Prince of Persia was released in October 1989 on the Apple II, designed by Jordan Mechner and published by Brøderbund. You play a prisoner in the sultan's dungeons with one hour — a real hour, counted without interruption from one attempt to the next — to escape, cross twelve levels of traps and reach the princess before the vizier Jaffar forces her into marriage.
Its signature is the animation. Mechner filmed his brother David running, jumping and grabbing ledges, then traced the footage frame by frame to turn it into sprites: this is rotoscoping, a technique borrowed from animated film and unheard of in video games at the time. The result is a character of startling fluidity for the period, with inertia and weight that completely change how you play — every jump has to be set up, every fall is paid for.
The game was ported to nearly every machine of the 1990s: DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, Master System, Mega Drive, SNES, Game Boy. Recalbox uses none of those versions: it ships SDLPoP, a free reimplementation of the DOS engine written by NagyD from a disassembly of the game, licensed under GPL-3.0. It reads the original resource files and adds free resolution, quick saves and native controller support.
| Author | Jordan Mechner |
| Publisher | Brøderbund |
| Year of release | 1989 (October) |
| Engine | Original DOS engine, reimplemented by SDLPoP |
| Game type | Cinematic action platformer |
| Port licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
Prince of Persia is shipped complete with Recalbox and playable straight away: the game data is installed out of the box, there is nothing to provide. See the Included games page.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SDLPoP | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
SDLPoP is the only emulator for this system and is therefore used by default on every machine, from the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 to the PC: the game dates from 1989 and runs at full speed everywhere. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled by the core, in multiresolution.
The system's roms folder is:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Prince of Persia/
The system does not expect a free-form extension: it looks for one specific file, named Prince of Persia (1990).zip, which acts as the entry in the game list.
Recalbox installs the following tree out of the box:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/Prince of Persia/
├── Prince of Persia (1990).zip ← the game list entry
└── data/ ← the actual game data, read by SDLPoP
├── LEVELS/ ← the twelve levels
├── KID/ PRINCE/ GUARD/ SHADOW/ SKEL/ VIZIER/
├── VPALACE/ VDUNGEON/ TITLE/
├── DIGISND1.DAT … MIDISND2.DAT
└── music/
The
Prince of Persia (1990).zipfile shipped by Recalbox is empty (0 bytes): it does not contain the game, it only makes the entry appear in the list. What SDLPoP actually reads are the files in thedata/folder. Delete neither of them, and keep them side by side.