Prince of Persia, now for the BBC Micro (Patreon)

If you're a fan of the fluidly-animated platforming classic Prince of Persia, give that link a click and read some nostalgic words by Kieran and Simon. Kieran (who is supporting here! greetings and shoutouts!) has really been throwing his all into this over the past year, and Simon helped out quite a bit, especially with me and getting audio onto the "beeb".

As a gaming and electronic entertainment historian, there's another interesting thing going on in the back of my head. The "Oregon Trail generation" of the US will recognise the Apple II (Prince of Persia's original platform) rather instantly and perhaps intimately, as our school computers. Yet in the UK there's an interesting parallel; their school computer is the BBC Micro (and later the cost-cut Acorn Electron). Both machines are driven by a 6502, have some interesting (and some wildly different) video modes, and contain similar amounts of RAM.

One huge difference, though, is that where the Apple II has no sound hardware other than a beeper that you have to control yourself (unless you have a soundcard, but those were uncommon), the BBC Micro is capable (if you can call it that) in the sound department: It has an SN76489, like the Sega Master System. There are a few minor differences though, for example the whitenoise is handled differently. You'd think "ok so it sounds a bit different, no big deal" but this is actually important to pay attention to because this chip doesn't have any bass, and there's a cool trick you can do with the whitenoise to get some bass notes. So, Simon and I had a few "fun" adventures into converting the audio because of that.

Much like my work with the Bad Apple video on BBC Micro (also done with Bitshifters), I really tried to make a sound chip shine even if it wasn't the best chip of its era. I'm pretty sure nobody will listen to my Prince of Persia work and say "I've never heard THAT come out of a Beeb", but I think our goal with this was more to produce something that was the best thing we could produce that still looked like it would've been released in that era. In an attempt to stay true to the original, I asked Jordan which soundtrack version he'd consider definitive and he actually got back to me (hello, senpai!) with the PC/DOS version, so I modeled almost everything I did after that version. 

Anyway, in my opinion, this is a huge success! Why not give it a try tonight? If you don't have a BBC Micro (I have one, but not a BBC Master, which is required), just hit the "Emulate" button to try the game out in a browser with Matt Godbolt's (seriously, he's supporting here too, what is this, my worlds are colliding) excellent jsBeeb. And feel free to report bugs to us on github!

Also, if there's enough demand, I'll put a render of the soundtrack up on Bandcamp. Leave me a comment if you think I should!