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

Adrian Crenshaw · talk · Watch on YouTube

Game history & retro gamingHistory of computingHacker culture & free software

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 5 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2014, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “My favourite example of digital archaeology from recent years”

    Saving Prince of Persia floppies

    voltagex_, 2014-08 · Strong recommendation · in “Prints”

  2. “I personally recommend his talks on the Prince of Persia[0]”

    Jason Scott talk on Prince of Persia

    _asummers, 2014-12 · Recommendation · in “Each New Boot a Miracle – DOSBOX in the Browser”

  3. “Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks”

    How original source code was recovered from dusty disks

    noufalibrahim, 2026-06 · Recommendation · in “How we made hit video game Prince of Persia”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: prince of persia, data recovery, jason scott, floppy disks, software preservation

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