Nostalgia - SimCity

Reading a write up on commercial games that have been open sourced I got reminded of how much I enjoyed playing the original SimCity back in the day. Since the post pointed out the source code of the Unix port I decided to download and try it out.

I downloaded, unpacked and tried to build the source:

$ curl -O http://www.donhopkins.com/home/micropolis/micropolis-activity-source.tgz
$ tar -zxvf micropolis-activity-source.tgz
$ cd micropolis-activity/src
$ make

Unfortunately it didn't build cleanly on my system and I learned that I needed some additional lib and tools installed. I found a blog post about Compiling Micropolis on Ubuntu. Most of it was correct but freebsd5-buildutils are now named freebsd-buildutils. I also needed to install libxpm-dev:

$ sudo apt-get install freebsd-buildutils
$ sudo apt-get install libxpm-dev

I didn't need to edit config.mk as mentioned in that post. After this I was able to build and run the game but saw the problem with tiles not being displayed correctly. So I downloaded and applied the patch mentioned in the post and re-build the source (from within the micropolis-activity directory):

$ cd ..
$ curl -O http://rmdir.de/~michael/micropolis_git.patch
$ patch -p1 < micropolis_git.path
$ cd src
$ make && make install

The install option installs the built binaries in the micropolis-activity/res directory. Now I could start the game from its root directory:

$ cd ..
$ ./Micropolis

Yay! The hours just rushed by. I still enjoyed the game as much as I remembered. Wonderful!