SDLPoP

About

Prince of Persia is a 1989 cinematic platform game by Broderbund, designed by Jordan Mechner for the Apple II, in which an unnamed protagonist ventures through dungeons in medieval Persia to defeat the Grand Vizier Jaffar and save an imprisoned princess. SDLPoP is an open-source port of the DOS version of Prince of Persia, built from a disassembly of the original executable and extended with many features not in the original game. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS, supports mod folders with custom level data, and has been actively developed by a large community of contributors through many versions.

How it differs from the original

SDLPoP adds features absent from the original DOS game, including full-screen mode, quicksave/quickload, replay recording and playback, gamepad hotplug support, and a mod-folder system for loading custom level data — all clearly marked as new in the game's own documentation.

Getting started

On Windows, run the included executable directly; on Linux it's available as a distro package or can be compiled from source; compiled builds for the main platforms are also offered from the project's website. Command-line options let you start at a specific level or enable cheats, and controls can be redefined from the in-game pause menu.

History

The author started the underlying Prince of Persia disassembly work after another community member posted a dungeon-wall-drawing algorithm and various hex-editing hacks on the princed.org forum, which directly led to SDLPoP itself.

Media

Modding & tools

• A community-made mod called "Secrets of the Citadel" was designed specifically to run on a modified version of SDLPoP.