A platform-jumping prince – History of Prince of Persia's 1990s Ports

> "For the first time I felt what it's really like to play Prince of Persia when you're not the author and don't already know by rote what's lurking around every corner."

This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions.

I remember seeing the following short but extremely interesting documentary about makings of the game as well: https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54?feature=shared - Essential viewing for anyone interested in game development history.

I've actually had the same experience the author describes -- me and a friend worked on a web game for 6 years together, and then later my friend made a steam port and extended the game. The experience was pretty awesome playing it for the first time; the connection to code review feels pretty trite in comparison.

The experience is more like discovering there was an extra book in a series you've read 20 times over. Except you were the original author!

If you find the columns jarring, run this in the console:

document.querySelectorAll('.col-50').forEach(d=>d.classList.replace('col-50','col-100'));

It's a shame that's a ~40MB single page of all blog posts. IMHO each blog post should have its own page, to make it easier to share.

> This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions.

It's not just that. It's anything creative, really. It can be a tech startup, it can be a book... you name it. The thing is that creators become blinded by their own perception as they lose the ability to see flaws.

The longer they work on a thing, the less they are able to understand that other people might not understand a lot of things. I experienced it myself few times with my coding projects. It's actually quite bad as you just cannot fix a problem as you do not see it. Even if someone points it out to you, it takes quite some time to admit it is a problem.

This is why having teams of people is useful. Single startup founders, game designers, writers... have inherent blind spots in their entire work.

He didn't mention the excellent, fan-made Atari 8-bit port of PoP [1].

[1] https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-prince-o...

My favorites will always be the PC and GameBoy releases but the SNES version is certainly worth a look.

How did you measure it?

I saved the page as mhtml and it was only 24.4 MB

> Elaborate production values and doubled playtime helped make SNES PoP a huge hit. I especially loved the fantastic box artwork by Katsuya Terada.

For those who wondered:

https://www.therage.ie/products/prince-of-persia-snes-japane...

https://x.com/Danny8bit/status/1196862172174811136/photo/1

I used to blame the kids for creating 40MB SPAs, but the author has written a popular game on an Apple II :(

To be fair, he probably has better to do today than keep up with web technologies. I know I would.

I quickly tried it (having only ever played the PC version when I was a kid).

They really upped the level and detailing on the art and the audio/music is quite good as well.

Design-wise they added a button to perform a forward jump which is really welcome.

One trick when doing music mixing is to play the mix from some really low-end speakers. In one studio they had a small radio someone could have in their kitchen. There are a lot of reasons to do this but you also get some perspective this way since you become deaf to your own work indeed very quickly.

I remember that I was playing the DOS version of PoP on a computer with Hercules Graphics Card (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card) so I suppose the DOS version also supported Hercules (beyond CGA/EGA/VGA).

The music, even though was playing from the PC beep speaker haunts me to this day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcI8lQvX8Ng

Finally, after all these years I still remember running it with "prince megahit" to enable cheat mode so I'd be able to pass the levels using ctrl+l...

Thanks! As usual people favor look over usability and readability.

As a teenager I did odd jobs at a small company that produced studio equipment (rack mounted reverbs and that kind of stuff) and was told this was one of the main features of mastering a CD - ensuring it sounded good on shitty kitchen radios and large stadium sound-systems.

I was told, somewhere, some guy was blasting himself with a giant speaker array tweaking the levels on Hit Me Baby One More Time, before it could be printed to masters. A mental scene that has lived rent free in my mind for decades.

It still blows my mind that consumer grade CDs and LPs were the source for radio broadcasts and such.

Years ago a thing people would do is make an initial mix, dump it to ordinary cassette tape and then just drive around with the cassette playing on an ordinary car stereo, similar thinking.

The one (only?) platform I ever played Prince of Persia on is not listed: a monochrome Siemens phone from the early 2000s!

I found someone briefly showing on yt :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQW4M5azj_0?t=60

> I suppose the DOS version also supported Hercules (beyond CGA/EGA/VGA).

IIRC, Hercules cards were more pro-oriented (monochrome graphics, but higher resolution than their contemporaries), so I doubt anyone would bother to make a game port specifically for them.

If you ran the game on a Hercules, most likely it was the CGA version run on top of a CGA simulator [1].

[1] https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/cga_simulators_for_hercules.php

I don't remember having such a CGA simulator. I suppose it would be a TSR program that I needed to run before prince, but definitely I wasn't doing that.

