Other old work :
Prince of Persia
OS and GUI
I did a version of the old classic Prince of Persia when I was learning to do my first bits of graphics programming in dos. It originally began as an attempt to do simply sprite animation with bmp files. That effort simply grew on me and slowly a miniature of Prince began to develop. I called it Prince 3.
Here are some screen shots of Prince 3 :) . The original Prince went to cult status for the games in its league. Since we loved prince in our beginning years and had some time to kill, we put together this version. This is not complete (maybe never will be) but it does do the basic things and taught us what we had to learn.
The main challenges here was getting the graphics... this was done by pausing the screen and pressing print-screen on a 100 or so frames. We then cut out the prince images and edit out the backgrounds. The second challenge was the multitasking. We did this on dos, so we had to do the multitasking engine and concurrency manager ourselves and time slice it with the timer int. That presented some nice challenges on a single tasking OS. My friend Tony worked with me on Prince, he coded mainly the sound routines and 8259 PIT.
I later went onto join a small group programmers working to re-develop some of the old dos games. Real old ones like Sopwith, Digger etc. I found these guys on the net a little while after I coded my small derivative of Prince.
I writing my prince however I added some new things to the game. This prince could move behind screens or pillars or nets, which the original prince couldn't do. This was done with an interesting use of the 256 color palette. Also this prince had obstacles that where not integral multiples of the floor height. The original prince did not have steps or any such constructs.
The following screen shots show the intro animation of prince.
It was a nice intro with an old assembly fire animation trick where the letters appeared and would then seem to burn off the screen.
until they were no more.
And then we did the same thing for the credits as well :)
And of course, the version info :)
This shows the prince behind a screen - this kind of a feature did not exist in the original prince.
This shows the prince standing in a terrain that had variable sized heights, like steps. this too was not there in the original prince.
The adventurous prince swings from an over hanging ledge.
This was the screen shot that we displayed when the level was through - this was a rip off from the original prince, with some of the palette changed.
Roshan James
circa 2000