Very cool to see that the original SimCity code has been updated and released under the name Micropolis.

There is coverage on Boing Boing:

 SimCity has just been released as free software under the GPL version 3 license (though the name has been changed to Micropolis for trademark reasons; it was the original working title). This was precipitated by the inclusion of SimCity on the One Laptop Per Child XO machines, but no reason the kids should have all the fun. Can’t wait to see the SimCity hacks that emerge now:

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.

There is more detailed coverage about the open source release on this blog.

Back in college, I spent a good chunk of my junior year coding up a fast sprite library for the Mac called “Pixie” which had hand-tuned blitters, layering, and other goodies that seem shockingly dated now in a world of graphics cards, modern rendering pipelines, and modern gaming engines.  Back then, getting 30 frame-per-second animation for about fifty 32×32 animated sprites was considered real bragging rights for a 68K-based Mac.  I can’t tell you how excited back then I would have been to download and play with this.

Check it out, if you are so inclined.