
Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code 23 years later - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/prince-of-persia-creator-finds-lost-source-code-23-years-later-20120329/
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alex_c
For those of you who haven't read them, Jordan Mechner's "The Making of Prince
of Persia" is one of the most engaging things I've read online.

<http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/>

Just realized there's an e-book now... I'll probably get it.

~~~
yan
Fascinating!

He taped his friend jumping and climbing in a parking lot to model the
animations after (and posted the video): [http://jordanmechner.com/old-
journals/1985/10/october-20-198...](http://jordanmechner.com/old-
journals/1985/10/october-20-1985/)

I can definitely see the character performing all those actions from my own
childhood memories..

~~~
Trufa
I know this comment doesn't add up much to the conversation but that is one of
the coolest things I've ever seen, I don't know why I'm so hyped, maybe it's
the memories...

~~~
gala8y
Must be memories. Prince of Persia was the first program I ran on my computer.

One day me and my father drove 30 kms to buy the box. We talked with the guys
about what we wanted ('16Hz, no, its to fast, 12 will do') and they sad it
would be ready in three days. Then, we were very surprised and disappointed.
They were surprised that we were surprised and finally said 'no biggie, we
will set it up right now for you'. So we were back home with the box this
evening.

At home we plugged it in only to discover that it was totally useless thingy
blinking at us. This evening I learned why software was so, sooo important.

Only the next day I would get some floppies from friends and feed the beast.

Empty parking lot, 1985... Shoot!

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ambirex
Here is a link directly to Mechner's blog post about the found disks.

[http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/03/prince-of-persia-
sourc...](http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/03/prince-of-persia-source-code-
found/)

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andyjohnson0
I wish him well. A while back I read "Floppy Disks: Its Too Late" [1] when it
was posted on HN and decided that I would finally get round to pulling the
data off some old (mid to late eighties) 5.25" Appple II and DOS 2.1 disks I
had sat in a drawer.

After buying a 5.25" drive (from ebay), acquiring a PC (from the dump,
literally) that was old enough to have a drive controller that could talk to
the drive, and tracking down old software for reading Apple disks on a PC, I
found that the bits had just faded away and all the disks were unreadable.

Time and money (and luck) can't beat entropy. It wasn't even much fun.

[1] <http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191>

~~~
sbisker
Hopefully if it comes to that, he'll consider using a professional data
recovery service or paying this guy for his time. It may not be worth a pile
of cash to read the disks sitting in your drawer, but it's probably worth the
cost for such a priceless piece of gaming history.

~~~
andyjohnson0
I hope so, and I sincerely hope he is successful. I contacted a few data
recovery companies myself, but they were changing over UK£60 per disk.

~~~
jarito
Thats what Kickstarter is for. I'm sure we can get a bunch of us to pledge
some money to pay for data recovery.

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vital_sol
There is a novel by famous Russian writer, Pelevin. It is called Prince of
Gosplan (Принц Госплана), written in 1991.

[http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%86_...](http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%86_%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0)

Protagonist works for the huge gov bureaucracy in Soviet Union (Gosplan) and
imagines that he is going through the levels to reach the Princess. He pretty
much lives in the world of Prince of Persia. Hes colleagues, OTOH, live in the
worlds of F19 or M1 Abrams, so when protagonist goes to speak to his boss, he
has to go through the tank battlefield of M1 game.

~~~
dnc
I thought that I knew all novels by V. Pelevin. I haven't even heard of this
one before, although I've read almost everything by him. Thanks for the info.

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gravitronic
I hope that his friend is not just someone with a usb 3.5" disk drive, as I
think just shoving these disks into a drive will end up with them erased.

For extraction he should be contacting this guy:

<http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191>

~~~
cpeterso
It looks like Jordan has contacted Jason "textfiles" Scott:

<https://twitter.com/#!/jmechner/status/185540207200833537>

 _I think @textfiles may have it covered. Fingers crossed_

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crusso
I remember playing the original. What a great game. It really was the first
game where natural body movement and acrobatics became important.

I haven't heard the term lately -- but for quite a while, Prince of Persia was
more of a genre description than anything else. Any game where you could have
some freedom to move around the environment, climb up, and drop yourself
smoothly down was "like Prince of Persia".

~~~
ElbertF
I played it once... For about three years straight.

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exDM69
Fun factoid: when Linus was coding the early kernel, he wasted a lot of time
playing Prince of Persia on a dos box (according to his co-workers in his
early biography Just for Fun). Maybe now we'll get a native port of PoP to
Linux so he can run it without DosBOX.

(IIRC the game was written in Assembly so it's not going to be easy, though).

