When it was released on January 14th 2003, SimCity 4 had its problems. Its huge cities would chug on even decent PCs, for one, and its traffic simulation seemed outright broken.
Twenty years later – thanks to faster PCs, the Rush Hour expansion, and a huge modding community – SimCity 4 is the best of all SimCity games. If what you care about is simulation, scale, variety, and the beauty of urban sprawl, it’s also the best citybuilder.
The year is 1994. You’re playing SimCity 2000 and you’re thinking, man, wouldn’t it be amazing if I could somehow get down into the game and walk these streets.
The year is 1997. You’re playing SimCopter, which says on the box that you can explore the streets of the city you’re created, but it sucks and looks like shit. You keep dreaming of a seemingly unattainable future.
The year is 2022 and, finally, you can do it. You can take the SimCity 2000 save that you have lugged around nearly 30 years, convert it into a modern video game and walk its streets as though you were born there and were on your way to work. The only catches are that it’s very hard to do it. And that you are actually playing Minecraft, not SimCity.
Jernej Gosar, a software developer from Slovenia, is the man to thank for this mod, which reads a SimCity 2000 save file and recreates it as best it can in Minecraft. “The main reason why I decided to create this project was that I thought it would be really cool”, he tells me. “SimCity 2000 has been one of my favourite games since I was a child and one day I thought that it would be extremely cool to go down into the streets and explore them.”
In 2014, having gained enough experience coding through his education and various IT jobs, he got to work fulfilling this childhood dream. Having also got very into Minecraft, he saw a few mods where folks had worked out ways to import SimCity 2000 terrain maps into Minecraft, but not the buildings and city itself.
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“So then I decided to make it myself”, he says. “If I remember correctly the core idea was implemented in a few weeks. I was really lucky that somebody wrote a detailed specification of the SimCity 2000 file format, otherwise this project couldn’t even get started.”
“The biggest challenge was probably digging through the bytes of both file formats and finally creating something that could actually be opened in Minecraft”, he says. The next big obstacle was simply the amount of time it took to recreate the buildings, as even the simplest could take hours, though with the added bonus that because this was a first-person adventure, Gosar’s work was generating an interior (and sometimes even basic furniture) to go along with the building’s exterior.
“I still haven’t finished all of the buildings, and doing the most complicated ones (such as the Arcologies) would be a huge effort”, he says. “In general the smallest buildings take just a few hours to complete, including some interior furniture that makes sense for the building type. And the biggest ones can take a few days. The most complex building I have done so far was the big corporate tower which was quite a big effort.
While the actual workings of the mod are incredibly complex—Gosar says “right now it’s not usable at all for people who are not software developers”—when you break it down, what it’s doing in principle is actually pretty simple. It’s essentially taking a SimCity 2000 map and matching each pixel to a Minecraft block. That helps the mod communicate between both games, and also helps keep everything to scale.
That’s not to say the conversion process is always smooth sailing. In addition to the complexity issues above, Gosar says “in some cases I have encountered 2D building structures that weren’t actually possible to recreate in 3D”, with one example being that some buildings were actually drawn like Penrose stairs instead of functional 3D spaces.
“Another problem is that Minecraft is limited to 256 blocks in height, so if there are lots of hills in the city, the highest parts can get cut off”, he adds. “Otherwise the accuracy is supposed to be close to 100%, and rendering the Minecraft world with a tool that generates an isometric representation of it should show something very close to the original from SimCity 2000.”
Here’s an example. Pictured below is a SimCity 2000 metropolis built by Gosar:
And here is that same city, translated into Minecraft and fully walkable. Note how it even manages to grab the little individual trees and bushes from out the front of some buildings:
While this video highlights some of the basic interiors that the mod generates for some of the game’s buildings:
Moving forwards, Gosar says he’d like to “make the project more usable”, lowering the bar for people to be able to use and understand it, ideally in the form of an online tool that would let users upload a SimCity 2000 save and he given a Minecraft world in return.
For now, though, given he has a hectic day job to attend to he “doesn’t have the time to work on it much, but I guess that the recent attention the project has received is a good motivation to move it forward”. If you’re brave and want to try it out for yourself, you can find the project here.
It’s still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes, those things are already documented (on a blog post) that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95.
A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand. The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed. A popular app like SimCity, which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch.
Spolsky’s post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds.
Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.
Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: “provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks.’
Windows developers may have deserved some sit-back time, seeing the extent of the tweaks they often have to make for individual games and apps in Windows 95. Further in @Kalyoshika’s replies, you can find another example, pulled from the Compatibility Administrator in Windows’ Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). A screenshot from @code_and_beer shows how Windows NT, upon detecting files typically installed with Final Fantasy VII, will implement a fittingly titled compatibility fix: “Win95VersionLie.” Simply telling the game that it’s on Windows 95 seems to fix a major issue with its operation, along with a few other emulation and virtualization tweaks.
Just did it. Too cool.
An example for a game I still own – FF7 – will outright die if it sees it’s running on Win NT instead of Win95, so Windows lies based on the presence of some files pic.twitter.com/Wc08tSffcz
— 🖥️ & 🍻 (@code_and_beer) October 6, 2022
Install the Windows ADK and open up the Compatibility Administrator, and you can spy on some of the things Windows does for particular apps to make them work in the System Database section. If it detects files named “Horny.tif” and “bullfrog.sbk”, it updates where Windows 95/98 versions of Dungeon Keeper should put those files in Windows XP and later. Windows has to stop Tom Clancy’s Rainbox Six from accessing the CD drive while it’s already playing a movie or other media, as well as disable Alt+Tab switching while the game is open because the game can’t handle losing focus. And it’s not just older titles; Street Fighter V gets a little tweak to its DirectX implementation to run on some systems.
In 2005, longtime Microsoft staffer and The Old New thing blogger Raymond Chen documented Microsoft’s Windows 95 compatibility obsession. Chen writes that Windows 95’s development manager “took his pick-up truck, drove down to the local Egghead Software store (back when Egghead still existed), and bought one copy of every single PC program in the store.” Everybody was responsible for up to two programs, which they would install, run, and document for bugs. If a staffer finished two, they could come back to grab up to two more. And testers could keep whatever they finished.
Mike Perry, former creative director at Sim empire Maxis (and later EA), noted later that there was, technically, a 32-bit Windows 95 version of Sim City available, as shown by the “Deluxe Edition” bundle of the game. He also states that Ross worked for Microsoft after leaving Maxis, which would further explain why Microsoft was so keen to ensure people could keep building parks in the perfect grid position to improve resident happiness.
It’s easy to take backwards compatibility for granted on PC, so much so that we rarely even use the phrase “backwards compatibility”. Most old games will simply run, and for everything else there’s usually a compatibility mode built into Windows or DOSBox to get it going.
This didn’t happen by accident, as an old blog post by a former Microsoft programmer explains. When Microsoft wanted users to switch to Windows 95, for example, they went so far as to add specific code that looked for SimCity and, if it was running, changed how memory allocation worked so that the game wouldn’t crash.
The deck-building, dungeon-making roguelite RPG Loop Hero is getting some much needed quality-of-life improvements in an upcoming update, the game’s developers announced yesterday. The most important of these fixes? Finally letting you save your game.
Technically, Loop Hero does that already, saving all progress automatically as you complete expeditions. But there’s no way to save the game while you’re mid-adventure, which might not seem like a big deal until it’s 2 a.m. and you’re falling asleep at your computer grinding for resources unable to log out without destroying your progress.
One current workaround for this is simply leaving the game running all the time, which is what I’ve recently started doing and why Steam tells me I’ve now played nearly 150 hours of Loop Hero. Even this system isn’t full-proof though, subject to the nefarious whims of Windows update logic as well as user error when you think you’ve paused the game to go make dinner but actually it kept running and now your little pixelated sprite is dead and burred and you’ve lost an hour’s worth of loot.
So long story short: yes, a mid-expedition save feature will be great. Four Quarters also says that more speed settings, another often request feature since Loop Hero’s repetition can make its early game quite rote and tedious after a while, are also coming soon. “After that, you can expect to see lots more content added to the game, such as new cards, transformations, classes and new music. We can’t wait to share more updates with you all soon!” the studio writes.
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That’s awesome news because I love Loop Hero and can’t wait to experiment with weird new combinations of cards and classes. Its music is also top-notch. I just wish there was more of it. If you haven’t checked out Loop Hero for yourself yet, well, you should. It’s like Slay The Spire meets Dota Chess turned into an 8-bit version of SimCity for the NES.