From some research it seems that hercules was actually supported:

https://www.dosbox-staging.org/getting-started/enhancing-pri...

and from

https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/Games/game_prince.php

> Intel 8088/8086 CPU, 512 KB of RAM (640 KB for MCGA/VGA version) Graphics support for Hercules, CGA, Tandy/PCjr, EGA and MCGA/VGA (320 x 200 max. resolution in 256 colours)

Notice that PoP was one of the few games I was able to play with that hercules monitor :|

Not quite a cassette anymore, but in 2013 I was in the studio with some friends and we'd do initial downmixes to MP3 and bring them to the car. World of difference, just getting the less-ideal and more realistic listening experience.

It seems you're right. I vaguely remember using simcga on a friend's PC (where we also played PoP) but I can't recall for which game.

Given that the PC version of PoP was launched in 1990 and CGA simulators existed since 1986, I would guess that even embedding the simulator to the game, so that it works out of the box, would have been a viable option.

The two-column layout is quite confusing here.

You're supposed to read the entire left-hand column first, then scroll back up where it continues with "Presage had an excellent, seasoned lead Mac programmer..."

This works in print where you can guarantee that both columns fit on the page, but on the web it's just weird.

The columns are responsive, so a quick usability to fix is to make your browser window narrow enough that the other column goes away.

My friends parents used to clean a business on the weekends, and as kids we got dragged along, but we had permission to play games on one of the office computers.

It was an unassuming 286 running DOS, but it had a modem and a couple bulletin boards in the phonebook.

Prince of Persia was one of the games we played the most. Paired with a Soundblaster and a small set of speakers, playing that game in a dark office was a great experience.

One suprising thing that seems to work with video/footage (a shot) once you've watched it a few hundred times and can't really 'see' it naturally any more, is to 'flip' it (horizontal mirror (or negation)) the result is usually surprising at least and can reveal things you couldn't see before! Or, if flipping has run out of juice too, even flopping (vertical mirror or negation, yes the shot is upside-down now, so not as helpful as flipping) but either/or and their combinations can definitely provide some extremely useful new perspective on the visual content one is trying to produce (VFX day job as Pipeline TD now, FX artist previously and this idea helped me numerous times!)

Sounds way more fun than my childhood, all I had was Raisins.

Jordan's books "The Making of Karateka" and "The Making of Prince of Persia" are delightful stream of consciousness journals of his time working on these early pioneering titles and are a fascinating look into the history of the personal computer and computer gaming revolutions.

Full of his hopes, thoughts, fears, struggles, aspirations, setbacks, and successes. Old sketches and screen captures. Just reading about his workflow for the animation on Prince of Persia is fascinating.

Jordan has a way with storytelling.

https://x.com/jmechner/status/1831585901350158436

We did this when I was in a band 25+ years ago. Record the song, quickly burn it to a CD, then drive back to campus in our shitty Honda Civic or band pickup truck and listen to it. It was 90% just to listen to what we made, but hearing it outside of the studio was good as well.

At this same time, this feels like No Speaker Left Behind. Now that I am middle aged and have a nice sound system at home and in my car, I sort of want a mix optimized for THAT! Like, don't hold me back just because we're still mixing for AM radio in a 1983 Pontiac Firebird!

> You can't unsee your own assumptions.

It's why you can't escape a prison of your own making (literally or figuratively).

Here's [1] a deeper look into the Amiga port, and MobyGames provides a very handy overview [2] that shows how the ports differ visually for anyone interested.

1. [https://shot97retro.blogspot.com/2019/06/prince-of-persia-in...]

2. [https://www.mobygames.com/game/196/prince-of-persia/screensh...]

Or use reading mode (F9 in Firefox)

The column layout is a very poor choice here. I started reading on the 2nd column because the images push the beginning of the article so low.

I saw this video for it[0]. The best 8-bit version IMO, though the Apple II one is the iconic classic.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sMaY9BRHG8

I also played it on a PC with Hercules too and I don't remember having to resort to an emulator or any other program.

I saw this at Interplay in the early 90s. Our audio director had a range of set ups, from high-end monitors to cheap Radio Shack speakers, and could switch between them with one knob.

(The artists, on the other hand, always worked in dark rooms and with their monitor contrast cranked up. We'd constantly complain about the dark, hard to see graphics.)

The game directly supports Hercules [1]. Plenty of games did back then, 500+ according to Mobygames [2].

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/196/prince-of-persia/specs/do...

[2] https://www.mobygames.com/attributes/attribute/4/

That's a wild port!

I was going from memory, but Pingdom says 34.0 MB. https://tools.pingdom.com/#6662282f0a800000

prince megahit! Now that takes me back, way back!

One month ago, when I first mentioned this issue to Jordan, the page was 32.5 MB https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/196030379371253381...