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

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:26:00 +0000

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. Finding the data had some big clues: we know that there are 18 holes, the distances of each hole and their sequence order, and I’d read the courses were made of ~256 points, so adding all these heuristics together meant it was much easier to find the data than finding a needle in a haystack.

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 like a pancake to confirm my understanding was correct, and then cranked it up to 11 into a sort of “Hyperactive Terrain Mode” that warps the fairways into something wild. Both worked well.

An early attempt changed its mind on every run; turned out I was seeding it from an uninitialised memory location. 🤦 With no debugger console to hand, I’d been hunting bugs like this the crude way—scribbling values into the cartridge’s SRAM (its battery-backed save memory) and reading them back out, a poor man’s printf. So it wasn’t exactly straightforward.

Once that was sorted, I gave the 32-year-old game some brand new, custom user interface to match.

Next I wondered if the course data was the same across all of the four Mega Drive games, could it be the same across the games on other platforms? The answer is yes: the same course data format turns out to be used right across the series, from the original PC-9801 games (and almost certainly X68000 and FM Towns) through to the Mega Drive and even the Virtual Boy. If my (little-endian) maths is correct that’s a total of 7 unique courses, all sharing one format. There’s some reformatting that needs to be done, but the data structure is the same. And since I could already read the courses, I could write them too—patching the games to pick a course at random, or to load one that was never available on the Mega Drive in the first place. PC-9801 to Mega Drive required sorting the polygons to match how they were expected to be stored.

But I guess T&E SOFT used the same POLYSYS-CAD software to design all the courses over several years? I love how such a tool could have that sort of longevity.

That last part is the really fun bit. (Can this even be more fun?)

Here are three courses running on the Mega Drive for the first time:

T&E Selection

Extracted from the NEC PC-9801 add-on course disk:

This course is somewhat unique as it has messages spelled using coloured topology:
the 1st has “GO!” by the tee position; the 18th has “T&E” just beyond the final green

Eight Lakes G.C.

Also extracted from NEC PC-9801 add-on course disk:

A fact perhaps only I care about: during development, prior to Feb 1990, it was Seven Lakes G.C.

Papillon C.C.

Extracted from the Nintendo Virtual Boy game T&E Virtual Golf:

It’s called Papillon—the French word for butterfly—because the course holes were laid out in the shape of a butterfly. Which was surely a nod to the shape of the Virtual Boy controller.

That last one needed a little extra work. T&E Golf on Virtual Boy doesn’t have a hole flyby, so I had to generate the camera path myself: a bezier curve from tee to pin, nudged towards the centre point of the visible course as it appears on the mini-map. The flyby path in this video was about half way to my final solution.

Playing these courses on Mega Drive is truly special and the effort was very much worthwhile. 🥰

A few things I learned along the way

Living inside the disassembly for weeks, I kept tripping over the little decisions T&E SOFT made all those years ago. Some are clever, some are quietly bonkers, and all of them made me grin:

The hole is three times too big. The cup grabs any ball within ~6.7 inches—triple a real hole’s radius—so balls drop from further out than they look. A fudge for the 320×224 screen, where ball and cup were both sub-pixel.
The polygons pre-sort themselves. No depth buffer on the Mega Drive, so the draw order is baked into the course data, back-to-front (the painter’s algorithm). The giveaway: it doesn’t match the original PC-9801 CAD order.
Backspin can reverse a putt. Spin isn’t cosmetic: it’s fed back into the roll and can make the ball check up and trickle backwards. Real ballistic physics in a 1993 cartridge. Love it!
Water isn’t a hazard—just very sticky. There’s no “in the water” state; water polygons carry friction so high it kills the ball in one frame. The penalty falls out of the ordinary maths.
Wind is a real force, not an aim fudge. It becomes a horizontal acceleration applied every frame of flight, exactly like gravity.
Augusta’s wind never actually changes. The direction is never written—only strength varies. The arrow only seems to swing because it’s drawn relative to the camera.
Bunkers plug, cart paths kick. Every surface has its own bounce coefficient. The fairway hands back a healthy ~40% of the ball’s speed; a bunker returns only ~10%, so the ball plugs where it lands; a cart path or rock fires it back at ~75% for that horrible hard skip.
Your lie quietly rolls the dice. On every stroke the game picks a random number from a per-(lie, club) range and folds it into your swing power. A clean fairway lie uses a narrow range; a bad lie widens it—so the rough genuinely makes your shots less predictable. The ranges live in a 17×17 table, one entry per lie-and-club combination.

