| Jordan mechner's blog post on finding and posting the Prince of Persia source [message #843] |
Wed, 18 April 2012 16:45  |
bill
Messages: 165
Registered: December 2011
Karma:
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Senior Member |
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Prince of Persia Source Code -- Posted!
http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/04/source/
"Let me begin to count the ways I've been lucky with this: The box
was found. The disks were intact. Prince of Persia and I happened to
have a high enough public profile that people of Jason and Tony's
caliber (and dozens of others who contributed their expertise via IRC,
skype and twitter from around the world) cared.
"In the bigger picture, our timing was lucky. The 1980s and the
Apple II are long enough ago to be of historical interest, yet recent
enough that the people who put the data on the disks are still with
us, and young enough to kind of remember how we did it. Roland
Gustafsson, author of the special 18-sector RWTS routines that had
made our disks super-efficient in 1988 (and unreadable to anyone but
us), was able to get on IRC in 2012 and explain what he'd done to
Discferret kids who weren't born then.
"For all these lucky reasons, our archaeological expedition was
crowned with success.
"From a preservationist point of view, the POP source code slipped
through a window that is rapidly closing. Anyone who turns up a 1980s
disk archive 20 or 30 years from now may be out of luck. Even if
it's something valuable that the world really cares about and is
willing to invest time and money into extracting, it will probably be
too late."
*Stares at my own collection of 5.25" floppies*
Also, thanks to folks like Kevin Savetz (AtariArchives.org &
Classic Computer Magazine Archive) and Peter Brantley,
et al (Internet Archive) who have been trying to archive great
stuff all along! :)
--
-bill!
Sent from my computer
--- Synchronet 3.13a-Win32 NewsLink 1.83
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