Prince of Persia Ported to the BBC Micro | Hacker News Reader

Prince of Persia Ported to the BBC Micro

bitshifters.github.io

88 pointsmatthewwarren17 comments

I remember being amazed by Prince of Persia's crazy fluid animations when it came out. Very impressive game and an impressive port as well.

I should point out though, where it has the Bitshifters logo multiple times on the loading screen... It's cut off in the middle one and the `f` looks more like a `t`.

He has actually taped his son doing the game stunts in real life, and applied a very early motion tracking methodology to produce the fluid animation. So much ahead of his time.

It was his brother, David Mechner. http://www.gameanim.com/2014/01/07/prince-persia-rotoscopy/.

His son? I think it was his brother. His sister played the princess IIRC. He might have used a video camera from his father to capture the movements. Jordan Mechner was still quite young when creating POP.

> I remember being amazed by Prince of Persia's crazy fluid animations when it came out.

Rotoscoping for you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping

Later used in Another World and Flashback to similar effect.

There is some original footage here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gC3WEwSJoHs

For a more current use of rotoscoping, see the movie A Scanner Darkly.

The loading screen is an homage to Acornsoft's loading screens:

https://i.imgur.com/SayhPeA.png

If you were loading from tape, the loading progress would go in the box inside the blue logo at the bottom.

No I get the homage to screens of that era, I'm just pointing out that it turns bitshifters to bitshitters.

Just one opinion, but I think this is a funny and cool name.

Not sure how it would be in other dialects, but I expect most British English speakers would think it a bit shit.

This game was so freaking hard! I'll never forget.

I first saw it on a monochrome XT, and it looked amazing in just two colors.

A friend of my brother's played through it on the Amiga, right to the end. He did it while I was watching, although I never managed to finish it. I'm not sure if the Amiga version was any easier than the other versions. Still fun, though.

Very nice work on the graphics, you almost forget the beeb only had 8 colours.

I hope it works on my B+ 128KB.

Unfortunately, it does not work on the 128K B+:

http://www.stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=13079&...

Oh dear. I didn't know Masters were so different; I had assumed they were repackaged B+s with a few extra bits.

YouTube footage?

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