This are hot news: The source code of the very original first game of Sim City was released a General Public License. This are good news, and the community is responding in: “Let’s do the porting begin”. Indeed, there are some pitfalls: Trademark rights forced to rename the game from Sim City to Micropolis, which should be no problem. Micropolis maybe pushing more the inspiration. After 9/11 they also left out the airplane crash.

I think the more trickier part is that one:

“The ‘MicropolisCore’ project includes the latest Micropolis (SimCity) source code, cleaned up and recast into C++ classes, integrated into Python, using the wonderful SWIG interface generator tool. It also includes a Cairo based TileEngine, and a cellular automata machine CellEngine, which are independent but can be plugged together, so the tile engine can display cellular automata cells as well as SimCity tiles, or any other application’s tiles.”

In other words they go on:

“The key thing here is to peek inside the mind of the original Maxis programmers when they built it. Remember, this was back in the day when games had to fit inside of 640k so some ‘creative’ programming techniques were employed.”

So, expert forums please! I really hope to play that game soon on DS and PSP, as well as in candy and also tandy colors. And never forget to have fun.

Update: Steeley set up a micropolis-forum. That’s where the future ramblings on micropolis will go.

[via]