Show us your old school SC2000 cities

[Bdub01 201]

Wow that's old. It's like going back to play the original civilization game.

[Sabretooth78 808]

Most impressive, and it all brings back very fond memories...

 

However looking at the graphics, I have second thoughts about buying SC2000 again... I think I just like SC4 so much better.

SC2k is abandonware - or at least the Macintosh version is.  I downloaded mine a few years ago.  It needs an emulator to run - I know at least Basilisk is available for PCs; I'm not sure about SheepShaver.  I used to run it to play old Mac games on my last Windows XP machine, in fact I still have my setup.

[matias93 7,535]

I played SC2000 in my old thinkpad, and this is one of my old cities:

[Odainsaker 2,136]

All my SC2000 cities are still trapped on 3.5" floppy disks long boxed away.  The old computer in the house still has a 3.5" drive, so maybe I'll try to reinstall SC2000 and search my storage box of unmarked disks.

The magic of the internet still had a few images and zip archives of the first three pieces of my SimCity 2000 recreation of Tokyo:





These were named Shinjuku, Chiyoda, and Minato, and you can even spot a few custom tower scurks of Shinjuku popping up at the edge.  I was in the middle of placing the roads for Shibuya, Ikebukuro, and Ueno to complete the Yamanote rail loop when SimCity 3000 came out.  The original map plans I had laid out used something like 9x9 cities to cover Saitama to Yokosuka and Tama to Edogawa, and the all the remaining cities were hand landscaped and hand forested.  It may have been lost to time on the web, but somewhere on an old disk is the mighty "God mode" map all pasted together in full resolution.  SimCity 2000 did not offer regions, so these cities are only conceptually connected visually with edges reconciled by hand.  Though I doubt it was the first, this was all a very early example of a single simcity spanning several city tiles, even if only three actually were fully developed into functioning cities.

 

My fantasy cities tended to have forested pyramids loosely based on Teotihuacan.  Gee, now I am tempted to fire up the old computer.

[Odainsaker 2,136]

Ah ha!  My old DOS disks of SimCity 2000 and SCURK actually loaded onto my decrepit XP rig and the game seems to work reasonably okay.  However, taking screenshots of the DOS version back in the day involved using an old shareware DOS screen capture utility called PCXDump, which does not cooperate with Windows XP.  Fortunately, the DOS version of SCURK includes a PCX export function, and it still works to grab city scenes.
 
I had to search through dozens of unmarked 3.5" disks, but I did find loose shots an old version of my composite Tokyo region, which I put back together:

Before finishing the foresting of Yokohama, I apparently decided that the individual city scales were visually wrong as I was developing the first cities, regardless of the SC2000 scale claimed by Maxis.  It seems I doubled that scale from 4x6 large maps to potentially 8x12 large maps, and then made the first ward cities of Chiyoda, Minato, and Shinjuku:

These were all planned out by hand on graph paper.  With the magic of SCURK, I even got to put in a few landmarks like Tokyo Tower, the NEC Supertower, Shinjuku Park Tower, the Mitsui Building, the Kasumigaseki Building, the Akasaka Prince Hotel, and the Tokyo Metropolitan City Hall.  Forget the giant spider robot attack, I want a Godzilla disaster!  SimCity preferred to smite me with earthquakes.
 
Somewhere in the area near Tokyo Tower is Atago Hill.  For whatever reason, having that little hill was significant enough that I still remember it almost 20 years later.
 
I also found a version of Kyoto made with two large maps:

Some fudging can be spotted...what was in my reference map a large rice paddy south of Fushimi turned into a bay, and the character "大" ("dai") of the famous mountainside Daimonji bonfire was ironically made out of plopped water so as not to inadvertently burn down the entire forested city.

Okay, I admit, I liked making picturesque maps and regions more than actually building cities.  Here was Hiroshima:

 
My futurist city of Miletos, where the ancient Greek colony of Miletus in Turkey would be the site of a newly enlightened community of coastal arcologies, complete with sheltered kelp beds to ecologically feed the New Society.  This was long before Dubai became famous for its outlandish island projects.  Oh, Brave New World...


The future site of Byzantine Constantinopolis:


Scenes of a canal, pond, and power pyramid from Oceanus Elephantine...yeah, that is my naming sense...







Hiroshima actually did get developed:


 
Just ready for a few strategically placed nuclear plants and the unleashing of a really bad disaster!

 

I fear my geometrically hierarchical cities of Xanadu and Teotihaucan will forever remain trapped on a box of Macintosh-formatted 3.5" disks.

[SimCoug 5,973]

Ah ha!  My old DOS disks of SimCity 2000 and SCURK actually loaded onto my decrepit XP rig and the game seems to work reasonably okay.  

*snip*

 

Wow!  That is so cool!  I played SC2000 like a junkie, but I was never exposed to the modding possibilities.  I do remember using the SC2000 Urban Renewal Kit to create my own buildings, but I'm pretty sure you had to substitute your buildings with original maxis buildings and my feeble creations were never up to maxis standards (I was around 14 at the time...)

 

Seeing those screen shots brings back memories... 

[Forsma7 1,325]

I have a lot of cities in SC2k, being the first sc series I played since 2001.

 

though I can't open any of the cities atm but I still have some images saved in internet beforehand:

 

made in 2005:

 

this one made in 2006 (I think)

 

 

 

Ah ha!  My old DOS disks of SimCity 2000 and SCURK actually loaded onto my decrepit XP rig and the game seems to work reasonably okay.  However, taking screenshots of the DOS version back in the day involved using an old shareware DOS screen capture utility called PCXDump, which does not cooperate with Windows XP.  Fortunately, the DOS version of SCURK includes a PCX export function, and it still works to grab city scenes.
 
I had to search through dozens of unmarked 3.5" disks, but I did find loose shots an old version of my composite Tokyo region, which I put back together:

Before finishing the foresting of Yokohama, I apparently decided that the individual city scales were visually wrong as I was developing the first cities, regardless of the SC2000 scale claimed by Maxis.  It seems I doubled that scale from 4x6 large maps to potentially 8x12 large maps, and then made the first ward cities of Chiyoda, Minato, and Shinjuku:

 

that is amazing! I really like how it turn out just using SC2k

[T Wrecks 10,210]

Odainsaker, your version of Toyko is the best SC2K city I have ever seen. Marvelous work!

[Major from Bajor 24]

Somebody tell me how did he "glue" individual maps into virtual region? Was there a tool for that?

[GMT 389]

I guess the tool is called photoshop...