News Archive
Acquire a free @princed.org email address
8 August 2008 - The Princed Project is providing free-of-charge email address on its domain @princed.org to active members, pop fans and friends. This is ONLY for princed.org related people and game fans, so if you are not so active in the forum you should add some text about you on the observations field. Each application is manually checked by a site administrator, so please use your real full name to avoid your request to be discarded, this policy is used to filter related people with opportunistic ones. Princed project will not take any responsibility on the use of the address, so play fair dude!
By filling in this form we'll take consideration of your email address and approve the email as soon as possible. Approval time may vary from one day to a week, depending on administrator availability and server propagation. When a new address is issued it will be properly notified to the email's owner with setup instructions.
Princed is hosting pop related projects
4 January 2008 - If you have a project related to the game and want to make it public, this is the place for you. Princed is the community used by game fans to find related projects, information, downloads, etc. Hosting your project here will increase the publicity of your project directing traffic to your project site. Having a hostname in the form http://yourproject.princed.org means that you are part of the community and it is in fact a good piece of work.
Website address changed
6 October 2007 - This year -compared to others- we haven't been very active doing releases, documentation and other stuff, but we didn't fall asleep. We have been analyzing and designing the future PV4. We have also evaluated the possibility of migrating the website framework to another better.
To generate some activity to show we are still here, we have renamed the site URL from http://www.princed.com.ar to http://www.princed.org. We are more like an organization rather than an Argentine Commercial website. So that's why we decided to do this change. Some traffic will be lost, but the spirit of this change is to show what we really are and it was very necessary. We should have done it before. So from now on, we'll use www.princed.org as the main website and keep the old address as a permanent redirection to this one.
POP2 Level format almost figured out
29 March 2007 - After working a lot in the POP2 Level format, we can say that we know about 90% of it. Brendon James is working in the editor Roomshaker 2 for POP2 using all the specifications discovered. The format specifications for both POP games are open and published in the technical documentation section of this web. I hope we'll soon be playing new POP2 mods. Thanks Brendon for the good stuff!
PR 1.2 scheduled for March, 22nd
7 March 2006 - Finally, after several delays we are setting a final release date. This version incorporates the extraction support of 256 colors images from the POP2 dat files in experimental mode. In order to do that we had to reverse the file format and rewrite two big parts of PR (the file format layer and the dat format layer). We believe that this version won't be as stable as the other 1.x's, this is because lots of lines of code were added without the propper testing time.
The release week It'll be one year since PR 1.0 had been released, two years since PR 1.0 beta and about three years since the development had started.
In future releases we'll include stability, full non-experimental extract support (PR 1.3) and importation support (PR 1.4).
Princed Project home page improved
16 February 2006 - After validating the page with the most strict standards in the web we decided to implement an RSS extraction system from the forum. So now the page and the forum are very close.
We also decided to drop out the nedstat visit counter because of the publicity they added. From now on, the only visit counters we'll use are internal. When the site was first published we had decided to use nedstat because it was an external and trusted visit counting system that we won't ever be able to modify.
The home page has reached more than 80 thousand visitors since the first time it was published.
PR 1.2 improvements
18 January 2006 - We are proud to announce that we succesfully imported a POP2 dat file.
This is going to help a lot in the POP2 level reverse engineering -wich has already started and it's going fine- because now we only have to worry about the level and not the .dat file and it's checksums. We have reversed everything but the guard properties.
Knowing that POP2 has two types of images and that the first type is similar to POP1 we were able -during the development of PR 1.2- to extract a graphic dat file of this first type and import it back again with an image edited having successful results.
This means that we are very near to get a version capable of editing (and not only extracting) POP2 graphics of this first type.
We also reversed the new POP2 compression algorithm that is present in the second type and we believe PR 1.2 will have an experimental feature to extract all the images from POP2. If you want to know more about it please refer to the news thread I posted in the forum.
PR 1.2 will be released very soon
22 December 2005 - We only need testing, lots of it. The main new features are the support non-unique resource IDs that will help a lot in POP2 resource importation and the index names are now in forwards and may be bigger than 4 letters, much easier to understand.
Other less important new features are the new option --format (to generate filenames with the name specified), and the new dat input syntax allows to extract more specific resources like for example "rooftops.dat@400:shape#second,401:shape" and the unknown.xml file is now all merged in the extracted main folder.
If you want to test it, please make a post in the forum.
PR anniversary
9 June 2005 - It's been 2 years since the release of PR v0.1 alpha.
However development didn't stop! We are coding very hard to release PR v1.1. For this new version we achieved coding a new dat handling layer to support pop2 dat files for extraction. The DAT v2 indexing is fully supported and some images and palettes do work properly.
