SAsantix·Oct 24, 2026
The implementation: https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
In How to run a city builder on 16 MHzSimHacker
micropolis
C2015–2026
SimHacker / micropolis
micropolis
Automatically exported from code.google.com/p/micropolis
7Distinct people
53Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
1.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Automatically exported from code.google.com/p/micropolis
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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.…
DonHopkins used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- simhacker/micropoliscore · linked in 5 of the same discussions
- yoottowermanagement/yoottower · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:53 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year53 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-04-01 11:00:56 UTC to 2026-10-24 12:55:29 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesThe original 1989 SimCity box was a Rorschach test that cost Maxis $50k.
The cover was a Bakelite toy city simulator appliance with a red MONSTER disaster button, and a stompy T-Rex-looking creature waving over San Francisco on its TV screen.
Maxis never called it Godzilla on the box or in the game. Reviewers looked at the inkblot and saw Godzilla anyway.
Original monster cover:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...
Revised cover after the lawsuit, monster swapped for a tornado (the MONSTER button survived):
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...
In Feb 2024 I emailed Jeff Braun (Maxis co-founder/CEO) and asked what actually happened and how much Maxis had to pay. He wrote back the same day:
> Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was
Read the rest
a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement.
All the box scans are in the Micropolis repo -- high res front, back with the "floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters" disaster list, side panels, and the platform variants, each with descriptions:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...
Full email thread:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...
The back of the box kept advertising monsters as a feature the same year the monster got lawyered off the front.
The function names in the code all refered to it like "MakeMonster()", but admittedly there was a "GOD" symbol in the code used to index the Monster sprite likw "GetSprite(GOD)", but Toho could not have know that, since it was a C preprocessor macro that was compiled away in the binary:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
Toffoli and Margolis's CAM-6 cellular automata machine board for the IBM-PC was programmed in FORTH. I made a simulator, and this video shows some of the original FORTH code that I saved, as well as my own compatible FORTH CA rule computer that le me run the rules from the book, which produced lookup table for the hardware, which the simulator is compatible with. I've since rewritten it in JavaScript. It's not live coding, but it has a live performance user interface (quite weird and hard to figure out, especially if you haven't read the book, but I demonstrate it in the video).
CAM6 Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck
Original FORTH code that drove the actual CAM-6 board:
tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt
tomt-users-forth-scr.txt: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth
Read the rest
-scr.txt
My compatible CA compiler and glue to the simulator written in C:
cam.f.txt: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/cam.f.txt
compile.f.txt: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/compile.f.txt
An old version of the simulator written C, before I rewrote it in JavaScript:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...
The JavaScript CAM6 simulator:
CAM6.js: https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...
I developed the open source version of this game, called Micropolis.
Great to see more people building on it! A few years before the LLM era,
Sam Earle took a different approach -- training reinforcement learning
agents with fractal neural networks to play Micropolis, optimizing for
population at variable map scales:
Using Fractal Neural Networks to Play SimCity 1 and Conway’s Game of Life at Variable Scales:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.03896
His gym-city repo wraps Micropolis as an OpenAI Gym environment:
https://github.com/smearle/gym-city
The interesting finding was that fractal architectures with weight-sharing
let agents transfer local strategies (zone placement, power connection)
into deeper networks with larger receptive fields -- giving them both
local and global spatial reasoning from one set of weights. But even
those agents coul
Read the rest
dn't manage demand at larger scales, so the spatial
reasoning problem discussed here has been hard for RL too, not just LLMs.
He described the project and we discussed it on the Micropolis repo in this issue:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/issues/86
He used the old PyGTK interface for his project:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...
These days I'd recommend the MicropolisCore repo instead. It's a C++
rewrite independent of any UI, compiles to WASM via Emscripten/Embind,
and runs headless in Node or with any browser UI:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore
Live demo:
https://micropolisweb.com
One note on naming: the open source license from EA requires using
"Micropolis" rather than "SimCity" (which is EA's trademark). The
Micropolis Public Name License allows use of the original name:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/Micropol...
This matters more than people think. Jeff Braun, CEO of Maxis, told me
this story:
"Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our
monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few
magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took.
Toho called it 'confusion in the marketplace'. We paid $50k for Godzilla
to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the
minimum they take for Godzilla infringement."
So please: call the game Micropolis, not SimCity, or EA's lawyers may
come knocking. And unlike Toho, EA and their Saudi investors
and Jarod Kushner might want to use their bone saws on you,
which are much worse than Godzilla.