Four volumes, one evolving engine

It’s tempting to treat the four Mega Drive games as a single engine with interchangeable courses. They’re not, and the very first line of the cross-volume notes I kept is a warning to myself: ⚠️ never assume all four ROMs share code or data layouts. T&E SOFT kept tinkering release to release, and you only catch it by dumping the same region in all four disassemblies and diffing.

The ROM headers number them New 3D Golf Simulation Vol.1–4, and each header also carries a build date stamped in YYYY.MMM form. Here’s the curiosity: the volume numbers track the build dates, not the retail release dates. Vol.2 Devil’s Course was finished a month before Vol.3 Augusta—but reached the shops a month after it:

Vol	Title	Japanese	ROM build	Retail release
1	Pebble Beach no Hatou	ペブルビーチの波濤	1993-07	1993-10-29
2	Devil’s Course	デビルズコース	1993-08	1994-01-28
3	Harukanaru Augusta	遙かなるオーガスタ	1993-09	1993-12-17
4	Waialae no Kiseki	ワイアラエの奇蹟	1993-09	1994-02-25

A couple of header quirks fell out of this. Pebble’s stamp reads 1993.JLY—Sega’s own oddball abbreviation for July. And while three of the carts credit SEGA, Augusta credits T&E Soft’s Sega licensee code T-114 instead—a clue that it alone was self-published by T&E SOFT rather than by Sega. The boxes agree: Augusta’s isn’t Sega-branded either.

Two places they genuinely diverge, each confirmed by dumping the same region in all four:

Colour isn’t a plain palette lookup—and the recipe is per-game. A surface byte runs through a little chain of lookup tables before it becomes a pen colour, and those tables aren’t shared: Pebble grades several surfaces differently and even reorders two entries, while Devil’s Course carries its own darker, redder palette. Waialae, charmingly, reuses a single palette three times where its siblings have three distinct ones.
A decoder bug only Pebble could trigger. In the polygon stream, vertex indices are single bytes, with 0xFF acting as an escape prefix—the byte after it encodes a higher index (0xE0 + xx), so a hole can point past the ~254 vertices a lone byte can name. My extractor mishandled that escaped range, but only Pebble’s holes are dense enough to actually use it—so the bug sailed through the other three games and only fell over when I reached Pebble. Same encoding in every cart; one course’s data was all it took to expose the flaw in my reader.

There’s also the US release, Pebble Beach Golf Links (header stamped 1993-11, likely on shelves 1994-04): the same course data on a larger ROM, with English strings present where the Japanese Vol.1 zeroed them. That parallel made a useful “Rosetta Stone” for decoding menus and text.

Inside Waialae

Waialae was my primary reference—1,572,864 bytes, header NEW 3D GOLF SIMULATION Vol.4 Waialae C.C., serial GM G-5529.

Each hole is reached through four ROM pointers, one per data block, and they’re wildly different sizes. Block 0 is the vertex list—244 XYZ points, the ~256-point mesh, about 1.5 KB. Block 1 is the bulk of it: sixteen view-order streams (one draw order per camera angle) that bake in the back-to-front sorting—around 5.5 KB, bigger than the geometry it orders. Block 2 holds the mesh and sprites themselves (230 polygons plus 54 sprites), ~1.8 KB. Block 3 is just the flyby keyframes, a slim ~0.7 KB. For Waialae’s first hole that comes to about 9.2 KB, split like this:

A couple more structural quirks:

A spatial grid, decades early. Immediately after the vertex pool sits a count followed by count × 16 word offsets into the face section—a two-level spatial grid (cell → faces) so the engine can look up the relevant polygons from the ball’s (x, z) without walking the whole hole.
Why the SRAM debugging hurt. Waialae’s battery-backed save RAM is odd-lane only, from $200001. Byte writes have to land on odd Mega Drive addresses; even-address writes to $200000 simply disappear. That’s the real reason scribbling values into SRAM as a printf substitute was so finicky—half my early writes were going into the void. (BlastEm helpfully flushes SRAM to disk on quit, so I could read it back from the host.)

