I am a big fan of Links Awakening and its one of those games I really miss. I know that with Legend of Link we get the sprites and all.

But it would have been nice to have a port of Links Awakening on the NES

Whats your take?

It would have to be programmed from the ground up

http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess...

It would take an insane amount of work. It would be have to be completely remade from scratch. Just like Megaman 9 on NES, it won't be done

Check the sticky two posts above this one for the usual answer.

My own personal answer is that too much would be lost in changing the screen resolution. Link's Awakening vies for my favorite game ever (next to the original Zelda), and I've put a decent amount of though into why (I think) it is so good. Screen/world size plays a huge part in this. Technically there is not much that can't be recreated, if anything, but the result would be a stretched and bloated, lackluster mess. I looked into doing Anodyne at some point (or trying to anyways), and the result would be the same with that. The worlds are built within bounds.

Gamecube + Gameboy player. No need to reinvent the unnecessary wheel

I've seen people make custom snes pokemon games. It's essentially the guts of a gameboy player and a pokemon game shoved into a snes cart. In that regards, you can do the same with links awakening but like Bert said, for nes it would be easier to remake it than to port it. I would love to see it though! Links awakening was one of my first and favorite gameboy games.

I had this sitting on my HDD for a long time. Forgot the author, but it's probably something you're looking for. For the life of me, I can't remember where I've downloaded it either... I may have got it from a random compilation bootleg disc or something.

However, this rom is incomplete, and just mainly a title screen and 1 overworld screen. 

Download on the bottom of my post. "zeldaiii.nes"

ETA: Screen shots of the only two screens in the rom. 

No stereo sound.

Retrovision if you can find one

http://www.retrousb.com/product_i...

I don't think the extra screen space would ruin anything.

I'd actually be really surprised if somebody hasn't mocked this up with whatever that Game-maker-like platform was that people use exclusively for Zelda fan-fiction games.
 

Zelda Classic has some similar things, if I recall (I used to mess around with it many years ago), and there were always just weird dead spaces where they lengthened the screen. It's been a while though.

Edit: Just to clarify. When I think of really good game design, like what we see in Zelda IV, I tend to look at it like a fine Swiss watch. If you want to re-size the watch, you can't just simply blow up the pieces, or add dead space to the frame without altering the contents. It's an integral whole. Just my philosophy with game design.

For an example of the reverse, check out Spiritual Warfare for the Game Boy. Here the frame was too big so they introduced scrolling instead of re-designing it to fit. Definitely loses the feel of the original, which I find to be well designed.

I think it's a matter of where and how the space gets added.

Buffering around the outside of the original screen shouldn't cause any issue, and could probably be done in a way that was aesthetically pleasing and not distracting.




I mean really, it's something you'd need to address screen-by-screen to determine what is best in each condition.

But if you expand the status bar, you could probably chew up MOST of the Y-axis discrepancy with no effort, at all, and it reduces to figuring out what to do with the extra x-axis tiles.