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The new title screen looks incredibly bland, should've left the old iconic screen alone. Also, the hitbox for when you collect items with your sword is waaay too generous. Other than that, great hack that doesn't go overboard with the changes, just really wish those problems were fixed.

Some simple, self explanatory changes like fixing the death counter, reduced slowdown, the ability to break pots with sword, and cancel flute transport are all welcome.

Some changes I'm a bit mixed on. The new pegasus boots controls add smoother navigation in the overworld, though I wonder if it could potentially break some puzzles in dungeons (not that I can think of any as of now).

The L/R item switching is useful early on when you only have 2-4 or so items, but it loses its value the more items you get since there's so many to switch between that you might as well open the menu and select the item. Making L+R 2 extra item slots would've been a VASTLY superior change.

Being able to collect items with your sword is standard in later Zeldas, but I've always liked its absence in LttP. It somewhat cheapens the difficulty when you're in a frantic fight low on hearts and can simply swing your sword to collect them, plus it makes less logical sense. But this is a bit of a nitpick.

One issue I want to mention with the base game itself is the annoying process of maxing out bombs/arrows by throwing 100 rupess over and over into a fountain, and it would be FANTASTIC if a future update to this patch could allow throwing 100 rupees at a time instead of 50.

Overall this is a decent QoL hack that offers minor improvements while respecting the original game's design and difficulty (unlike the Redux hack which altered a dungeon to match the dumbed down GBA port). It's not crucial to play and enjoy the game like the OoT/Majora's Mask Redux hacks, but this is understandable because unlike those games, original LttP is nearly flawless, save for that tedious process to max out bombs/arrows I mentioned earlier. A fix for that would elevate this patch to a definitive MUST.

Update: While this hack is still really awesome, and the folks who worked on it still deserve tons of credit for the impressive ASM hacks they implemented, I would actually recommend checking out A Link to the Past Redux instead. It's a fork of this hack that has even more improvements. I'm about halfway through Redux as I write this, and I personally consider it the best version of Zelda 3 for a casual playthrough.

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Original review (December 2, 2014):

Play Zelda with CD quality music

Zelda 3 was always my favorite game in the series, so I was excited when I saw the news that this patch was released. In addition to a number of bug fixes and minor gameplay changes, this patch allows you to play the game with CD quality music using the MSU1. I can confirm that this feature works on a real SNES with an SD2SNES flash cart. Additionally, it should also work in the bsnes/higan emulator. If you like Zelda 3, definitely give this a shot.

The premise of having a CD-like soundtrack in the popular Zelda game A Link to the Past sounds nothing short of amazing. There's one problem, though...

The creators of this hack haven't added any guide that explains how to actually get all these things working. We are only provided with the necessary tools (Higan, the orchestral soundtrack), but nor the readme of this hack, nor the readme provided with the soundtrack give away any clue of how to set up the music.

Also, given the fact that another user made a hack that improved upon this hack, called A Link to the Past Redux, I see no reason to download A Link to the Past DX.

(Played on SNES with SD2SNES card, non MSU version)

If you like Link to the Past, but are now an adult who doesn't have as much time to waste screwing around with unnecessary kludge, then this is the LTTP hack for you.

The original game and it's glory/difficulty remains intact while the hack grants you some small conveniences that make it that much less of a slog.

I tried playing the MSU-1 version with the enhanced music, but my game save kept getting erased. I am told this is due to the SD card, while it is being accessed to play music (which it is doing pretty much 100% of the time) it can't write data back to the SD, like game saves.

I think this hack would benefit from a dead-period in music playback right after saving to ensure save data gets written down to the SD card, because starting over after being a few hours in was quite infuriating.

Took me a few days to play all the way through and had a great time. Reminded me of being a kid again.

What this patch does is something revolutionary, namely it allows you to play the well known A link to the past game with a new MSU-1 sound experience. This new ASM code was written by Conn. The code is associated with the external audio files with CD quality, but to be able to run them, you will need the Bsnes emulator.

Later, however, the same code was also adopted further for the SD-2-SNES and is therefore compatible with real hardware as well. You can choose your audio tracks freely, but the default is usually the Alttp orchestrated soundtrack, which matches the original tracks, but you can clearly hear the difference.

The patch also contains some fine new ASM codes written by Conn, namely the canceling of the Flute transport, death counter fix, breaking pots with level-2 sword, and the code for the improved Pegasus boots was transfered into the game from the Zelda Ancient stone tablets.

The other fixes are rather small ASM codes, which were also written by Conn. Namely the original authors didn't realize, that if you wear a cape and pull the statue, your magic meter is not reducing, and that the repeated use of Cane of Somaria can sometimes make gfx glitches. It also fixes some palette problems.

This patch also enables the special code, written by original authors, which was not inserted (NOP-ed out), namely the shell of the Khold Stare boss in the ice dungeon. This ice shell now slowly fades, rather than disappears instantly.

In addition the new title screen was added. Altogether this patch contains a nice collection of ASM codes/features, the gameplay however is identical to the original game.