Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code 23 years later | Hacker News Reader

Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code 23 years later

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392 pointsukdm67 comments

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.

Similarly Andy Gavin wrote a series of blog posts about the development of Crash Bandicoot. It's more of an overview than the journals, but still interesting.

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...

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...

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

David is his brother, rather than his friend.

crikey, is that mutually exclusive?

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...

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!

Reminds me of the creation of the rotoscoped graphics for the intro animation to "Out of This World", another classic video game.

If you like "making of" stories this one is pretty good too, it's been posted on HN before but is a great read.

http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm

Reading Jordan's full diary will take you at least eight hours but it is well worth it. It is one of the best stories of making a game, runaway success when success wasn't runaway, determination (not to get screwed legally/financially) out there. About ambition and leaping the artistic gap into film making when being a hit game maker was not enough. Jordan wrote POP in 6502 Assembler and he writes well (with off-hand notes - oh a royalty check for $65k - time to go to class) and inside observations, sometimes about his life.

> We chatted for an hour about peripherally related topics. Broderbund, corporate America, the rat race, capitalism, freedom. I was seducing him.

At the critical psychological moment, I remarked: "You know, all my clipping is done on the byte boundaries."

There was a pause

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/page/33/

April 3, 1989

That's actually on page 27 right now. :-)

Direct link: http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1989/04/april-3-1989/

76 pages in 8 hours? If it were dense as a textbook it wouldn't half that long.

Those are html pages. It's 330 pages as a paperback:

http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/

>...the comfort of having an organization is largely illusory. It still comes down to one programmer in the end.

From the original article on him finding the source code:

Yesterday he found it, and the discovery is all thanks to his father. The three packs of 3.5″ Apple ProDOS disks had been safely stored away in a brown box along with a load of Amstrad copies of his 1984 game Karateka.

And from your link, in the first excerpt from his Journal from 1985:

Dad called. Billboard’s top-ranked program for this week is, indeed, Karateka.

I thought that was a funny coincidence. :)

Karateka was truly awesome. Those were truly the days; good games really amazed with their originality and game play.not course there was nothing to compare to but it was magical as a kid. Wonder if my kids will feel the same about FPS?

Yeah, I never realized he was the same guy that made Karateka. Played the crap out of that back then.

I still remember Time Zone, that multi-floppy time-traveling graphic/text adventure.

And Swashbuckler! And Aztec! (Nerd boner.)

In the early days of anything almost everything is original simply because there was nothing to do compare it to. Karateka and Prince of Persia were innovative.

For the older generation, there are also Andrew Braybrook's notes while he developed Paradroid:

http://www.zzap64.co.uk/zzap3/para_birth01.html

http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1986/09/september-10-1...

"Now that the day’s over and it’s clear that I had nothing to be scared of, I’m not scared any more – I’m terrified. I’m scared shitless.

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."

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

http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/03/prince-of-persia-sourc...

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

Likewise, I waited too long to rescue my 80's era diskettes. Wish I'd had that article to hand...thx for posting it.

I had about a dozen 8" floppy disks sitting in a box since about 1982. About 2 years ago, I needed to get a file off of them. I have a friend with a machine that would read them, and they all read perfectly.

I think in the early days of floppies the quality of the media and the drives was much better.

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.

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.

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

It would depend on the type of floppy. My Commodore 64's 5¼'' floppies from the mid-1980s still work mostly perfectly. These store about 170KB on each side, as do the earliest "single density" DOS floppies. Later "double density" floppies had twice the capacity, and "high density" twice that.

Wow - you're especially lucky given that you said "each side". One of the problems with Commodore floppies was that if you punched a notch to use the unintended "other side", you were taking a few risks:

- That side wasn't necessarily quality tested. Since disks, like CPUs today, were binned, you could often use the "bad" side anyway, as the failure rates went down on the production runs.

- That side didn't have a dust filter, or whatever you call those little felt pads.

- If it DID have a dust filter, it might have been in a position to catch the dust on a true double-sided drive, which would be spinning in the opposite direction, and so would end up being useless to you.

- Or, worse, if the pad was napped, like velour, spinning in the opposite direction would actually release all the dust that had been captured. That would be bad.

Or at least this was the lore that we passed around on BBS's at the time. It could have been every bit as wrong as the truism "When your computer crashes, try wrapping your disk drive in tinfoil" (which was in fact true if your problem was RF from the TV hitting the poorly-shielded-and-filtered serial cable, but otherwise either useless or a good way to overheat your drive).

Probably true. I don't remember ever regarding the B side as being of potentially inferior quality, however, or ever experiencing any data loss on the B side. I may have been lucky. The floppies I have today are one-sided, though.

Remembered some more now. First of all, "double density" floppies ("SSDD") could actually be used safely on both sides if you did the notch thing. Bona fide double-sided floppies ("DSDD") were eventually introduced.

Boy, it's been a long time.

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_...

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.

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.

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

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

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

I think @textfiles may have it covered. Fingers crossed

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".

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

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).

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

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...

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.

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

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. :)

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/

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.

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.

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)

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.

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).

OS/9 is Unix-like and ran on the CoCo (and Dragon, if you're in the UK).

I remember OS/9 fondly. It was my first introduction to a "real" operating system (e.g. not just BASIC and a program loader). Oh, and preemptive multitasking! Whoa... :-)

Maybe they were thinking of the Commodore Amiga version, which is the only version I ever saw.

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

Oh man, I wish I am able to look at code I wrote today, 23 years later. It's like going to your parents house and picking out toys you played with when you were 5 years old. Might seem like a silly thing to do when you're 15, but priceless when you're 30.

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.

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.

I recently found a 1.44" floppy with my first serious game, written in, ahem, Visual Basic. Neverless it still runs and is actually very playable and fun!

Now I wish I knew better then to shove it in a cardboard box and forget about it for so many years. I could have made some serious $$$ from it.

The worst part was reading the source code and realising that, despite being written in Visual Basic, the alghoritms are actually smarter and better than something I wrote very recently.

"With great system resources comes a great carelessness about ones performance"

Parts of the D compiler were written in 1982-3 and are still in use.

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd

30 years!

It's sorta like our genes carry bits and pieces of the animals we evolved from millennia ago.

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

Those spike traps were brutal.

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.

> 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?

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

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...

Darn, I just read the article below :)

Will this be released as open source?

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

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

Oh, it was such a tough game to play!

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

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