Apparently coming off the release of SimCity for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), Don Hopkins’ port of SimCity for Unix has been released as free, open-source software. To avoid copyright issues with EA, the game has been renamed “Micropolis“.

For those of you who are into that type of thing, the Micropolis OLPC activity source includes the original(ish) C source of the game. Bil Simser says there’s some “pretty craptastic code”, but you also have to consider the time when it was written: everything had to fit into 640 KB of memory (probably less than .01% of what your computer has today!) and it had to be as fast as possible.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t run on Windows (yet), but the graphics are completely separated from the simulation (something that makes me happy as a software engineer), so it should be only a matter of time (in my estimation) before you can find Windows Micropolis, or Micropolis in lots of other interesting places. (via Slashdot)