FreePrince updates & delays
26 May 2005 - We've kept coding freeprince and it is now in an advanced stage, but not in an alpha state yet. Because this is not my only project and I didn't have time (I have to finish the university too) for the last two month, the coding times are much slower than expected. This means there will be delays in the release.
In the last two month we only improved the portability (also worked in IRIX), fixed a few bugs and commented a bit more the code.
As the project has existed for more than a year, I can say it was very productive, the coding was good and the engine is very customizable. I like how the things are going and I want to code and finish my part. I think the balance is positive.
2005 Princed contest awards
18 March 2005 - Both algorithms were solved in two days since the samples had been published by Diego Essaya. Congratulations!
The results will be added in PR 1.0 final, scheduled for 2005-03-23.
After that, we'll start thinking in the GUI editor for PR. For the moment we only know it will be portable and made in wxPython.
FreePrince development
4 March 2005 - In all the previous months FreePrince became a playable game. By the beginning of March we had released the last pre-alpha version (FP0.4). The next version is going to be the first alpha and have guards, timing and better moves coordination. Screenshots may be seen at the freeprince screen shots page. FP0.4-pre-alpha-soc (the first release of FP0.4 was compiled under GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and windows).
Princed home page is now standard
26 February 2005 - During the month of February our new volunteer became our new webmaster and normalized the site to be html 4.01 strict according to the W3C standards. The page is now supported by console browsers and the sites now presents a right separation between presentation (CSS styles) and data (HTML information).
Princed contest 2005
20 January 2005 - Check out the Princed Programming contest awards 2005. It is about the coding of a compression algorithm used by the original game. Check out the bases.
FreePrince portable
29 August 2004 - Today we could came up with the first windows version of FreePrince. We used LCC and added a new makefile. The port can be downloaded from the CVS, by compiling the source using LCC and the makefile.lcc file you can get the exe file. The file res_conf.h requires to be generated and is a need in the compilation. This file can't be generated in windows in an easy maner, bacause it uses awk. Any Linux version of the game can generate the file, so there is no problem at all. To compile you need to download the SDL and import the libs into LCC using the import facility at the utils menu. Don't forget to put SDL.DLL in the game directory.
Mac Os X users can compile the game but PPC architecture isn't fully supported, we need to upgrade the resource module code in FP from the latest PR sources. The rest of the source is ported.
There is a new FreePrince screenshots section in where you can find the latest shots of the development. Today's addition is the windows shot.
FreePrince
11 August 2004 - During the Second Lugfi Conference we got the Freeprince kernel and graphics running, for the following weeks we've been redisigning and rewritting the FP kernel. FP is now in an advanced pre-alpha. Our kid can run, jump, couch and do all the movements depending on the pressed keys. It is read from the original dat files from disk and loaded into memory. The titles are also going fine, maps are read and loaded into memory in several object-oriented-structures and there is an interesting key binding event manager. We believe that a working version could be released before the end of the year. Interested guys may go to the FP project home page and take a look at the remaining tasks or offer any help.
PR 1.0
4 July 2004 - I've been working in the debugging of PR 1.0 beta -that is very buggy- and fixed a lot of bugs. I want to thank the creators of Valgrind and Gdb for those two great tools that helped a lot finding bugs and memory leaks. The release is not delayed, when PR 1.0 beta was released I decided to keep this as the last released version for a very long time until I come out with PR 1.0 after at least 6 months of testing. The current problem is in the compression stuff, that is the most difficult code to debug and it has at least 2 known bugs (reports corruption when it's not and reads wrong the memory). Those bugs could keep me busy for a long time -I hope not-. After fixing all bugs I'll send people some copies so they can test it (if you are interested just mail me). For those who can't wait, if I had to schedule or say an approximate release time I would say PR 1.0 could be finished in September. Who knows, may be it comes together with FreePrince 
I've played Prince in the Lugfi symposium :p
11 May 2004 - Click to enlarge the images
FreePrince
10 May 2004 - FreePrince is in the way: we have decided to code it in ANSI C, using the SDL library but adding an abstraction layer in case we need to use any other library. For the moment the target platforms will be Linux, Windows and Mac. The file structure of the game will be the same as POP1 but adding an "exception DAT file" where the mirror, the mouse and other special game features could be saved allowing a better edition without any source compiling. In the original game those features were hard-coded so the only way to modify them was hex-editing the file. If you have the original game you would be able to replace prince.exe with freeprince.exe and add the features dat file to play the game with the old art. Due to legal stuff we won't distribute the original dat files, but we will use owr own art instead.
