I know I'm most likely the only person who still cares so much about this game, but I recently started poking around the original Apple IIGS version to try and test the feasibility of mapping it.
Simply emulating the game was difficult enough (the controls are buggy as hell with the character always moving downward and left despite no key being pressed, no savestates, etc) and I have no doubt that giving this version the same treatment as I gave to the NES version would be very demanding. But I've already managed to hack the camera using Cheat Engine. It's far from perfect as it doesn't update the memory often enough, jumping at random from the camera's normal position to the chosen coordinates for a split second every few seconds or so, so I have to be really quick with the screen capture. But it's allowed me to capture the full "empty" maps for the first few stages, meaning you see the outline of all the normal rooms without their interior, as well as various inaccessible rooms scattered all around for decoration. Or so I thought...
Below, you can see the full map for Level 1 (in green), which also happens to contain all of Level 2 (in red) as well! There is a lonely unused room on the bottom right whose purpose I haven't been able to determine. Better emulation tools might help there but are unlikely to ever become available given the age of the platform. Also, Levels 3 and 4 are on the same map together, as are Levels 5, 6 and 7, with Level 8 standing all alone.
Another neat thing I noticed is this version uses more capital letters than the NES one with its limited tile memory. Thinking back to the letters I had to "improvise", I decided to try and see just how far off the mark my attempt had been. Kegs32, the emulator I was using, is pretty barebone so there was no way to see the graphics in memory, and I quickly gave up on ripping the font from the game's files which use a proprietary format in addition to being packed in disk image files.
I *did* use an hexadecimal editor on the disk image (which was uncompressed) to search for and replace the very first lines of dialog of the game (thankfully stored in plain text) by all the letters and numbers so that I could *then* capture that while playing.
Turns out the official capital letters are somewhat close to what I came up on my own. You can see the comparison below, with my original letters in the first row and the real letters right below.
I don't know if I'll actually try to map the Apple IIGS version given how difficult it is to simply move around, not to mention edit the game's memory, but I'm always itching for a challenge...