Variable zoom

The shared course format is what let me move holes between platforms, but each machine scales the world differently. The proven case: Waialae hole 1 from the PC-9801 drops into the Mega Drive after a fixed 1.6× rescale on X and Z (Y untouched), plus a little-endian → big-endian flip on the flyby path records.

Lining those transplanted polygons up against the stock Mega Drive ones is also what proved the rendering trick I mentioned earlier: the Mega Drive packs faces in descending max-Z order—back to front, the painter’s algorithm—and the original PC-9801 face id survives the journey as the Mega Drive’s attr1 byte.

Two deeper cuts

The flyby camera, decoded by statistics. Each flyby keyframe carries two mystery bytes. With no documentation, I histogrammed 4,723 of them across every hole and the shape gave it away: one byte is an 8-bit angle (256 units = 360°) for yaw, the other a signed pitch clamped to about ±40, positive meaning the camera looks down. Educated guessing, with visuals.
The Virtual Boy world is built at a different scale. The Virtual Boy stores its courses at 32 raw units per yard, where the Mega Drive works in 17—so Papillon has to be shrunk by exactly 17/32 (0.53) to sit correctly on the Mega Drive, otherwise every club hits too short for the hole. (My first attempt used the wrong unit and reported hole 1 as 321 yards instead of its true 360.) It’s the same idea as the 1.6× I needed coming the other way from the PC-9801—one shared format, but every machine measures its yards differently.

The whole thing ran on rizin and vasmm68k with BlastEm for execution—though frame-time profiling had to move to Genesis Plus GX, because BlastEm freezes the VDP’s HV counter during the long rendering routines I was trying to measure.

What the old magazines turned up

Reverse engineering only tells you what the games do; for the why, I went digging through a stack of Japanese computer magazines from the era, OCRing the scans to pull out the text. A 1989 developer interview about Harukanaru Augusta (遙かなるオーガスタ)—the PC-9801 original that kicked off the series—turned out to be a goldmine:

The 3D engine came first. T&E’s POLYSYS pre-dated the golf games by a couple of years, already appearing—only in the 3D intro logos, as far as I can tell—in DAIVA STORY 7: Light of Kali Yuga and Psy-O-Blade.
Trees were nearly real 3D. They tried modelling trees as polygons, leaves and all—but one tree took as long to draw as a whole screen. So scaled sprites were used instead.
The first game had no hills. T&E’s 3-D Golf Simulation, written in BASIC six years earlier, had no terrain undulation at all—and on the Sharp X1, 18 holes took half a day to play through.
POLYSYS was meant to be general-purpose: swap the data and it renders anything. T&E planned an RPG and a shooter on it and intended to license it to other software houses.
One programmer, mostly: Eiji Kato (加藤英治).

And the Augusta course itself came with a wonderful backstory:

They licensed the real thing. An official contract with Augusta National, working from the club’s blueprints. Staff visited, didn’t play, but “rubbed their cheeks on the grass.”
Augusta sent back ~60 corrections: eg. pine trees too short and too spread out, flowers too pink, bunker sand the wrong colour.
No do-overs, by design. You could save mid-round, but loading erased the save data—so no replaying holes to pad your score.
Best of all: the dev build’s four caddies were all women. Augusta’s are all men, so the final game swapped them. The ladies returned in the expansion courses and Mega Drive games.
The T&E Selection caddies are real people: four women who worked at Brother Industries—whose TAKERU software vending machines sold these add-on course disks.

What Next?

