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?
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :]
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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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[ 154 ms ] story [ 1842 ms ] thread/nostalgia
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.
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.
I've read it end to end. Expect it to take a day. Very inspiring.
I'm already hooked. :-)
"Microsoft Word 4 arrived via Fed Express. I booted it up and it crashed immediately."
Not worked on such interesting projects, but wish I'd started a work journal years ago - might have to start one now!
I still have a phobic reaction seeing screenshots of this game :)
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".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH0cpppGuow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lywBYHjn8wc
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.
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.
Second thought was, damn! How the heck am I going to get that on a floppy to load it on my Commodore?
http://store.go4retro.com/products/ZoomFloppy.html
[1] - http://www.worldofsam.org/node/24 [2] - http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisjwhite [3] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg9YR8qnQWk
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 ..