A bit of history
23 March 2004 - It was 1989 and I was 7 years old when I went to play to a friend's home. This day was different from the other days, my friend wasn't at his room, so I went upstairs and found him playing with his new computer. It was the first time I've ever seen a personal computer, and I was very curious. My friend was completely captured with the game, he didn't say hi, he was just moving this funny kid in white clothes all over the dungeons. After a while he said: "wanna play". My answer was "no, just keep playing, I'd rather watch". This day I decided to make my own game, a game like this, so I started learning programming and computer stuff.
Years later I've browsed the whole net looking for a kind of editor of this game, I had spent all my primary school drawing levels of the game in papper and I wanted to play them! Being unsuccessful with the search I've opened the levels file to see if a could edit something but, without any success.
In 2000 I've started again, but this time I knew more coding stuff, so I could edit some parts of the game. Once again I've been looking for an editor and found that there had been one! but I could only read some russian stuff I didn't understand. The only thing I've got was the name of the author of this game that was in some BBS, Alexandr Larionov. As the editor wasn't very functional I stopped looking for an editor and started princed project. I have to belive that Kirill Terebilov got the editor in a BBS and used it to come up with his own Prince of Persia version "POP4D" in 1994.
PR v0.9 Release 2 finished
16 February 2004 - A bit behind schedule, the stable, fully functional version of PR that supports cathegorized extractions was completed and succesfully ported to Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac Os X, SunOs, FreeBSD and NetBSD .This version can import and export resources from all the DAT files from Prince of Persia V1.4 except for the CGA and EGA graphics. The last tests are being performed, and once done the release will be available immediately in the sourceforge.net download section of the princed project. We are focusing on the last pvl format checks. This is to avoid format problems between plv versions.
Future releases: We do not know whether there will be a third release of the version 0.9, but we are sure that this version is very close to the version 1 of the program. Perhaps the only changes will be regarding resource cathegorization.
Record 2.0 beta released
27 December 2003 - The new software available for download can capture an animation from 13h games (320 * 200 and 256 colors). When you quit the game, it creates as many bmp files as frames were recorded. Then you can use any simple image edition software to join all these pictures into one .avi or .gif (animated) file.
PR v0.8 beta released
25 November 2003 - Two weeks ago we released the latest version of PR. This version is available as binary files for 9 platforms (including win32 and Linux), you can also get the source code. There is also in the distribution a sample vdungeon.dat. PR v0.7 was the first stable release. It was announced in the SF.net project page. This new version has lots of improvements, but it is not as stable as the first one. The main improvement is the resource file (the parser was completely rebuilt and now supports xml) so now the extracted files have friendlier names.
In December a PR v0.9 will be released. It will support all the dat files in the resource file. This is going to be a stable version and it should need only a few changes to become PR 1.0. After this version we are going to stop PR development for a few months and start working on PV3.
Servers moved and source code completely opened
12 October 2003 - We are proud to announce we have moved our primary server to SourceForge.Net .
SF.net is the world's largest Open Source software development website, with the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet. We also decided to migrate all licenses to the GNU General Public License, except some Libraries programs we made -in that case we will use GNU Lesser General Public License, that is a less restrictive license made by the Free Software Foundation-. We garantee Princed will be allways open software and there will be no charge to use it. We do that because we are fans of the game making an editor as a hobby, not a software company.
Due to this migration and some requirememts SF.net asks their powered projects, some internal pages will me suspended or removed.
Within the course of the year we will distribute all sources and files we have and/or think may be useful.
SF.net services included a CVS repository, so you may download the latest unestable source if you like at pserver:anonymous@cvs.princed.org:/cvsroot/princed (for the moment modules are pv3 and PR). We also have some tracker systems such as Support and Feature requests. Our SF.net project homepage will be http://project.princed.org, note that this page will not replace http://www.princed.org (hosted by SF.net since October 2003) as our Official home page.
PR v0.6 near to come out
19 July 2003 - This will be the first full-featured version of the Princed Resources editor, the application that allows you to edit graphics, sounds and other resources in POP1 and POP2. PR v0.7 will be the first stable release of the editor. It also has a .dll for developers and binary versions to be ran in linux and windows. For more info about the coding improvements you may check out the PR thread in our forum.
POP2: "The arena" development
29 June 2003 - PiotreK is working in this new game. This is a fighting game with Prince of Persia characters. The development has some PR elements that uses the original extracted images from the game. This is due to the PR improvements in POP2 dat file format that is rather different than POP1. You can see the POP2 home page to check for newer versions, anyways we added the game in the download section and we promise to keep it updated.