I am a digital packrat. I have a blob of data that I started way back in the early 80s on my Apple II. It includes Bank Street Writer files from elementary school, and nearly all of my school assignments throughout middle school, high school and college. It also includes at least one SimCity save game file I made way back in March, 1994.
I was eager to see if the file would still boot up. I likely made it on my Mac PowerBook that I got in December of 1993 so I figured a Mac emulator would be a good place to start.
There’s a quick turn-key solution out there called Infinite Mac that lets you boot up a number of different classic Mac configurations in your web browser! They even have a copy of SimCity 2000 already installed. I demoed the emulator in this video from a few years ago:
Initially SimCity did not recognize the file and I couldn’t open it up. But what likely happened was that at some point in the 90’s I copied the file onto my Windows PC for safe keeping and it lost some of its embedded file information. Enter the Mac utility ResEdit that helps manually assign those values.
To figure out what those values were I created a new city and saved it and got the “type” and “creator” for that working file. Once I entered the values in the old file I reloaded SimCity 2000 and voila!
My city is a bit of a mess as it kind of just grew over time without doing much urban planning to get it up and running. I’ve had fun this weekend trying to improve the underground utilities and transportation systems, but I do think the bulldozer will be needed soon to get everything whipped into shape.
The early 90’s were a golden era for PC gaming. PCs of course had the advantage of significantly more storage space and processing power vs. the cartridge-based console titles at the time. But there was more to it than just greater system resources. Developers came up with fun and inventive new gaming concepts. We were blessed with Sierra’s adventure games (including talkie CD-ROMs), awesome flight sims, space simulators like Wing Commander and X-Wing, and of course the dawn of first person shooters with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.