If there is one thing I love about the current state of the Vita scene, it’s that developers take their work very seriously and usually are quite good at updating their work until they feel it is near-perfect, or at least until it is fully-featured and needs no more updates. This brings me to developer usineur‘s port of SDLPoP, the original Prince of Persia port using the SDL library that he recently ported to the Vita. This update fixes rendering and “updates” controls to be friendlier for the modern gamer. A new issue has apparently arisen with this updated, but usineur has already promised it will be fixed with the next update.

What is SDLPoP?

SDLPoP is an open-source project that aims to allow people to play the original Prince of Persia DOS games on modern systems without the use of tools like DosBox. It was originally created by disassembling the code of the original game to get the source. Now we can all enjoy it on the Vita thanks to developer usineur.

Changelog for SDLPoP v1.1

Real fullscreen mode
Loading time is reduced
Unneeded “overclocking” is removed
Circle button performs the same action as “up” button

Instructions for SDLPoP

Quick installation:

• Install SDLPoP-Vita.vpk using VitaShell
• Extract the prince.zip archive into ux0:data/

Controls:

• Left: turn or run left
• Right: turn or run right
• Up or O: jump or climb up
• Down: crouch or climb down
• X: pick up things
• X +left/right: careful step
• /\: display remaining time

Download SDLPoP

To play the newly updated SDLPoP, all you need to do is head to usineur‘s GitHub release page and get both the VPK file and the prince.zip file. After that just follow the extraction instructions for the zip file and play the game. As usual, if you run into any issues, I would advise you to report them here so the developer can get around fixing them. Enjoy the release everyone!

[Update: it has come to our attention that the developer’s page contains copyrighted content that we cannot link to here, so we had to remove the download urls]