That you can apparently see where designers changed their mind when building a room, because items have sometimes been "painted over" with other items, is absolutely amazing. That is some kind of computer/game archeology that you have to be very lucky to be able to do.<p>I do wonder however if that's certain... in the example where bushes have been overlaid with flower titles, are we certain this does not change some property of the tiles in meaningful ways? In the same room, you can also see how the cave entry is painted over with the statue, and in this case that cave entrance is something that gets revealed later in the game.<p>In any case, a great series. This is exactly the type of content I come to HN for.
The rooms' data compression remind me of the Pokémon sprites during battles in Pokémon Gen I/II (Red/Blue(/green) and G/S/Y). As I remember it, the in-battle sprites (which are fairly large) are "compressed" using a custom algorithm. IIRC, it does RLE, and has some facilities for doing dithering, which was used in a lot of the sprites to give the impression of more color depth than there actually was. And they were only 4-bit (white, black, and two colors) in G/S/Y!
wow. Great way to understand how the games were created back then with the low storage space. It would be great if this game can be remade to play on the browser. I remember playing this from my older brother's console but never got through it because at the time, it was well before my time and the graphics just didn't work for me. Older now, and I feel like I can appreciate this game now and overlook the old graphics... I know emulators exists, but never understood how to set it up.