Dragon Warrior
UntestedNES · 1989 · RPG · Decompilation
Erdrick's descendant sets out from Tantegel Castle to recover the Ball of Light.
Controls
| Arrow keys | walk |
| X | A (confirm, open the command window) |
| Z | B (cancel) |
| Enter | Start |
| Shift | Select |
| Gamepad | d-pad walks, A/B confirm and cancel |
About this build
Dragon Warrior reassembled byte-for-byte from a complete 6502 disassembly and run in the browser on a wasm NES core. The project ships only source and build tooling: the 64 KB of program ROM is assembled from the disassembly, and the 16 KB of cartridge graphics is read out of the dump you supply, in your own browser. Upstream targets the first US release; the later Rev 1 dump plays identically and differs in three bytes of on-screen text.
- Built from
- The nmikstas 6502 disassembly, reassembled with Ophis and run on EmulatorJS 4.2.3 with the libretro fceumm core.
- Type
- Decompilation
- Game files
- You supply your own Dragon Warrior (NES) ROM. It is read in the browser and never uploaded; the page's Content-Security-Policy permits no remote origin.
- Code licence
- Ophis is MIT. The disassembly carries no licence file and is used as a build input only.
- Assets
- No game data is distributed. Graphics, text and music are read from your own cartridge dump at build time and at run time.
- Source
- nmikstas/dragon-warrior-disassembly ↗
What has been tested
Reassembles byte-for-byte to Dragon Warrior (USA) (body sha1 73f9b88def80756ef29c5aa1a724c3112e5918c1), confirmed against NES Directory's published per-chip hashes. Played from a cold boot to the overworld with every step gated on the game's own variables read out of the save state, including a two-way input proof from one save state. The cartridge battery was written by saving with King Lorik and survived navigating away and back, checked from the decoded save slot.
Last tested 2026-10-05 in Chrome 151 (Linux, headless). Full playthrough: not verified. How games are tested.
Known limitations
- Not yet playable here: no hosted page has been published for this title.
- Audio was never switched on during testing, so sound is unverified.
- Verified on desktop Chrome only. Keyboard and gamepad mappings and the on-screen touch pad are untested.
- Progress is proven to survive reloading the page; surviving a full browser restart was not testable here.
- Play testing reached the overworld outside Tantegel. Combat, towns, dungeons and the ending were not played.
Saves
Talk to King Lorik in Tantegel Castle to record your deeds, exactly as on the cartridge. The 8 KB battery image is kept in this browser under this site's origin; clearing site data erases it.