There’s an extra bit of hacking I’m working on but am unsure if it will lead to anything, but if it does it will need a post all of its own. Hold your thumbs. Fingers crossed. 🤞

It would be possible to release a small script which given both original games would do the extraction and patching, but for now I don’t feel comfortable doing that. I still need to figure out the correct tree mapping for each game, decide which of the four Mega Drive games is most suited to each of the three new courses, add new title screens and a few more bits of detail work.

I’d love to see these ported courses released officially some day—the series IP is now owned and managed by D4 Enterprise—so if you know anybody there please hook us up! If you are an employee of D4 Enterprise then please check my request to license the IP. 🙏

There are more period games in the series that I’d like to take a look at to see if they use the same data format, or modify it in any specific way. SNES and 3DO seem to be the most interesting. 🧐

But for now it’s just me, a pile of disassembly files, rizin and vasmm68k, the BlastEm emulator, and a soft spot for blue skies and FM synth — still trying to get the ball in the hole. ⛳️🏌️‍♂️

New 3D Golf Simulation (video game series)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 20:00:00 +0000

Golf video games are one of my passions, ever since World Class Leader Board and Microprose Golf on Atari ST. These days my favourite golf games are still the old ones. In particular I have a soft spot for T&E SOFT’s New 3D Golf Simulation series with its blue skies, bright colours, and FM synth tunes. This series has a long history so I thought I’d do my best to recap and share some little-known knowledge.

Translation Guides

To make it easier for you to play the Japanese games mentioned below, I wrote translation guides: gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/msephton/contributions/faqs

8-bit Computers

The series began in 1982 with リアルゴルフゲーム (Real Golf Game) for NEC PC-6001, a distinctly 2D presentation with overhead view, power bar and course map. Here’s a video of where it all began.

Things got interesting later that year with the follow-up ３Ｄゴルフシミュレーション (3-D Golf Simulation) which was written for the Fujitsu FM-7 computer and published in the 1983-4 issue of I/O magazine. The game was written in BASIC and its source code, including data for 18 holes known as T&E Island Golf Course, was given away in the magazine as a type-in listing. The game was released commercially on a few other Japanese 8-bit computers over the next couple of years, with machine code gradually added to speed up the 3D processing in 1984’s “High-Speed” edition for MSX and 1985’s “Super Version” for PC-6001 mkII. They’re still painfully slow.

16-bit Computers

A break of 4 years should give you some idea as to the work that was going on behind the scenes, culminating in the 1989 release of Harukanaru Augusta for PC-9801. This was an official licensed representation of Augusta National Golf Club, also known as the location of the famous Masters tournament.

This is where the series really hit its stride and made lasting impressions: high resolution graphics using a bespoke dithering system to make the most of the limited colour palette, digitised caddy images and sound effects, catchy music using FM synthesis, detailed real life golf courses, and an engaging control system. The 3DGOLF system software was upgraded a couple of times over the next few years, and a handful of add-on courses were released.

For PC-9801 the total list of available courses counted six:

Harukanaru Augusta (1989)
- “Distant Augusta”
- [System Disk 1.0]
Eight Lakes G.C. (1990)
- fictional course
T&E Selection (1990)
- fictional course
Waialae no Kiseki (1991)
- “Miracle of Waialae”
Pebble Beach no Hatou (1992)
- “Waves of Pebble Beach”
- [System Disk 2.0]
Devil’s Course (1992)
- aka Wicked 18
- fictional course

Harukanaru Augusta and Eight Lakes G.C. were also released on FM-TOWNS and Sharp X68000, but not the later courses. Maybe sales weren’t good enough? Harukanaru Augusta would also see a mail-in upgrade release as a “HD” hard disk installable version, running System Disk 2.5, but this was not backwards compatible with the previous releases. At this point the engine powering the games had been rewritten and was referred to as POLYSYS and made claims of being an “Integrated 3D Processor” or software DSP. The holes were designed in a custom CAD package. Each 3D hole consisted of a mere 256 points!

Throughout this hugely productive Japanese PC period T&E SOFT published a printed newsletter for New 3D Golf Simulation owners called “Top Spin”, which I’m yet to see a copy of. Please do get in touch if you have any information!

