This old ZC quest was actually the inspiration for the more-recent ZC tileset that I made, and then the project I'm currently working on using said tileset. Which is basically a remake of this old one, but with a lot of stuff changed around and just generally improved.
So I poked around with it a bit, playing through as much as I could (it was maybe around half finished when I stopped working on it) and fixing a couple of horrible bugs that I had somehow missed before -- like if you tried to continue from one area of the map, you'd end up stuck in a tree and unable to move. Here's some screenshots (old version above, new version below) comparing places from the old version to their equivalent areas in the one I'm working on now.
Not quite an exact-equivalent screenshot, but it does show part of the town area in both versions of the game (and makes it pretty obvious that the new version's house tiles were based on the old version's house tiles), so it works.
Apparently the town area of the map had a name in the old version -- "Wumpton." I didn't remember that at all, and in the new version the town doesn't have any name specified. Wumpton is kind of a silly-sounding name anyway, so I probably won't put it in the current version of the game. The old version actually had three towns -- Wumpton in the central foresty area, a town in the snowy northern area named Skemo (in the new version there's a single house and a shed that you can bomb your way into up there, but not an entire town), and a town on the western island called Mureen. Yeah, the Mureen Swamp was on its own separate landmass back then rather than just taking up the lower-left corner of the map. The old version had a bigger overworld in general, with the northlands and the Mureen Swamp area both having their own maps (and I had planned an eastern desert ruins type area to have its own map also, though I never actually got that area done... or even started. XD)
Both new and old versions have a castle, with a king who sends you on your quest. Except in the old version, you couldn't actually get to the castle before completing Level 1 (which was, thankfully, directly north of the town where you start... so it wasn't hard to find), while in the new version it's the first place you have to go since you get the sword there and you can't leave town without getting a sword.
The name of the castle has also (...slightly) changed. XD
The king's sprite was a bit goofy in the old version, with a HUGE crown and a face that was obviously edited from the NES Zelda old man. Rather than giving advice on where you might find some of the relics as in the new version, he gave you the letter which allowed you to buy bombs and the magic shield from one of his knights. The castle itself was a lot bigger in the old version, with a knight running a store and a "test your strength" gauntlet of Darknut fights which, if I'm remembering right, led to either a heart piece or a buttload of money if you cleared it. There were also storage rooms with money and heart/magic containers that you could access using the hammer and wand. In the new version, all this has sort of melded together into the side-rooms of the castle which you eventually have to go through in order to gain access to Level 9, which require you to use all of the items you find in the previous dungeons to get through (arrows to hit an eyeball block target, ladder to get over some little pits of water, red candle to light torches, whistle to get rid of a Digdogger, boots to cross lava and get a key, wand to remove a weird block, hammer to pound some posts.) There's still a couple of heart pieces hidden around in the castle, but the way of getting to them is a bit different now.
The name of the castle has also (...slightly) changed. XD
The king's sprite was a bit goofy in the old version, with a HUGE crown and a face that was obviously edited from the NES Zelda old man. Rather than giving advice on where you might find some of the relics as in the new version, he gave you the letter which allowed you to buy bombs and the magic shield from one of his knights. The castle itself was a lot bigger in the old version, with a knight running a store and a "test your strength" gauntlet of Darknut fights which, if I'm remembering right, led to either a heart piece or a buttload of money if you cleared it. There were also storage rooms with money and heart/magic containers that you could access using the hammer and wand. In the new version, all this has sort of melded together into the side-rooms of the castle which you eventually have to go through in order to gain access to Level 9, which require you to use all of the items you find in the previous dungeons to get through (arrows to hit an eyeball block target, ladder to get over some little pits of water, red candle to light torches, whistle to get rid of a Digdogger, boots to cross lava and get a key, wand to remove a weird block, hammer to pound some posts.) There's still a couple of heart pieces hidden around in the castle, but the way of getting to them is a bit different now.
In both versions of the game, there's a snowy northern area. In the old, it's a separate overworld map (and you start out climbing up there through some not-so-snowy mountains before reaching the snowy part)... in the new version, it's the upper-left corner of the map, though it's implied that that isn't the actual location of the area since you reach it by going through some mountain caves in the northeast. Basically, the northlands of the new version are an unreachable mountainous region within the old game's northlands, and you skip over the "long way" of getting to them now.
