Legend Of Zelda, The: A Link to the Past

This prototype originated from a massive find by jollerancher. Thanks to ReadOnly for some information on this prototype. By: Evan G Last updated: July 8, 2012

The origins of this prototype are the subject of legends in collectors' circles. A person who goes by the handle "jollerancher" happened upon a motherload of awesome items at a garage sale of a former Nintendo employee. In this lot, there was a prototype for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. This prototype is currently owned by DreamTR.

The jollerancher Zelda prototype.

Although this prototype has not been dumped, it is almost certainly identical to the final US version. ReadOnly broke apart the US Zelda ROM image, and found the checksum of the the first 4 Mb:

---------------------Internal ROM Info----------------------
           File: Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past (USA).sfc.001.sfc
           Name: THE LEGEND OF ZELDA      Company: Nintendo
         Header: None                        Bank: LoROM
    Interleaved: None                        SRAM: 64 Kb
           Type: Normal + Batt                ROM: 4 Mb
        Country: USA                        Video: NTSC
      ROM Speed: 200ns (SlowROM)         Revision: 1.0
       Checksum: Bad 0x179E != 0xAF0D   Game Code:
    ---------------------------Hashes---------------------------
          CRC32: 977BD6D9
          SHA-1: 9701257E4FB7EF59D9D9BBBEE56821B0E2D865E2

As you can see, the checksum is identical to the checksum listed on the first chip of the prototype (0x179E). Now, it could be possible that the second chip has differences, but that is exceedingly unlikely, as it would likely affect the checksum of the first chip.

Bibliography

• jollerancher's find thread on Digital Press (link)
• DreamTR's sales thread on Nintendo Age (link)