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2 1 1 Jason Scott Rescuing The Prince of Persia from the sands of time

Adrian Crenshaw · 24.8K views · 2012-09-30 · 52:47

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Overview

Jason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.

On Hacker News

Repeatedly recommended as a favorite tech talk and a great example of digital preservation work.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2014–2026

Topics

Game history & retro gamingHistory of computingHacker culture & free software
Search by tags
prince of persiadata recoveryjason scottfloppy diskssoftware preservation

What people said

voltagex_ · 2014-08 · Strong recommendation

My favourite example of digital archaeology from recent years is [LINK] - saving the Prince of Persia floppies. [VIDEO]

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noufalibrahim · 2026-06 · Recommendation

Was going to say the same thing. It's a very nice trip down memory lane. Also, Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks [VIDEO]

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voltagex_ · 2016-10 · Recommendation

Your second link reminded me of [LINK] (which definitely builds on some of Matt's work). [LINK] - C++17 for the Commodore 64. Probable language warnings for my other suggestions: * Rescuing Prince of Persia from the Sands of Time [VIDEO] (was this talk ever given elsewhere?) * And You Shall Know Me By My Trail of Documentation - [LINK] * The History and Evolution of Computer Viruses - [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Adrian Crenshaw, played through YouTube.

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