16-bit Consoles

The series was eventually ported to console, first to Nintendo’s Super Famicom (SNES), with Harukanaru Augusta arriving early in Japan and Waialae Country Club being a USA launch title. Later, totally different ports were released on Sega Mega Drive, which was lucky enough to get four out of the six courses. Pebble Beach was released first in the USA and later in Japan. Harukanaru Augusta, Devil’s Course and Waialae followed, but only in Japan.

These Japanese Mega Drive versions are my favourite of the bunch. They’re based on the PC-9801 games, right down to using the same course data, and the user interface is a low-resolution facsimile that retains the charm and style of the original PC interface. They really are a work of art. The Japanese versions maintain the dithering effect to show different grass types, but the USA version features only solid colours. The USA version features an easier power meter but removes the special full power shot that the Japanese version had. All in all I’d say the USA versions are easier and less attractive.

Playing them today under emulation I make sure to overclock the CPU (400% is good) to reduce the redraw times, speed up transitions, and make for an altogether more modern and enjoyable experience. You can also hold the B button to speed up ball flight animation, which is even more noticable when running overclocked. Speed runners take note!

Real 3D?

With the arrival of systems capable of real-time 3D came the opportunity for more realistic golf courses, at least. But there was some legacy baggage hanging around. The SNES was still very popular, and it wasn’t obvious how much more powerful the more awkward to program 32-bit systems like the 3DO and Saturn might be. So the final games in the series on SNES and the first in the series on 3DO and Saturn were pretty much the same: 3D but no dynamic camera. Amazing for SNES owners, and perhaps disappointing for 3DO and Saturn owners.

PlayStation and N64, on the other hand, got real 3D versions of the game. Even the Virtual Boy got a decent wireframe 3D version of this era T&E SOFT golf engine, as T&E Virtual Golf (or just Golf worldwide). Quite surprising! All are very much worth playing, though I personally favour the PlayStation games over the N64 games. Virtual Boy Golf is worth a try, just for kicks, and can be played under emulation in 3D using anaglyph red/blue glasses or in glasses-free 3D in an emulator on a Nintendo 3DS!

That said, the Saturn still had a trump up its sleeve. Perhaps because it was very popular in Japan it was the console T&E SOFT chose to release the final 32-bit version of the game, Waialae no Kiseki ~Extra 36 Holes~. As you might expect from its name there were two extra courses bundled with this game. Windy G.C. was a brand new ultra-difficult course, whilst Eight Lakes G.C. was a modernisation of the fictional course featured in the 1990 add-on disk for the original Harukanaru Augusta game for PC-98 and X68000 that released back in 1989. Full circle self-referencing from T&E SOFT—nice!

The engine also powered RPG Virtual Hydlide on SEGA Saturn.

The 19th Hole

T&E SOFT kind of ceased to exist at some point after this, though they managed to spit out a few golf games under one name or another to mixed reviews. Windows 9x got a proper version of the game in Harukanaru Augusta for Windows, which is great. PS2 got Golf Paradise (Swing Away Golf) and a Disney-branded version called Disney Golf Classic (Disney Golf) which are somewhat souless games that really don’t excite me.

The finale was somewhat of a surprise, with the DS getting Touch Golf (True Swing Golf) in 2005, and a DSi version in 2009 as A Little Bit of Nintendo Touch Golf. These are both truly great games, though if I had to choose I’d pick the DSi version as it trims some fat and focuses the game and experience perfectly: a real treat! You can read my review of the DSi version in an older blog post.

Music

The music in this series really is some of the best FM synth you’ll hear. I can recommend this episode of the Pixelated Audio podcast to bring you up to speed.

A bunch of these games share a common music track—I call it the “T&E SOFT Golf Theme”—arranged differently to suit the host sound system capabilities.

Waialae no Kiseki (SFC)
Pebble Beach no Hatou (SFC)
Harukanaru Augusta (PC-98, X68000, FMT)

Here’s a playlist of the 5 versions.

Box Art

Perhaps the box artwork is the most striking thing about the Mega Drive versions, with its classic typography-led design, strong brush-stroked calligraphic logo, and the intriguing hand-painted golf scene.

