The 2003 classic Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has been added to GOG’s Preservation Program.

After Ubisoft cancelled its remake of the game earlier this year, GOG stepped in to take care of the original instead. The team built a lightweight wrapper around the old Scimitar engine, bringing the game up to speed for modern systems without touching the experience itself - including Linux via Proton.

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. The result brings a host of improvements without changing the experience at the heart of the game.

Key changes:

• Implemented a lightweight wrapper to resolve modern hardware incompatibilities.
• Added native widescreen and ultrawide support for all modern resolutions and aspect ratios.
• Implemented camera scaling that automatically adjusts the field of view (FOV) based on monitor aspect ratio.
• Added a multi-monitor mouse lock option to confine the cursor to the game window.
• Added an FPS limiter to lock the frame rate to a chosen value.
• Introduced a lightweight, real-time in-game overlay (press F11 to open, ESC to close) for instant adjustments to FPS limits and FOV multipliers.
• Locked the main menu to its original 4:3 bounds to preserve hard-coded UI assets.
• Capped the manual FOV slider at roughly 110% on ultrawide displays to prevent engine stretching and graphical glitches.
• Verified stability.

The game is available on GOG for €2.99, DRM-free, without a native Linux build - but runs fine thanks to the new wrapper and Proton.

Source: GOG