~~~
bad_user
Not necessarily a direct port, but a clone written in C/SDL with the original
artwork is doable.

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Luyt
The same happened to me, on a bunch of old diskettes I found a computer game I
wrote more than two decades ago.

[http://www.michielovertoom.com/software/risky-software-
archa...](http://www.michielovertoom.com/software/risky-software-archaeology-
discovery/)

It's revealing to look at source code you wrote 20 years ago. For example,
back then I was already using the 'banner' indenting style for C and C-like
languages. I picked this up from the book Software Tools, by Kernighan and
Plauger, a book which has been formative for my programming education.

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ChuckMcM
Lots of collectors have machines around that can read ProDOS disks. A quick
note to the Classic Computer Collectors email list [1] would turn one up.

[1] <http://classiccmp.org/cctech.html>

~~~
VikingCoder
So maybe the Library of Alexandria wasn't burned, it was just stored in a
format that no one knows how to read any more. :)

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dgant
The journals referenced in the article are an excellent read and will likely
hit home for those pursuing or considering startups:

<http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2011/10/ebook/>

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bhz
We were demo'ing the recently created Commodore 64 port of PoP at MGC. It was
funny to hear people say, "I used to play this on my Commodore" (No, you
didn't.)

Funny how they finish the C64 port and now the source turns up. Glad he
mentions that in his post.

~~~
unimpressive
In a similar vein someone once told me that they'd ran Unix on a TRS-80. (In
case you don't know, older *nixes required a mainframe to get running.) The
TRS-80 ran a BASIC prompt.

~~~
bodyfour
I don't know if you're just trolling or not.

There were UNIXes that ran on desktop hardware as far back as the early 80s.
In particular, the certain TRS-80 models were sold with Xenix -- a port of
UNIX that Microsoft did which later was passed on to SCO (the original company
in Santa Cruz, not to be confused with the notorious Utah company that ended
up owning the name)

~~~
unimpressive
I stand corrected then. I was under the impression that __nix was a hog until
the 90's.

The place I read that from probably _was_ trolling.

(Then again, IIRC the original V6 source code was 10K or so lines, which
doesn't really match up with that statement. (That it was a hog.) I figured it
was just written in a way that needed lots of memory.)

Thanks by the way. Filling little gaps in my knowledge like that is always a
treat.

~~~
brazzy
Unix was a success exactly because it _wasn't_ a hog and didn't require a
mainframe. Instead it could run on PDP minicomputers (small and cheap at the
time, they cost only $100k and were only as large as a small car).

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dirtyagile
Yikes. I would be scared to look at code I wrote 23 years ago.

~~~
thought_alarm
I recently recovered code that I wrote 23 years ago in middle school. It was
for an Apple II BBS we ran for a little while.

To read source code (and BBS messages) that you wrote in 1989 as a kid is
quite a surreal experience, to say the least.

I got the code running, too, thanks to an email I wrote to a friend on said
BBS describing in detail how to edit the code (using the AppleWorks word
processor), recompile the code, and operate the BBS from the console. Without
that 23-year-old email there's no way I would have ever figured it out.

~~~
WalterBright
Last month I found, in an old box, a listing of the first computer game I
wrote back in 1975. I thought that had been lost forever. I'm going to try and
scan it & OCR it.

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w1ntermute
He's very fortunate that the code wasn't lost in the sands of time.

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mikeriess
Those spike traps were brutal.

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StacyC
I had so much fun playing PoP when I was in college! I lived in a student co-
op at the University of Texas, late 80s, and we had a little ‘computer room’
(more like a closet) in the hallway with a Mac Plus (one 400k floppy drive, i
think) and I would battle those stupid squeaky bats all freaking night. I
loved it, great memories of that game.

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Torn
> The problem he faces now is how to extract the code from those old 3.5″
> disks to his MacBook Air, but he has a friend on board with the requisite
> skill set.

... a floppy drive? Or am I missing something. Do the disks degrade over time?

~~~
Harkins
Yes, disks fail. See "Floppy Disks: It's Already Too Late", by one of the most
prominent digital archivists: <http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191>

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wyan
This would be awesome!

How can old floppies be read without destroying them? Somehow I don't feel
comfortable with inserting them into a modern machine...

~~~
wyan
Darn, I just read the article below :)

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kamaal
Will this be released as open source?

Can wait to see it and may be hack on it.

~~~
rayd
yea, I would love to see this put up on github once he gets it off the disks

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skbohra123
Oh, it was such a tough game to play!

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jstalin
But wait, wouldn't releasing the source code violate Apple's copyright? :)

