Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

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Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by Shauing »

On January 1st of this year, an US prototype of the first Prince of Persia for SNES was released on Hidden Palace.

Based on what the website says, and my own not-so in-depth look at it, it is a US prototype that's is uncensored (or mostly at least) as the pentagrams on levels 19 and the fight against Jaffar are still on this prototype, the epilogue narration says ''Jaffar lies dead'' instead of ''Jaffar lies defeated'', plus the torture scene is in the intro.
However, there's is no text when the Prince is being dragged unconscious like on the final Japanese, so I suspect they were starting to censor it.

A few other differences versus the final US release noted are that you can skip the Konami/Title screens from the very beginning like on Japanese, alignment of the texts is different, and there are a few typos such as ''In Jaffar's oders,''. Also the password alphabet, special password and level 1 password matches the Japanese version.

A quick look of comparing bytes between the Final US and Final Japanese with the prototype, it seems to be in the middle, as lots of the filler/garbage
data from the Japanese is still on the prototype, but music/sound cues are identical with the US final. The area on offset 20000 onwards doesn't seem to match either version though (unless the US prototype bytes are a few bytes early or late versus any of the final versions).

For now that's pretty much all I can say. I don't expect the US prototype to have things that the Japanese release doesn't have. It would be interesting if a japanese prototype would leak.

https://hiddenpalace.org/Prince_of_Pers ... prototype)
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Re: Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by Amethyst »

Thanks for mentioning it, hadn't seen it before. :D

I just played through this including the five training levels and am surprised how very close the prototype is to the release.
If Arsys had gotten this far by November 1990, I wonder what delayed the release by more than a year. Just the censoring, text and passwords?
And if this is indeed from late 1990, the 1992 copyright date leaves me wondering... (how) did they know it would be released in 1992?

I'd love to see an earlier prototype leak, to see how it all came together.
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Re: Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by Shauing »

Amethyst wrote: January 11th, 2022, 12:51 am Thanks for mentioning it, hadn't seen it before. :D

I just played through this including the five training levels and am surprised how very close the prototype is to the release.
If Arsys had gotten this far by November 1990, I wonder what delayed the release by more than a year. Just the censoring, text and passwords?
And if this is indeed from late 1990, the 1992 copyright date leaves me wondering... (how) did they know it would be released in 1992?

I'd love to see an earlier prototype leak, to see how it all came together.
I feel that November 21st, 1990 date might be either erroneous or when they started work on the port. If we go by what we have seen in the magazines, before January 1992 the levels were still similar to the original and before May the deaths were still uncensored. Though we have to keep in mind that whatever appears in the magazines might be weeks or even months old.
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Re: Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by Amethyst »

Shauing wrote: January 11th, 2022, 1:47 am I feel that November 21st, 1990 date might be either erroneous or when they started work on the port.
The ROM image within the ZIP is dated November 20th, 1990. But that isn't necessarily correct.
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Re: Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by Shauing »

Adolf in the ''Hacking the SNES ROM'' thread, pointed to these magazine scans, but here I re-ripped them a bit clearer. It would be neat to know what each of them says:
Jan 10th-17th, 1992. Famitsu 160. Page 93.
Famitsu160Jan1092P93.png
May 8th-15th, 1992. Famitsu 178. Page 99.
Famitsu178May8thP99.png
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Re: Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by Amethyst »

Shauing wrote: January 11th, 2022, 2:18 am Adolf in the ''Hacking the SNES ROM'' thread, pointed to these magazine scans, but here I re-ripped them a bit clearer.
Awesome. Now I really hope that earlier prototypes of PoP1 SNES are going to show up someday.
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Re: Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by David »

Shauing wrote: January 11th, 2022, 2:18 am It would be neat to know what each of them says:
I have OCR'ed and translated them some time ago.
See the attachment.
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Re: Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by Shauing »

David wrote: January 16th, 2022, 2:16 pm
Shauing wrote: January 11th, 2022, 2:18 am It would be neat to know what each of them says:
I have OCR'ed and translated them some time ago.
See the attachment.
Neat! So it seems that on the January 1992 magazine is already mentioning a fire-type of level (presumably) what would be Level 10 in the final version, so probably it was starting to be expanded (if it was ever a straight port originally based on the screenshot of what originally was Level 5 in any other port).
And that by the May magazine, the game had those more violent traps and deaths rejected/removed.
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Re: Prince Of Persia 1 SNES US Prototype Released At Hidden Palace

Post by Amethyst »

Shauing wrote: January 16th, 2022, 10:25 pm [...] so probably it was starting to be expanded (if it was ever a straight port originally based on the screenshot of what originally was Level 5 in any other port).
And that by the May magazine, the game had those more violent traps and deaths rejected/removed.
It would be cool if they had a beta that was just like the Apple II/DOS or PC-98 version, before any expansions were made. Of course, we have your excellent 30th Anniversary Port. :)
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