Seth Michael Larson: Extracting NES & N64 ROMs from Zelda Collector's Edition

Gaming as a hobby isabout to become much more expensivein the United States due to tariffs. I cannot recall a time in the past where aconsole's price has increased during its generation, and yet the Xbox Series X & S, the Nintendo Switch, and most recently the Playstation 5 have had price hikes. These are not normal times.

So here's another entry in my mini-series (#1,#2) of extracting ROMs from GameCube games, this time the “Zelda Collector's Edition” which contains 2 NES and 2 N64 Zelda titles.

This article only took so long because I was trying to actually implement the Nintendo “TGC” archive format, but it turns out that even the popular tools handling TGC can't parse the NES ROMs out of the archives included in the Zelda Collector's Edition game properly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So instead Icreated a scriptwhich looks for NES and N64 ROM header magic strings (NES\x1Aand\x80\x37\x12\x40) and usedknown lengthsfor these ROMs instead of the TGC format for framing information.So much easier!

You know the drill by now: buying these games costs over $150 USD and “Zelda Collector's Edition” for the GameCubeonly costs ~$50 USD. Pretty good savings, especially for two of the most celebrated Zelda titles. However, the price is high enough that you might consider buying a year of “Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack” if you already have the console.

I still haven't beaten “Ocarina of Time” or “Majora's Mask”, even though I know they are both masterpieces. The only Legend of Zelda games I've beaten end-to-end are “Wind Waker” and “Four Swords Adventures”, can you tell I'm a GameCube player? Let me know what your favorite Legend of Zelda title is.

Thanks for keeping RSS alive! ♥

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