Prince of Persia for Commodore 64/128 released | Hacker News Reader

Prince of Persia for Commodore 64/128 released

popc64.blogspot.com

191 pointsth0ma551 comments

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

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

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/

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?

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

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

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

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 ?

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

Works in DOSBOX

What shocked me at the time was the "real" blood. I remember thinking "ew, he fell on those spikes and was impaled". It actually made me afraid to play the game.

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. :]

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

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

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.

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 :)

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

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".

That brings back memories - Karateka on the Apple ][+...

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.

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

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

Yes, BBS.

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

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.

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.

May 17, 1989 (page 30)

"Microsoft Word 4 arrived via Fed Express. I booted it up and it crashed immediately."

  October 23, 1986

  Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris - a
  Russian submission for the IBM PC. It’s a classic, like
  Breakout. But I don’t think Broderbund is going to publish
  it. The knaves.

This is one of the best, inspiring first person looks at the mind of a superb software artist. When I read it, it took about ten hours to read it in a single, captive sitting.

Argh - after an (over stretched) lunch hour, having to tear myself away.

Not worked on such interesting projects, but wish I'd started a work journal years ago - might have to start one now!

Thank you for that link!

I'm already hooked. :-)

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 ..

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

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

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?

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

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

Indeed! Fantastic!

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.

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ja%27far_ibn_Yahya

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?

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

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

The nice thing about the old commodore drives is that they (almost) use a standard bus that allows easy implementation using microcontrollers: http://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/SD2IEC

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

There is one: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prince-of-persia-retro/id3739...

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.

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.

Cool. Sadly, the "updated" graphics look pretty awful. I agree, "classic" mode would be much better.

There is an Apple IIgs emulator in the App Store called ActiveGS. Out of the box it only runs some pre-packaged demos, but with a little hacking it can be set up to run any Apple II disk image, including games that require multiple disks (it doesn't require Jailbreaking, just USB access to the file system to copy over the disk images and change a config file).

It runs Prince of Persia nicely; I spent the better part of the afternoon playing it. It works so well I haven't even gotten around to playing the "official" iOS version of PoP yet. The experience of holding an Apple II in your hands like that is surprisingly compelling.

Also note that the original Apple II version fits on three 140 kB disks. The iOS version is 60 MB.

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

thanks for posting this!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com