Zelda Classic - has this been considered as a candidate for new cores?

Libretro Cores
#1

I’m not sure how familiar people around here are with Zelda Classic, but Zelda Classic started as a engine reimplementation of the original The Legend of Zelda on the NES, making it run on MS-DOS and later on Windows PCs. The unique thing with Zelda Classic is its level editor, making it possible for users to create entirely original quests, with the best custom made quest maybe even rival the old Zelda games made by Nintendo themselves.

A couple of years ago Zelda Classic moved its codebase to GitHub, going open source and all that.

The benefits of a libretro port of Zelda Classic compared to just using the various versions found on the web could be many, one being having the clean RetroArch frontend with full controller support instead of having to fiddle with gamepad wrappers such as Xinput Plus just to get a modern Xbox One gamepad to work with Zelda Classic for the end user (been there, done that).

An other benefit could be to have the ability to within the core options itself to have custom configs for each custom quests, and thereby selecting which version of Zelda Classic to use based on the custom quest (running a ZC 2.10 quest in ZC 2.5 may cause issues in terms of both gameplay- and completing the actual quest).

I have no idea whatsoever how much work this would be to port over to libretro, how popular Zelda Classic is nowadays (something tells me it peaked 10 years ago), if this could end up as a niche that only few people care about and so on.

The only thing I can add, is that if this somehow in the future happened, it would be cool.

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#2

The codebase seems huge, and there might be 64-bit incompatibility (meaning you can’t run it through a 64-bit retroarch, which is what most people use). Not sure how much work would be needed to get this core usable. Did you ask the author if he is interested ?

#3

No, I haven’t asked the author.

Maybe I should ask him? I have no idea if he’s familiar with RetroArch and libretro, but my guess is that Zelda Classic could get some exposure if it was ported over to libretro.

#4

I’ve asked the author(s) via the Issue tracker on the Zelda Classic GitHub page itself now, so maybe we’ll get an official reply soon :slightly_smiling_face:

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#5

I have found finally this port really updated of ZC for Libretro <3

This project is excellent and working fine. I’m using it on Linux 64bit and it run perfectly. Where i can’t build fine the real officiel engine … Games running fine, but not the 2.50 one because the author has choose to port an older engine version. And it’s like OpenBOR, you must use the build of each game to run it, not really compatible with new engine … Here like he write, some one will must port the 2.5 version in an other core, or add it in parallel with a core option to switch version by game. He has also remove some options like external MP3 OGG music files … maybe it can also do a cool core option to support them, and cheats :slight_smile:

For sure Retroarch will help ZeldaClassic to be more popular … Libretro now is every where :slight_smile: Now i dream some one port OpenBOR to Libretro one day … maybe … lol

#6

Hi @Twinaphex

I think you could consider maybe built-in or based on the work of “zc210-libretro” which works great but mostly 32/64bit compatible.

Best Regards