kinda interesting how Nintendo tried to make the item drop in Zelda not completely random but meaningful balanced. Well maybe pure random was just something that wasn’t as easily avaible on the NES…
I love stuff like this! Meaningless to most, archaeological findings to me… 
I’m surprised nobody’s analyzed the ROM and figured out the exact algorithm for item drops, including the bits and pieces the video says are still unknown.
Those speedrunner guys though, they always figure out everything.
That’s pretty cool, actually.
Maybe the obfuscation is so intense that it’s impossible to find. I know you can’t look in .exe files to look at code as far as I know so maybe it’s something similar there.
Sure you can. It’ll just be assembly you’ll be looking at, and that’s far harder to read/understand than e.g. java source code is. Which may be why no one has bothered to reverse engineer the code, to figure out the algorithm.
NES games had to be packed super small, so having a feature-rich game was hard, because of the limits. Not only is it probably obfuscated and compressed to hell, but it was probably written in a way to not make it any bigger that it had to be. Kind of like how intense J4K games are sometimes written in an odd non-obvious way.
The first zelda game only takes up 129 kb, on my end.
IMO it’s pretty amazing to see how all those old games that entertained for hours on end were packed up into a minuscule file size like that.
Yeah its assembly code and really small compressed stuff, so yeah…
I don’t even see this as “archaeological”. Sure the assembly is ancient, but I mean if you want to have item drops in your game and want it to be balanced kinda - you gotta think about this kinda stuff and write some kind of algorithm
This is pretty freaking cool