Manuals of various versions

[Andrew]

^That's like explaining a joke and ruining it! Seeing just the portion David presented was much more fun, leading one to imagine some overzealous censor deleting 'objectionable' words, even if they're simply part of bigger ones.

[Norbert]

Ah, it was a joke.
I only now get it.

[David]

I found a funny omission in the German manual for PoP1: Page 3 and 5 have no page numbers.
In a manual for a game that frequently asks for letters from certain pages, no less.

[David]

I have found a Japanese manual for PoP1, for the Sega CD version: http://theromdepot.com/roms/%5BGame%20M ... Persia.pdf
(Beware, the download is very slow. It took me about 5 minutes to download the whole 12 MB file.)
So far, this is the only Japanese manual for any PoP game that I could find.

There are a couple of interesting things about this manual:

* It's in full color. Screenhots are in color, some headers are written in red, and every page has a marble-like light green background pattern and a brown border.
By comparison, the English manual of the same version (see here or here) is in black and white, except for the covers.
I wonder why is this.
This is not even unique to PoP. For example, the manuals of Rocket Knight Adventures have similar differences.

* There is Furigana above every Kanji (except on the cover pages).
These are usually used in texts written for children.
Oddly contrasting this is that the Brazilian release of the same version has a warning on its front cover that it's recommended for people above 18 years.
I don't see such a warning on the Japanese front or back covers, though.
(Or on the other PoP Mega-CD covers.)

* There is a portrait of the main characters, taken from the anime-style cutscenes.


In other news, I have also found a Spanish manual for PoP1 SNES: http://www.digitpress.com/library/manua ... 20(es).pdf
Interestingly their list doesn't have the English version.

This manual is not as drastically different from the English version as the Japanese SEGA CD manual above, but some pages have a different background color.

[Norbert]

I have found a Japanese manual for PoP1, for the Sega CD version: http://theromdepot.com/roms/%5BGame%20M ... Persia.pdf
(Beware, the download is very slow. It took me about 5 minutes to download the whole 12 MB file.)

Attached a 5MB version of that PDF file.
(I converted the file you linked to.)

[David]

MobyGames mentions this on the Trivia page:

The manual for Macintosh/IBM release of the game had a figure of Prince in the right bottom corner of each spread. If you flip through the book, Prince would jump.

You can find this manual on PoPUW <http://www.popuw.com/files/pop1manualbw.pdf>, but the quality of this scan is poor.

You can find better scans on these sites:
* http://macintoshgarden.org/games/prince-of-persia
* https://archive.org/details/Prince_Of_P ... d_Software
* https://www.myabandonware.com/game/prin ... sia-pd#Mac

By the way, is the prince trying to jump over those spikes at the bottom of each page?

[Norbert]

Fun little detail.

[realXCV]

By the way, is the prince trying to jump over those spikes at the bottom of each page?

He's probably gonna get impaled on one of them.

[David]

I found the manual of PoP for the Sega Genesis: https://segaretro.org/File:Prince_of_Pe ... Manual.pdf

Things of note:
• I think the screenshot on page 6 is from the Mac version. The Genesis version of the princess's room doesn't have torches!
• Page 7 has an extra tip: "Be willing to play a level several times to get a good time."


I also found a cleaner scan of the DOS 1.0 manual here: https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple ... ames/misc/

[David]

The Spanish PoP manual has this written at the bottom of every page:

footer.jpg (5.75 KiB) Viewed 9155 times

Using Character Map and Wiktionary, I transcribed it as:
أَمِير اَلْ إِيرَان

Translation: Prince of Iran

So, this is the title of the game translated to Arabic, except it says Iran instead of Persia.