GOG updates Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for modern PCs

In recent years, Ubisoft's Prince of Persia franchise has only been seeing spin-offs, with the mainline games being dormant since 2010. Even a highly anticipated remake of The Sands of Time was shelved by the company earlier this year. However, in some good news for fans, the original version of that classic from 2003 has been the target of the GOG store's preservation program.

"Our team has gone deep into the sands of the original Scimitar engine, rebuilding our early experimental work into a lightweight wrapper designed to address the challenges of running this 2003 classic on modern hardware," said GOG.

Without the improvements, the original game running on newer systems would have glitches caused by the frame-capped engine, the CRT-targeting 4:3 aspect ratio, and other problems.

The custom DirectX wrapper that GOG built for the game intercepts the engine's own boundary calls to cleanly implement the required fixes. With access to the game's precise frame timings, the preservation team had managed to cap the physics ticks at 60 FPS while allowing players to adjust it manually, fixing the glitches that were plaguing it before.

A camera scaler has also been implemented inside the wrapper, letting players dynamically change their FOV while inside the game. This also adds support for wide-screen and ultra-wide-screen monitors that most gamers use nowadays.

Interestingly, GOG says that the core wrapper architecture that it made for Sands of Time is a game-agnostic solution. This is being called a reusable platform that can be expanded to cover other DirectX games in the future for its preservation causes with less custom reverse engineering than this venture.

"After all these years, the Prince’s journey deserves to remain playable for years to come," says the company. "We hope these improvements make it easier than ever to step into the sands, rewind time, and experience one of gaming’s most memorable adventures on modern hardware!"

The newly enhanced Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is currently discounted on the GOG store as well. The game is 70% off, dropping to $2.99, until August 23.