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Appendix A Announcement

Menininho is the Brazilian Portuguese word for male kid, and mininim is how it’s informally pronounced throughout the country. Kid is the term used by Jordan Mechner51 when referring to the main character of his most famous game — Prince of Persia — in its source code and documentation, because the character’s movements were derived from rotoscoping footage of Mechner’s little brother. MININIM is the Advanced Prince of Persia Engine, written from scratch by computer programmer and free software activist Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro (oitofelix). Bruno had a childhood dream of deciphering the secrets of his favorite game that introduced him to computing — a dream dreamt when he was just a kid, a dream realized now that he’s still a mininim deep in his heart.52

MININIM is the Advanced Prince of Persia Engine — a childhood dream, the free software implementation of Jordan Mechner’s masterpiece game, developed from scratch by Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro (oitofelix). MININIM is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU GPL (General Public Licence) as published by the FSF (Free Software Foundation); either version 3, or (at your option) any later version.

In addition to being already a complete replacement for the original game with several improvements, MININIM aims to have detailed documentation on all matters concerning the original Prince of Persia world, ranging from its design concepts to the engine’s practical use and development. MININIM documentation is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU FDL (Free Documentation Licence) as published by the FSF — with no Invariant Sections; either version 1.3, or (at your option) any later version.

MININIM features various improvements over the original game, too many to make an exhaustive list here. Some of its noteworthy advantages are:

News

Features:

Behavior changes:

Bug fixes:

Links

Homepage

http://oitofelix.github.io/mininim/

Atom feed

http://oitofelix.github.io/feed.xml

Forum

http://forum.princed.org/viewforum.php?f=127

IRC channel

irc://irc.freenode.net/mininim

Bug reporting

https://github.com/oitofelix/mininim/issues

VCS

https://github.com/oitofelix/mininim

Download

User’s Manual

If you just want to have a look in the latest release documentation, you can download the manual in PDF format separately.

https://github.com/oitofelix/mininim/releases/download/v202505220946/mininim-202505220946.pdf

Windows

If you are under Microsoft Windows a MinGW build is readily available. No installation is required, just extract the zip archive and run mininim.exe. The PDF manual is bundled as well.

https://github.com/oitofelix/mininim/releases/download/v202505220946/mininim-202505220946-win32.zip

GNU/Linux

If you use GNU/Linux, you have to build from source. This should be quite straightforward, provided you install the Allegro 5 development libraries using your distribution’s package manager. If you use an apt based distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, ...) you can do this by invoking the command:

sudo apt-get install '^liballegro.*5-dev$'

When building the sources, the usual incantation ./configure && make is often enough. The installation step (make install) is optional as MININIM is able to run directly from its source directory (provided you don’t make a VPATH build, in which case you need to specify the data path. See the --data-path option).

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature:

Use the .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run this command:

gpg --verify mininim-202505220946.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don’t have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

gpg --recv-keys 0x28D618AF --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net

and rerun the gpg --verify command.

This release is signed by Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro. His key fingerprint is 7CB1 208C 7336 56B7 5962 2500 27B9 C6FD 28D6 18AF.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:

To do

The following additional features are planned to be implemented eventually.

Please, support MININIM development!

MININIM development is voluntary. If you like this game and want to thank the author for the work he has done so far, or want to enable him to spend more time improving it, please make a donation! For values equal or greater than 50 US$ or 0.12 BTC your name will be acknowledged in this manual (Donors) and in the donors page at the author’s website (http://oitofelix.github.io/funding.html#donors). If you decide to make recurrent donations, the total amount of your donations will be updated every month for all records. Please, donate at http://oitofelix.github.io/funding.html.

Thank you for your support!


Footnotes

(51)

Jordan Mechner (born June 4, 1964) is an American video game designer, author, screenwriter, and filmmaker, best known for creating the Prince of Persia video game franchise and the 8-bit computer game Karateka.

(52)

Of course, none of this is reason enough to name a game engine “MININIM”, if not by the fact that it’s a really cool palindrome!


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