didn't you accidently press shift+L ?

No, the hand is nowhere near the L or any letter.

That's not a DosBox bug... That a prince of persia cheat tweaker...
If you press shift+l you'll be transported to the next level, and if try to reach lvl 12 that way you'll only have 3 minutes to rescue the princess.. 😎

I've been having the same problem with 0.63, and no I haven't been touching the 'L' key either. It seems to happen randomly after exiting a room.

I installed straight from an original 'Prince of Persia Collection' CD. There have been no trainers or cracks added.

Yep, I'm having the same problem... no cheat modes either :<
it seems that I have found at least two ways to reproduce this.
1. in first level go down as fast as possible and run left to the first door and try to go through it as fast as possible (crouching below it while it's opening)
2. in level 3 where there's three razors and an extra life point, when coming down, it jumps to level 4 and leaves 15 minutes time.

I tried the cheatmode thingie as xErath suggested, I went to level 12 and I still had an hour left to finish it :p

It seems to be problem with your PoP version. I tried to reproduce this behaviour with my version and I didn't work.

If you press shift+l you'll be transported to the next level, and if try to reach lvl 12 that way you'll only have 3 minutes to rescue the princess..

I tried the cheatmode thingie as xErath suggested, I went to level 12 and I still had an hour left to finish it :p

If you run PoP without cheatmode (i.e. you just start PoP w/0 any commandline parameters) the SHIFT-L combination will take you to the next level until you reach level 4. Once you reach level 4 this combination gets disabled. You'll always have 15 minutes left after that teleport (even if you only beam to level 2 for instance).
If you run PoP with cheatmode the combination will take you to any of the 14 levels and it will not touch the time left (this makes it easier to get into the highscore list 😁 ).

Funny though, it works fine on my hardware dosbox 😀
ah well, I'll try to get some other version of pop and try it again

I tried to play with the arrow keys (uh, so awful) and I couldn't reproduce the "bug"... I think it might have something to do with the shift+l thing and they numpad...

yep, confirmed... with prince megahit it jumps to next level with 60 minutes left (even if I don't press shift+l... I just play with numpad + right shift)