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[IMG News]

In a recent blog post Jordan Mechner revealed that he has found the source code to his original Apple II version of Prince of Persia. After years of searching in vain, Mechner discovered the 3.5" floppies containing the code in a box of old items his father found in a closet. He now plans to transfer the code to a modern computer.

My Dad (yep, the same guy who composed the music for the original Karateka and Prince of Persia) called from New York to tell me he was doing some spring cleaning and had shipped me a carton of old games and other stuff of mine he’d found in the back of a closet.

The carton arrived yesterday. My jaw dropped when I saw what was inside.

No, I don’t mean the stacks of Spanish Drosoft versions of POP and Karateka (though those are cool too, especially if you have an Amstrad computer with a cassette player). I mean those three little plastic 3.5" disk boxes nestled among them… which appear to contain the ORIGINAL APPLE II SOURCE CODE OF PRINCE OF PERSIA that I’ve been searching for, off and on, for the past ten years, pestering everyone from Doug Carlston to Danny Gorlin and everyone who ever worked at Broderbund, and finally gave up hope of ever finding.

I KNEW it wasn’t like me to throw stuff out!

So, for all fifteen of you 6502 assembly-language coders out there who might care… including the hardy soul who ported POP to the Commodore 64 from an Apple II memory dump… I will now begin working with a digital-archeology-minded friend to attempt to figure out how to transfer 3.5? Apple ProDOS disks onto a MacBook Air and into some kind of 21st-century-readable format. (Yuri Lowenthal, you can guess who I’m talking about.)

Click over to the link below to read more.

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[Thain Esh Kelch]

Nice..

[DaveyJJ]

Excellent!

[nagromme]

Makes me hopeful that some of my old stuff is still working on 3.5” floppies! I have crates of them, mainly for Amiga. And my Amiga’s HD may be dead, but it still has a floppy drive... I just need to put a new HD in somehow.

[Kilvain]

The source code has been successfully extracted and is available for download.

Quote

please don't ask me to explain anything about the source code, because I don't remember! I hung up my 6502 programming guns in October 1989, and after two decades working primarily as a writer, game designer, and creative director, to say my coding skills are rusty would be an understatement.

Thanks to Jason Scott and Tony Diaz for successfully extracting the source code from a 22-year-old 3.5" floppy disk archive, a task that took most of a long day and night, and would have taken much longer if not for Tony's incredible expertise, perseverence, and well-maintained collection of vintage Apple hardware.

We extracted and posted the 6502 code because it was a piece of computer history that could be of interest to others, and because if we hadn't, it might have been lost for all time. We did this for fun, not profit. As the author and copyright holder of this source code, I personally have no problem with anyone studying it, modifying it, attempting to run it, etc. Please understand that this does NOT constitute a grant of rights of any kind in Prince of Persia, which is an ongoing Ubisoft game franchise. Ubisoft alone has the right to make and distribute Prince of Persia games.

That's about all I know. If additional information becomes available, I'll post and/or tweet about it (@jmechner). In the meantime, if you have questions -- technical, legal, or otherwise -- I recommend that you direct them to the community at large, whose collective knowledge and expertise far exceeds mine, and will only increase as more people get their eyes on this code.

As for me, it's time to get back to my day job of making new games and making up stories.