I have spent my life trying to document and champion the CDi - including interviewing Dale DeSharone, who made the side-scrolling Zelda games (WoG and FoE). The side-scrolling games have already received really fantastic remasters for Windows.
I finished this a long time ago on the CDi, and have been emulating it with some difficulty, so I am so happy to see a remaster for it too.
Someone is also working on a Hotel Mario remaster. So if you are able to finish this, then all the Nintendo CDi games will be available on Windows!
You are doing fantastic work, and I hope you are able to finish this. I look forward to trying the demo and the QOL improvements.
What sort of cut content are you adding back in? When I finished this I found a ton of useless items that had no use, and then I read interviews with the testers which said that during the QA phase, they had to cut large sections of gameplay to remove bugs. It was such a messy development.
Good luck - may your quest to remaster this goes smoothly.
Viewing post in Zelda's Adventure Remastered comments
Thank you for your kind words!
I'm definitely planning on adding back more of the cut dialogue and some cut functionality. In the current demo you can attack some NPCs, like if you hit Enid the hag with a ranged spell she won't take away a heart xD (only in remastered mode though). I'm not sure what other things I might add. Someone once gave me the idea to make the gold boots speed up your movement while wielding them, but I'm not sure if that would make the shrines easier to beat so maybe I would only make them usable in the overworld? I'm not sure yet. We'll see :P it'll be a while before the game is finished so I have plenty of time to think :)
So I managed to get TE to run a news story on this!
https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/01/the-zelda-adventure-nintendo-would-ra...
Also, I like your ideas - however, since it is still early, I'd like to make a suggestion.
I am most excited for the Remaster mode, since I have completed the original, on original hardware, twice now.
But since there are so many choices of things you can change, for the Remaster mode, can you include a list of selectable options? So you can choose which QOL and which extra content you want? So before you start a new game there is a list.
New Item Uses: Yes / No
Attacking NPCs: Yes/No
Extra Dialogue: Yes/No
Drop Rate Slider: x0.5 ---------- x3
Etc. Etc.
Obviously this is your game. So you must do what you see fit. So this is just a suggestion for the Remaster mode. For example, one thing I'd like to see, is more enemies dropping rupees. I recall playing the game and often enemies would drop nothing, and it took ages to grind by killing them over and over. Maybe a toggle to increase the drop rate? Or a slider bar?
Question: Are you decompiling the code, or are playing the game and making the content based on observations, for example seeing how many times an enemy needs to be hit? Either way, it sounds like a lot of work!
Good luck!
Also! I assume you know about the secret skateboarding character you can find in the woods on the far West of the map? The weird easter egg? You stand for a while and he rides out of the woods saying stuff, then vanishes again.
OMGGG an article about my remaster project, that's so cool! Thank you so much!
If I were to make a Remastered Mode feature tweaking system, I'd probably make it an extra submenu in the settings to be honest. I'm not sure yet, I'll think about it but I can't guarantee I'll include it. As for increased ruby drops... I'm not sure. It feels a little more like a cheat code to be honest. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, but I'm not sure if I'm 100% on board with that. The things enemies drop are currently completely random. Either they drop 5 rubies, 20 rubies, a heart or nothing. I don't want to make the game too easy or predetermined if that makes sense, but I understand the frustration.
About the question at the end, part of the code has been extracted by discord user Phlosion, which gives me information about how much damage attacks and enemies do as well as the defense of the player and enemies and the bonus damage weapons do against enemies.
One thing that is also very important that the extracted code includes is the movement patterns of shrine bosses, keese and walking NPCs, which I had to guess before, and it was a mess to figure out back then.
Apart from code, he also extracted a bunch of textures and turned the palette cycling image data (to simulate streaming water for example) into animations so I can import those easier. Dialogue was also extracted by him, though music tracks (intros and loops) were extracted and organized by MundyC.
For the usage of the weapons however, I basically have to replicate how the projectiles move by watching footage I record of the original game. For enemies I have to more or less guess a reasonable hit range. I'm also redrawing every collision texture (the originals were sloppy and didn't reach the edge of the "tile") and cutting out the foreground objects by hand.
You are doing fantastic work! Please, carry on as you see fit. This is YOUR project, That is fascinating regarding the data extraction. I'm not kidding - I love reading about this stuff. May the rest of development continue smoothly. Be sure to ping the Time Extension team via email or social media, and they'll run a big news story once finished. They might even ask me to cover it, since I'm a big CDi fan.