jumping has not been implemented yet (i.e. with the Roc's Feather), but you can use the Raft paths to simulate jumping as well as insta-warps, for instance, for Link jumping off cliffs.

So at least, you can put some of that Zelda 2 feel to a ZC quest.

[mirror_shield33]

You can actually find the collectors edition at gamestop... at least sometimes.

In case you didn't know, zelda classic is much more than a Z1 remake. try some of the custom quests, or try making your own.

[LinkMaster500]

What I meant by the Collector's Edition never being "available commercially in stores" was that you could not buy it new in stores. Of course, you can get it used at GameStop, EB Games, or other used game shops.

[Mitsukara]

Just my two cents, but... while buying a copy for Gameboy Advance or the collector's disc is all cool to have and novel and everything, I'd like to point out that ROMs are extremely available. Many, many sites up with NES ROMs.

ROM images are illegal; you aren't supposed to make copies of the game's data, and are thus violating copyright limitations. It could be likened to a form of theft, you are acquiring the game for free without buying.

However, this game is old and out of circulation for the most part. I can justify a few dollars to play it on the Wii- which, by the way, is almost definitely possible, all NES games among other things will be available for paid download on the Wii- but I can't justify $20 for the Gameboy Advance copy. The collectors disc is kind of neat since you get four games, but...

I think Nintendo has bigger fish to fry than worrying about making a continuous profit off games they made in 1987. Just my opinion.

Also of note is that while ROM images are not legal to own, the Emulator programs used to play them are because they contain no copyrighted material. You can download an emulator program, like say, FCE Ultra, completely legally if you wished to mess around with one, and there are some odd little demo ROMs (known as Public Domain ROMs) made by people which are legal to download and play. If you're curious about this, you can- very legally- look up http://www.zophar.net or similar sites and download such things.

The illegal part is downloading the actual copyrighted games, such as Zelda II. Such things are not to be endorsed or linked to on this forum, for good reason I suppose, but it's your choice rather or not you want to investigate such things.

Now, when you hear about "hacking" in relation to ROMs and emulation, what that typically refers to is when a person edits the actual game ROM files themselves. A "ROM hack" is like, say, you take the original Super Mario Bros and replace Mario's graphics so he looks differnet, or you edit the game so that Mario jumps at a different height, or the stages are different. One need not know anything about ROM hacking to dump a game and host it online, or host versions they'd downloaded elsewhere; to dump it they need the proper hardware tool and knowledge for doing so, and hosting is just like hosting any website.

[Modus Ponens]

I know this great site where you can find pretty much every rom for every system. Here's the link.

[Rowan]

Z2E is still being worked on, but not under Solaris. He regretfully had to drop the project for a little something called life. I'm working on it myself with SDL, but I'm far from having anything worth looking at.