
Prince of Persia for Commodore 64/128 released - th0ma5
http://popc64.blogspot.com/2011/10/prince-of-persia-for-commodore-64128.html
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chaosmachine
In case anyone hasn't seen them yet, here's a few videos of Jordan Mechner and
his brother performing moves that would later become Prince of Persia's in-
game animations:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0cpppGuow>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lywBYHjn8wc>

~~~
igrekel
I also remembered seeing the source code's documentation in an earlier HN
post. Here it is <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961713>

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doomlaser
You can read Jordan Mechner's journal from the time that he was developing the
original Prince of Persia. It's one of the most fascinating devlogs/creation
sagas I'e ever read: <http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/page/11/>

~~~
kleiba
That together with Andrew Braybrook's journals on the development of Paradroid
are among my most favorite developer stories from the golden age of computer
games. Does anyone know if there are more reports like that available online?

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iuguy
If you liked this, then you'll love the port to the almost unheard of Sam
Coupé[1] microcomputer by Chris White[2]. Chris actually recreated the
graphics by hand, pausing the Amiga version and redrawing frame by frame.
Because it was an unofficial port at first, it has some fairly unique bugs.
There's a fairly good video on Youtube[3] if you want to see what it looked
and sounded like compared to the C64 version.

[1] - <http://www.worldofsam.org/node/24> [2] -
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisjwhite> [3] -
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg9YR8qnQWk>

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tatsuke95
I remember seeing this game for the first time at my cousin's house, probably
around 1990. Jumping, hanging, swinging, creeping, sword-fighting? The
animation blew my mind.

/nostalgia

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

~~~
crazydiamond
This was my favorite game (way back 1989). Missed it all these years. I used
to complete the whole thing in 20 or 25 minutes. Was so happy to see the
screenshots. Any way I could run this on a new OSX machine ?

~~~
ElbertF
Should work with DOSBox, I got all my old QBASIC games to run.

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lhnz
I used to watch my dad play this when I was a little boy. When the prince
landed in the spikes it would make me jump and I had to put my hands over my
ears because of the scary sound. :]

~~~
js2
Oof, boy do I feel old now. Wasn't it just yesterday I was teaching myself
6502 assembly on my Apple ][?

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disguisedcoder
I can't remember who said it or what the exact words were, but still:

If you want to be remembered (or do something that will be), write a computer
game. People will write emulators for ancient architectures just to play old
games.

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eliasmacpherson
I'm impressed that Jordan Mechner himself responds within a number of hours in
the comments of the post!

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5hoom
This game really did pioneer great animation in video games (wasn't it the
first one to use rotoscoping?), but damn was it punishingly hard.

I still have a phobic reaction seeing screenshots of this game :)

~~~
Ogre
I think Karateka, 5 years before Prince of Persia, was the first rotoscoped
game. Jordan Mechner made both of them though.

~~~
lini
Karateka was the first game I saw and played on a friend's Apple II clone. It
had a really cool easter egg (from the Wikipedia page) -

The Apple II version came on one apparently single-sided disk. As an easter
egg, a second version of the game was placed on the flip side of the disk. If
one put the disk into the drive upside-down, the game played identically to
the first side, except that the game was displayed vertically flipped.
According to Mechner, this was done as a joke, causing naive users to call
tech support and ask why the game was upside-down. Invariably, they would
receive the reply, "take the disk out, insert it right-side up, and reboot".

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jpitz
Ohh the memories. Back in '90 or '91 I was teaching myself Turbo Pascal and
completely sucking so badly at PoP that I wrote a cheat - I made a little DOS
GUI save game editor that could max out your lives and/or time remaining. I
released it to the wild but sadly there's no chance of finding that source
again.

~~~
scottshapiro
How'd you release to the wild back then? BBS?

~~~
mmahemoff
FTP servers with usenet announcements, or just post the binary to usenet.

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bprater
Does anyone have the article talking about Jordan and the development of this
game? I was really inspired by it!

~~~
gridspy
Detailed blog written during development starts here:
<http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/>

I've read it end to end. Expect it to take a day. Very inspiring.

~~~
trobertson
Found an excellent gem, from page 7, that reminds me of what I imagine is a
lot of people's experience, moving out to the Valley to do a startup. His
attitude about it all is awesome:

    
    
        I have to rent a car. I have to drive it. On these insane twelve-lane racetracks
        they call freeways. I have to find an apartment and rent it. I have to move in.
        I have to buy a car. I have to buy insurance. I’ve never done any of this stuff
        before… and now I have to do it all at once.
    
        And on top of this – or rather, at the bottom of it – I have to make a
        computer game.
    
        It’s gonna be fun.

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seclorum
There is a lot of interest in the old 8bit platforms these days .. those of us
with the machines still in operation are having a blast with the new wave of
software being developed.

I'm a huge fan, personally, of the Oric-1/Atmos machines, and in the last few
years we've had quite some great titles released for this platform .. you can
see some of these great releases here:

<http://www.oric.org/index.php?page=software>

I'm a personal fan of the SPACE 1999, PULSOIDS, and IMPOSSIBLE MISSION titles,
being that they are recent ports/releases being done to bring life back into
the platform. Anyone with an interest in their gaming history would do well to
investigate this new phenomenon ..

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comatose_kid
No link bait title and a pretty rocking technical achievement. Great
submission!

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joshu
little known fact: robert, one of the founders of Metaweb/Freebase was one of
the rotoscoped models for PoP.

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coderdude
So what's up with this game having a Grand Vizier named Jaffar and Disney's
Aladdin having a Grand Vizier named Jafar?

Edit:

Did some digging around and apparently there was a fictional Grand Vizier
named Jaffar in the 1940s film "The Thief of Bagdad."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_of_Bagdad_(1940_film)>

So it looks like those two instances are a rip-off of a character in that
movie.

~~~
fhars
Also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja%27far_ibn_Yahya>

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tluyben2
Very nice. I'm back in my retro computing phase atm and trying to do some
ports from the C64 to the MSX (fun hacking!). This is great work; any
annotated assembly source?

~~~
daeken
According to the comments on the post, he'll be putting up chunks of annotated
assembly. This is a seriously, seriously impressive effort.

~~~
comatose_kid
Yeah, I can see how it took him 2+ years

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jvdh
My first thought was, cool! I still have my Commodore 64, and it still works
(tested a few weeks ago).

Second thought was, damn! How the heck am I going to get that on a floppy to
load it on my Commodore?

~~~
Maci
Provided that you have an LPT port. <http://sta.c64.org/xcables.html>

~~~
NateLawson
No, now you just need a USB port. I developed the ZoomFloppy to read/write old
formats from modern computers. This way we can archive bits that might
disappear otherwise.

<http://store.go4retro.com/products/ZoomFloppy.html>

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gcv
I'd love to see an iOS port of the original Prince of Persia.

~~~
epenn
There is one: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prince-of-persia-
retro/id3739...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prince-of-persia-
retro/id373984189?mt=8)

The graphics have been updated though, resembling POP2. I wish there was a
version or a mode of POP for iOS where I could put it in a kind of "classic"
graphics mode that would resemble what I remember of the DOS version I used to
have.

Edit: grammar.

~~~
kalleboo
The graphics aren't really "updated", they're just the graphics from the
original Mac version. Which kicked ass, as a Mac user back then I remember
looking at the back of the box and laughing at the chunky DOS/Apple II
screenshots.

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knotty66
This looks almost as good as the Amiga version. Incredible.

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geoffroy
thanks for posting this!

