New (Old) 3D Golf: porting PC-9801 & Virtual Boy to Mega Drive

The Japanese Mega Drive ports of T&E SOFT’s New 3D Golf Simulation series are my favourite golf games, and recently I’ve been living inside their ROMs. As with all the craziest ideas, it began with a “I wonder if I could”… In the early hours of one April morning I managed to pull a single course out of the game—its terrain and flyby data—and reimplement it in a viewer of my own, written in Three.js. Over the following week or so of continued reverse engineering, that viewer quietly grew into something resembling a 3D golf game running in the browser. Understanding the data that well meant I could go the other way, too—back into the original Mega Drive games themselves. First I added a terrain modifier. To test it I flattened the entire course as flat as a pancake to check it was working, then cranked it up to 11 into a sort of “Hyperactive Terrain Mode” that warps the fairways into something wild. An early attempt changed its mind on every run; turned out I was seeding it from an…