Case study

Zelda3: a C reimplementation of A Link to the Past

Zelda3 reimplements The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in C, extracting levels and images from the user's US SNES ROM. It can run the original machine code beside the replacement and compare RAM state after each frame; the author reports that the game is playable from start to end.

Targets: Game
Category: Independent reconstruction cases
Relationship: Independent reconstruction project
Sources reviewed: 2026-11-06
Evidence class: C2 code & docs, no demo or download

Stars: 5.0k
Last commit: 2026-10-02
Language: C

GitHub data as of 2026-11-10

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Evidence

Observed: Code, documentation and a download method observed; no demo found.
Checked: 2026-11-09

How evidence classes are assigned

Requirements & limits

Prerequisites: Requires the user's US-region ROM named zelda3.sfc with the SHA-256 hash documented in BUILDING.md.
Prerequisites: Must be built from source; the documented Windows path uses Python, TCC and SDL2.
License: Licensed under MIT.

Cite

BibTeX

@misc{zelda3-case,
  title = {{Zelda3: a C reimplementation of A Link to the Past}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/snesrev/zelda3}},
  url = {https://github.com/snesrev/zelda3},
  urldate = {2026-11-06},
  note = {Awesome REA entry: \url{https://awesomerea.org/resources/zelda3-case/}}
}

Plain text

Zelda3: a C reimplementation of A Link to the Past. https://github.com/snesrev/zelda3 (accessed 2026-11-06). Awesome REA entry: https://awesomerea.org/resources/zelda3-case/

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About this entry

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Primary sources

README.md GitHub · snesrev/zelda3 · Revision 45a149d
BUILDING.md GitHub · snesrev/zelda3 · Revision 45a149d