openfirmware VS micropolis

>I find, only pointfree notation has some beauty to it that makes reading code sweet again.

I haven't written FORTH code in ages, but I still enjoy reading well written FORTH code for its pure literary pleasure!

https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware/blob/master/for...

As a SPARC and PowerPC guy, of course I wish the foundation would settle on IEEE-1275 (a.k.a. OpenFirmware) as the default firmware/bootloader, but I'm not holding my breath. Full implementation available, it just needs the Forth interpreter ported to RISC-V and maybe some additional drivers.

https://weblogs.asp.net/bsimser/simcity-source-code-released-to-the-wild-let-the-ports-begin https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/community

One great reason for taking a high level networked based approach to graphics (like the C++ and Cairo based Micropolis TileEngine and the Python and AMF based Micropolis Online server and the XML / JavaScript OpenLaszlo / Flash based client use, of only sending the tile differences between each frame) would be if you were implementing a multi player game or distributed graphics application, and wanted to run WAForth on a server instead of in the browser, i.e. like low cost CloudFlare Worker edge servers that run WebAssembly and are geographically located near the users, that send commands to the clients to render graphics in their web browsers. (WebRTC is the way to go for doing that! Forget about all the old proprietary Flash AMF media server crap I was using back in the day for Micropolis Online.)

This is somewhat helpful: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/daa4297696d955a93b051627e6d84a7da5f8a4a3/micropolis-activity/src/notes

You can check out the original SimCity Classic source code here, which I cleaned up, refactored and renamed for consistency and readability, documented, and translated to C++, but it still retains the original behavior and intent:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...

This is also an earlier version which that code was derived from, that I started from the Mac version, ported to Unix, cleaned up and translated old C and 68k assembly to ANSI C, and made a user interface with the TCL/Tk scripting language and X11 GUI toolkit:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/micropol...

The one little "modernization" I made to the simulation was to copy the radar dish tile animation from the airport, and make it individually placeable as a "high speed network connection" that let people telecommute from home without generating traffic and pollution. That was a tip of the hat to John Gauge's "Net Day" craze of the mid-90's internet.

Chaim Gingold mentions the function s_traf.c/FindPTele in his SimCity Reverse Diagrams animation characters atlas of tiles, under "Telecommunications" -- /* look for telecommunication on edges of zone */ -- if there is a telecommunication dish adjacent to a residential zone, then its residents can telecommute without driving around generating traffic and pollution. I turned that off for the OLPC release, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetDay

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...

Chaim Gingold has analyzed the code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams":

https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...

>SimCity reverse diagrams:

I love this article! Great analysis and solutions. It's nice when user interface designers care enough to think through, implement, try out, and refine such important details.

I developed a multi player version of SimCity for X11 that I released in 1993 and demonstrated at the InterCHI '93 Interactive Experience, which showed you other player's cursors moving around and editing the map, but of course it required a fast network to run on and updated all the clients synchronously, due to the limitations of X-Windows, so there were no interpolation issues. (X-Windows clients aren't even capable of performing local computation and feedback the way NeWS clients could and web browser clients now can, so it was a moot point.)

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcity-anno...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/simcity/simcitynet.h...

The multi player demo showing voting dialogs, multiple cursors, and voting by building the same thing in the same place, starts at 5m45s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA&t=5m45s

One interesting thing about the SimCity cursor was that it was color and shape coded to show which tool was selected. The tool palette (and also the pie menus which had the same icons and layout as the tool palette) served as a legend for the cursor by showing the same color coded outline around the icons as the cursor used. So you could tell which tool other users had selected. You could hide the tool palette to make the map bigger, and use the pie menus instead, which were much more efficient.

Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux: Demo of the latest optimized Linux version of Multi Player SimCity for X11. Ported to Unix, optimized for Linux and demonstrated by Don Hopkins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA

Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo: A demo of the open source Micropolis Online game (based on the original SimCity Classic source code from Maxis), running on a web server, written in C++ and Python, and displaying in a web browser, written in OpenLaszlo and JavaScript, running in the Flash player. Developed by Don Hopkins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

Source Code:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

HAR 2009 talk: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...

Actually, EA released the source code and binary Linux version the original SimCity under GPL-3, which I ported to various Unix platforms including Linux and the OLPC.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...

>Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold.

Granted, EA's QA folks had never QA'ed a Linux game before, so I had to walk them through installing VMWare on Windows and gave them a Linux operating system image to test it with, but it did pass QA, and they released it in binary on the OLPC as well as in source code form.

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

Here's the contract with all the legal details:

https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf

Can also get the original source code for SimCity classic: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

I've got the original monochrome SimCity tile set kicking around somewhere, as well as all of the original tile packs, too. (Medieval Village, Moon Base, etc.) Should be possible to convert and reformat them into a single tile bitmap, and drop it in. If somebody wants to add them, ask me and I'll dig them up.

Original tiles:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...