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Preface

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 Mechner1 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.2

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:


Footnotes

(1)

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.

(2)

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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