The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Preview Trailer

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Preview Trailer
Publisher: Nintendo Platform: Nintendo DS Released in US: May 18, 2005 This game has hidden development-related text.

Zelda Preview Trailer was given out at E3 2005 in cartridge form to a select 500 attendees. It features a video so highly compressed that your microwave is quite likely able to record better ones - and there's an alternate version that's even worse!

Unused Text Files

The cartridge release contains two unused text files: README.TXT (empty) and info.txt, which contains a seemingly-incomplete list of files inside the ROM... and then some other list of files not found in the ROM at all.

2

rom:/zeldamovie_sgn.srl
Legend of ZELDA Movie Trailer
Legend of ZELDA Movie Trailer$%Nintendo
rom:/zelda1_01.nbfc
rom:/zelda1_01.nbfp

rom:/zeldastory_sgn.srl
Legend of ZELDA Story
Legend of ZELDA Story$%Nintendo
rom:/zeldastory.nbfc
rom:/zeldastory.nbfp

zeldastory_sgn.srl is likely the second Twilight Princess preview that was being distributed, but it is not found in this ROM. zeldamovie_sgn.srl, however, is.

Embedded ROM

The demo contains zeldamovie_sgn.srl, which is a version of itself likely meant to be sent out via Download Play to other DSes. However, there exists no functionality to do this.

What appears to be a slight modification of this (header changes only) was made by firefly and shared in the guise (not necessarily with the intention of being misleading) of being the Zelda Preview Trailer ROM broadcast from the DS Download Station at E3 2005. Sgstair's packet captures (http://akkit.org/e3_2005_nds_capture_data.zip), from which firefly extracted the other ROMs from, seem to contain only partial data for the actual ROM that was broadcast at E3 2005.

Menu

Embedded ROM	Cart

This ROM features an option to see the "E3 Guidebook". It seemingly doesn't do anything, but perhaps it did on the showfloor. The button to start the movie is also different, and there is a sound effect that plays when you touch it in the cart version. The early title screen refers to itself as "Movie Trailer Vol. 1" (as opposed to all the non-movie trailers?) instead of "Preview Trailer", and the copyright date isn't present.

Lack of info.txt

The embedded ROM lacks the aforementioned info.txt, though README.TXT is present (albeit still empty) and in fact is the only actual file in the entire file structure - the movie is hardcoded into the binary.

Lack of Splash Screen

The cart version contains a splash screen which indicates the game uses the ACTImagine codec to encode its video. It is not present in the embedded ROM...

Compression Differences

Embedded ROM	Cart

...possibly because it's not used, as the embedded ROM features far more compression artifacts and some excellently crackly audio. It also freezes at one point, even though the music keeps going. The cart version also adds some sound effects from Ocarina of Time, mostly of Link's various grunts and screams. You can go back to the menu by pressing Start, which you cannot do in the cart version; it features a Touch Screen button to do that, instead, while the embedded ROM only has a Nintendo logo there.