Bringing one SimCity per child to the OLPC

Don Hopkins ported SimCity to Unix in 1991. Today, he is putting the finishing touches on a GPL version of this classic computer game for the One Laptop Per Child project's XO laptop.

By Howard Wen, LinuxWorld.com, 12/11/07

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In 1991, DUX Software licensed the rights to port Maxis Software's SimCity to Unix. Don Hopkins, working then as a contractor for DUX, rewrote the Mac version of the game to run on numerous Unix platforms. More recently, John Gilmore, an advisor to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, suggested the idea to Hopkins of bringing the game to the OLPC's XO laptop. Hopkins told SimCity creator Will Wright, who was enthusiastic about the idea and got the ball rolling at Electronic Arts, the current owner of Maxis.

Hopkins has done the majority of the additional programming needed for the XO port. He started with the TCL/Tk version of the game that he originally created for the Unix platforms. Gilmore has been helping in debugging and sorting out intellectual property issues in order to have the game, under the name Micropolis, released under the GPL for the XO.

We spoke with Hopkins, who described for us the technical nature of the work involved in this port.

What have been the major challenges in porting SimCity to the OLPC's XO laptop?

Installing and building the early version of the OLPC development environment was a challenge, but the development process has gotten easier as more people have volunteered to work on the project, gone through the process, submitted bugs and fixed them.

The main programming tasks were converting SimCity to use one full-screen window, supporting sound, and integrating SimCity into the Sugar environment by making a Python adapter activity. The Etoys project provided a good example of how to do that.

Please describe what the porting process entailed.

Because the OLPC uses the X Window System, which SimCity already supported, the port was relatively easy. Most of the work involved re-designing the windows and dialogs to work with the full-screen window manager, making a splash screen, a new start-up screen, supporting sound, adjusting fonts, removing old dead code, fixing bugs, and making a simple Sugar wrapper written in Python that runs TCL/Tk SimCity in another process, and roughly integrates it with the OLPC Sugar user interface.

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