These paintings obviously represent the real life courses, but further investigation revealed that not only did they show a particular hole but they also showed a famous event that happened on the course (with the obvious exception of the fictional Devil’s Course).

I don’t have much knowledge of real life golf events but I managed to figure them out, I think, using my Google-fu. Though I’d still love to know who painted them!?

Harukanaru Augusta

Pebble Beach no Hatou

Waialae no Kiseki

Devil’s Course (Wicked 18)

T&E SOFT 3D Golf Simulation Series Dokuhon (1993/04/30)

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a Special Appendix that came with the 1993-04-30 issue of Japanese magazine Theスーパーファミコン (The Super Famicom)

This guide book shows tips for all 18 holes on each the four T&E SOFT golf games available on SNES:

Harukanaru Augusta
Pebble Beach no Hatou
Waialae no Kiseki
Devil’s Course

These courses were also featured in games on other platforms so the guide has much broader usefulness.

Review: A Little Bit of... Nintendo Touch Golf

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 23:16:18 +0000

Less is more.

A Little Bit of… was series of previously released retail DS games adapted to suit Nintendo’s DSiWare download service. The idea for these “Chotto” games came from Satoru Iwata, who said “I thought it would be good if there were a Chotto game series that you could play with little by little and interact with little by little in your life.”

The games were adapted by refining one or more elements of the core gameplay to suit the concept of playing a little bit at a time over a long period. These changes were either overlooked by the press, or described as a bad thing, but closer inspection shows that the changes were well considered and well executed. And in the case of this particular game by a largely different team than the original game.

I played through the DSiWare version of this golf game some 10 years after it was released as I was intrigued how different it might be to the original cartridge release.

The answer was a lot. And it turns out this DSiWare version is a much better game as a result. It features a proper interactive tutorial rather than the still screens of the original, as well as a refined user interface with simpler power and putting display, an updated and improved version of the game engine with a higher frame-rate due do the increased CPU speed of the Nintendo DSi, and an all new Challenge mode.

Challenge mode, which replaces Championship Tour mode, introduces a method of levelling up that is focused on improving your golf technique. This adds a lot to the game and provides a method of increasing your player stats and unlocking additional courses. It includes 100 challenges at each of several different difficulty levels, totalling over 300 different challenges. They include such variations as: nearest to the pin, chip-in, limited strokes, single putt, total distance, limited time, competition (vs CPU), and limited clubs.

This little version is also missing a bunch of courses and their associated music, replays, special shot, Wi-Fi features, and a few other small things. But they’re not essential to the experience so it’s not a big deal.

With this tweaked version T&E SOFT took a look at the existing game with fresh eyes, removed the stuff that made it needlessly complicated, and added a new mode that reinforces the core gameplay. It’s a more focused and better game as a result.

Music: T&E SOFT “New 3D Golf Simulation” games

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a huge fan of the music in T&E SOFT’s “New 3D Golf Simulation” series, so I have spent some time to digitise the music from those games in the series I did not have in my music library. That makes 13 new soundtracks!

Devil’s Course (PC-98, 3DO)
Eight Lakes G.C. (PC-98, X68000)
Harukanaru Augusta (PC-98, X68000)
Harukanaru Augusta HD (PC-98)
Masters: Harukanaru Augusta 2 (PC-98)
Masters: Harukanaru Augusta 3 (3DO)
Pebble Beach no Hatou (3DO)
T&E Selection (PC-98)
Waialae no Kiseki (PC-98 + 3DO)

For PC-98 and X68000 I used a Windows app called HOOT to play back the “chip” music and export it as WAV, then I trimmed any loops and added fades, then finally converted to FLAC and MP3.

For 3DO I extracted the filesystem from CD-ROM ISOs, then converted files containing audio into WAV and then FLAC. For AIFF/AIFC files I converted using command line ffmpeg, and for Stream files I used ZStream CHUNKS Reader (version 0.96).

www.mediafire.com/folder/tcm6u1rhz1xsy/vgm

They should make it on to the Video Game Music website soon, but they are available first here. Enjoy!