The game

Konami's Golf is a nine-hole course, par 36, 3,512 metres, in a 16 KB cartridge. Three modes: one player stroke play, two players stroke play, and two players match play.

The course

Hole	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Par	4	4	4	5	3	4	4	4	4
Metres	475	360	362	475	168	477	472	244	479

Those numbers are not typed in by hand: they come from the table at 0x4D3F, nine four-byte records holding the par and the length in BCD. And the nine holes on this site are drawn from the ROM, not captured.

Each hole is stored once and read two ways

This is the neatest thing in the cartridge. A hole's data is a single block, and the game walks it twice with two different readers:

As a VRAM script it paints the plan you see on the right, sixteen rows of nine tiles.
As data, 0x53B2 unpacks it into a grid of 12 columns by 18 rows in RAM — the one that knows whether you are on the fairway, in a bunker, in the rough, on the green or out of bounds.

And the joint between the two readings is a piece of craft: the last byte of the header is a 0x80 — the interpreter's "change destination" code — and its two destination bytes are exactly the start of the grid. So painting from the first pointer paints the whole hole.

The shot

Thirteen clubs, read from their own tiles: 1W 3W 1I 3I 4I 5I 6I 7I 8I 9I PW SW PT. The range comes from the table at 0x5152, minus whatever you lose depending on where you stop the power bar (0x516C, or 0x5177 for the putter). In a bunker it is halved; in the rough with club 2 or above, 48 is taken off.

The direction comes from a single 66-byte curve, read at two points 0x21 apart: sine and cosine off the same table. And there is spin — STRAIGHT, SLICE, HOOK — which bends the ball on its own.

The wind is not decoration

It is rolled at the start of each hole with ld a,r: a strength from 1 to 8 and one of four directions, painted on the panel's WIND row.

What it does is not push harder, but more often. Every nudge is the same size; what changes is how many frames apart they arrive. 0x6C4C reloads the 0xE03C countdown with 20 if the club is a wood — the 1W or the 3W, the first two — and with 10 for anything else, then subtracts the wind strength from that. At wind 8, an iron gets a nudge every 2 counted frames and a wood every 12. On top of that the countdown only advances on one frame in four (and 3 on the 0xE000 counter), so the real clock is four times slower.

Put another way: the woods are the clubs that suffer the wind least, which is the opposite of what you would expect from a club that sends the ball high and far.