In both games, you'll find one of the main dungeons up in the snowy area. In the old version it's Level 2, the Mountain Orc's Fort, which I actually like more than the new version's Level 2 for the most part -- I don't plan on replacing the new one with something closer to the old one (they're too drastically different for that to be possible!), but I will probably mess around with the new version's Level 2 a bit before I make this thing publicly available. In the old version, the Moblins were replaced by orcs; the old version's world was more of a completely different and unrelated world (with very few "regular" Zelda monsters carried over, mostly the invertebrates like Leevers and Octoroks and Moldorms) while the new version's is more like an alternate-universe Hyrule. In the new version, Level 3 (the Frozen Forest Temple) is located here instead. Shown above are the entrances of the two dungeons.
And going out of order a bit here, this is the end of Level 1 in both the old version and the new version, with Link holding up the Holy Relic box. The old version had a teleporter in the relic rooms, I'm guessing because in some of them it might be possible to get stuck otherwise (or just to make it easier to get back out again if you, for some odd reason, went all the way through the dungeon over again?), while in the new version that's not the case. The new version also has a consistent layout for the relic storage rooms, with the relic box sitting on a raised platform, two torches, and lots of statues around the outer edges.
And here's Level 3's entrance in the old quest, compared to the entrance of the Geru Fort in the new one (where I reused the "locked gate in front of dungeon" thing, albeit for an optional mini-dungeon where the spear is hidden rather than one of the main ones.) Old-version Level 3 has more of a resemblance to new-version Level 1, considering the abundance of Rope snakes and traps and the green color scheme... they're even both located in the eastern part of the map, though old Level 3 is further south and a bit further east than new Level 1.
Last pair of screenshots for now -- showing the subscreens of both versions. The new one, of course, looks a hell of a lot better... though you can probably tell that some of the sprites for items are pretty much exactly the same between the two versions. This also shows a few differences -- the old version had torches rather than candles, the magic shield had a different design, and the rupees were replaced with coins (again, as the old version's world was completely unrelated to Hyrule rather than being an alternate-universe version of it.)
The old version had a weirdly huge gap between the two rows of the inventory, and the relics did not yet have their fancy background color octagon things like in the current version. Exactly what some of the relics are has also changed -- the shiny sword shown in the old version screenshot is gone, replaced with the Rod of Mushesh (also a useable item!) in the new version. Actually, I think that's the only one that actually changed -- the others just got new, better sprites (you can see this with the scroll.) I think only the apple's sprite was carried over as-is, though it became a golden apple rather than a glowing version of a regular ol' red apple as in the old version. The order you get them in has also changed -- old version had scroll, sword, apple, either stone or skull (I can't remember which was in Level 4 before), Burijeoo symbol, and then probably the stone/skull (whichever wasn't in level 4), crown, and holy grail. I can't remember what levels 6, 7, and 8 were in the old version, though I know one of them was hidden in the graveyard (like new-version's Level 7) and one was basically Hell, complete with Satan as boss battle (replaced by new-version's Level 8.) No clue what the one I'm completely forgetting would've been.
The old version had a weirdly huge gap between the two rows of the inventory, and the relics did not yet have their fancy background color octagon things like in the current version. Exactly what some of the relics are has also changed -- the shiny sword shown in the old version screenshot is gone, replaced with the Rod of Mushesh (also a useable item!) in the new version. Actually, I think that's the only one that actually changed -- the others just got new, better sprites (you can see this with the scroll.) I think only the apple's sprite was carried over as-is, though it became a golden apple rather than a glowing version of a regular ol' red apple as in the old version. The order you get them in has also changed -- old version had scroll, sword, apple, either stone or skull (I can't remember which was in Level 4 before), Burijeoo symbol, and then probably the stone/skull (whichever wasn't in level 4), crown, and holy grail. I can't remember what levels 6, 7, and 8 were in the old version, though I know one of them was hidden in the graveyard (like new-version's Level 7) and one was basically Hell, complete with Satan as boss battle (replaced by new-version's Level 8.) No clue what the one I'm completely forgetting would've been.
And... that's all for now. I'll be posting more on this later, though -- I took over 100 screenshots of the old version, these are just the ones I had a new-version equivalent to compare them to!
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