Forest of Illusion, a Twitter user who collects and hosts information about beta builds of video games, has accidentally made a new discovery involving a classic Zelda game. After dissecting a prototype cartridge of F-Zero X, they found that the ROM dump contained a few files from an early build of Ocarina of Time. Supposedly, the files are dated to around the same time as Spaceworld 1997. The information that was pulled from the dev cart consists of beta map data for the game, along with early textures and graphics files. Following this discovery, some users began porting the maps into Ocarina of Time, letting players experience these areas in full, such as a beta version of Kakariko Village, which can be seen in the above video.

We have a prototype Nintendo 64 cartridge of F-Zero X that contained data from an early build of Zelda 64 that used to be on the cartridge. We're estimating it's from Spaceworld 1997. We're going to look into this more. Of course everything will be released. pic.twitter.com/Q5SoAbsdWM

— Forest of Illusion (@forestillusion) January 19, 2021

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[raxadian]

Beside much effort and risks to save the princess without carnal intentions, I wonder why LINK is left handed?

Ask their creator, who is left handled.

 

[Jonna]

Of all the hipsterish things you post here as "news"... This really takes the cake.. Bravo Looking forward to the next major announcement that weeb visual novel x is being localized.

Dude, this is legitimate news. This forum is about gaming and development of homebrew and development of games. I don't see how this couldn't be more relevant.


I am extremely, outrageously excited for this. I never anticipated the stuff from the Gigaleak, but now all this stuff? Never thought I would see it until shortly before I die, somehow. I've been wanting to see all of this beyond 90's magazine low resolution screenshots since at least the year 2000 when I discovered there was a BETA of Ocarina of Time vastly different to the final version. I joined and browsed Zelda's Secret Ocarina a hell of a lot, to the point I have those screenshots burned into my memory. So yeah, I'm so happy about this.

Although maybe this is an omen that I'm about to die.

 

[Ecchi95]

The title is not doing this justice.

WE HAVE A REAL PROTOTYPE OF OCARINA OF TIME FROM 1997. It was partially overwritten with F-Zero X.

The item icons start at 01014E40. You can see the Reed Whistle, old Kokiri and Master Swords,etc.

Spoiler

INTERESTING DISCOVERY: THE PRE-RENDERED BACKGROUNDS WERE ORIGINALLY RGBA 5551 AND NOT JPEG!

Market with lamppost 0197EC70:

 

[Julie_Pilgrim]

Of all the hipsterish things you post here as "news"... This really takes the cake.. Bravo Looking forward to the next major announcement that weeb visual novel x is being localized.

How the fuck is this not news?

 

[DarthDub]

Of all the hipsterish things you post here as "news"... This really takes the cake.. Bravo Looking forward to the next major announcement that weeb visual novel x is being localized.

Okay zoomer. You do realize that The Legend of Zelda is a major game series and not some niche series right? People have been anticipating some form of "beta" dump for Ocarina of Time for over 2 decades and here we are.

 

[Jonna]

The title is not doing this justice.

WE HAVE A REAL PROTOTYPE OF OCARINA OF TIME FROM 1997. It was partially overwritten with F-Zero X.

The item icons start at 01014E40. You can see the Reed Whistle, old Kokiri and Master Swords,etc.

Spoiler

INTERESTING DISCOVERY: THE PRE-RENDERED BACKGROUNDS WERE ORIGINALLY RGBA 5551 AND NOT JPEG!

Market with lamppost 0197EC70:

While it's so sad that we didn't get the full playable build, this shows that the fact that all the BETA builds aren't all hoarded in Nintendo's deep office archives somewhere, so there's now possible hope we could have a build somewhere. Maybe even an earlier build??

 

[raxadian]

While it's so sad that we didn't get the full playable build, this shows that the fact that all the BETA builds aren't all hoarded in Nintendo's deep office archives somewhere, so there's now possible hope we could have a build somewhere. Maybe even an earlier build??

It would be hard to find an earlier build than this as the village looks really basic. Maybe an earlier model of Link himself is possible I guess?

 

[Jonna]

It would be hard to find an earlier build than this as the village looks really basic. Maybe an earlier model of Link himself is possible I guess?

It would definitely be harder, no doubt, but this find shows it could be closer to possible than impossible.

This build shows areas and items from what the Zelda 64 BETA community calls the "A and B" era, where those buttons were switched around. An even earlier build would be the "A and C" era, where items would seemingly be assigned to any of the A or B or C buttons, as shown randomly in those screenshots. The likes of that would include things like the red nose on Deku Tree, very early enemies not seen from the Gigaleak find (with red blood coming out), an earlier Link model (with no kid Link to be found), the ability to jump any where, the beam sword attack, and areas like the chest with the Triforce, that eerie top-of-castle-with-grey-cloud-coverage, ice palace-looking Zelda 1-like dungeon and assortments of other things that are only coming off the top of my head.

Do let me know if you already know of all this, I'm just a huuuuge fanatic of this, if it wasn't obvious already. If we had assets from such a build, I'd be freaking the fuck out, just like I already did with this. But if there was a WORKING BUILD of that, I would probably have a happy heart attack. If we somehow got a playable version of this build, with the other half of the data out, some one here may need to call me a paramedic.

 

[WhoIAm]

the ability to jump any where

There's some text found in this overdump that describes a manual jump, at least according to TCRF: "While holding down the Z Button
the B icon will change to "Jump", and you can press the B Button to jump. While jumping, press A to do a jump slash." Sounds like what they ended up implementing in Skyward Sword and BotW! Other text also describes the auto-jump found in the final game, so I'd imagine this was removed for the sake of streamlining the controls.

 

[console]

Awesome! I not sure if we like to build new Zelda with different world, dungeons and maps in near future. I think it would be amazing to have different Zelda with custom world, dungeons and maps.

 

[g4jek8j54]

Just learned about this yesterday. Very awesome! I have been wanting to see some of those beta areas since I saw them in gaming magazines back when Ocarina of Time first came out. Never thought it would actually happen. Amazing that we keep getting new developments in Ocarina of Time, from this, to speedrunning glitches, etc.

If anyone is interested, and you haven't already seen all of it (possible since this was posted over a week ago), here is a video showcasing the different beta maps found on this development cartridge...

Apparently, there was also a "0.9" version of Ocarina of Time found as well, which is dated three days before the build of the 1.0 version...

 

[Ecchi95]

 

[Ecchi95]

I made a GameShark code to restore the actors for Newer Hyrule Field, if you have z64me's maps patch.

Don't turn the code on until you're on the map select. I found all of the actors except the drawbridge. It should be loaded but I couldn't find it.

80461F99 0007
80461F9F 0050
80461FA1 0011
81461FB0 002F
81461FB2 007C
80461FB5 001A
80461FB7 0027
80461FB9 0013
80461FBB 002D
80461FBD 0046
80461FC1 004A
80461FD1 0008
80461FE1 0008
80461FF1 0077
81461FFE 0713
80462001 0019
80462011 0019
80462021 0019
80462031 003C
80462041 0077
8046204F 0000
80462051 0077
8046205F 0000
80462061 0077
8046206F 0000
80462071 0077
8046207F 0000
80462081 0077
8046208F 0000
80462091 0077
8046209F 0000
804620A1 0077
804620AF 0000
804620B1 0042
804620C1 005B