Yet another Hacker News

30 points rex64 1 day ago 10 comments

phire 2 hours ago | parent

> The original SimCity for example lists Intel’s 386SX as the CPU in it’s system requirements.

Not sure where that comes from. The original release box art [1] says it will work on any PC with 512KB of ram. So that's an 8088 running at just 4.77 MHz.

But that's far from the lowest spec port of the game. The Commodore 64 version might have been missing quite a few features (like stadiums, police/fire stations and railways), but the main city simulation loop was there in just 64KB of ram and a 1MHz 6502.

And the BBC Micro/Acorn Election port was even more impressive. Had basically all the features of the full Amiga/PC/Mac version, only missing Music/Sound/Animation. With a 2Mhz 6502 (or 1Mhz on the Election) and just 32KB of ram.

[1] https://images.launchbox-app.com/79861ce4-75ea-46dd-b46e-521...

ant6n 2 hours ago | parent

I was running Sim City 2000 inside Win 3.1 on an 386 with 33MHz (I had 16MB of ram though). But it was virtually unplayable.

throw-qqqqq 1 hour ago | parent

In my youth, people would quit Windows 3.1 to run games in DOS, because the overhead of the OS was too much.

Don’t know if that could be an explanation.

ant6n 29 minutes ago | parent

Definitely that was often a solution, but the version I had didn't run on DOS. Not sure whether this was a windows only version I had. Often the problem was ram, extended memory often didn't really work on DOS.

dansquizsoft 56 minutes ago | parent

Sim City 2000 is a very different (and computationally more demanding) game than the original Sim City.

morsch 34 minutes ago | parent

It ran great on a Performa 475 (25 MHz Motorola 68LC040). I guess that settles that old debate!

vidarh 1 hour ago | parent

The original release was for Amiga and Mac. The C64 version followed around the same time as the PC version, though apparently the C64 version was the original.

retrac 2 hours ago | parent

This reminds me of microcity which is a Simcity Clone for the Game Boy Colour.

The author has some great in-depth docs about the design, and how they managed to make a fairly lively-seeming simulation fit into a machine with an 8 MHz 8-bit processor.

https://github.com/AntonioND/ucity/blob/master/docs/index.rs...

anthk 1 hour ago | parent

Bear in mind that the GBC is almost between high end NES graphics and SNES.

a1r 22 minutes ago | parent

O huh. I just learned that SHADOWFIRE on the C64 is able to simulate 50 different characters, by only updating one of them per frame. So the limit is 50 to fit the refresh rate of a PAL TV.

https://gamesexplained.com/c64/shadowfire/#people