Jeff Minter's history of llamasoft biography thingy is a good read...
http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/lshistory1.phpI remember reading about Peter Scott managing to port the original Sim City onto the BBC Micro towards the end of it's life time. There's a bit here..
http://beebgames.com/psinterv.php
...But SIM CITY was my one major programming achievement. I was a competent programmer, no better, no worse than many. Gary Partis, for example, was a far better programmer than me. But not being that good had its advantages. I couldn't do that many fancy tricks so I'd try and make the games playable. I didn't want to impress anyone with my technical knowledge, so I tried extra hard on the graphics and sound.
SIM CITY wasn't cute, wasn't easy and simply didn't seem possible. Fitting a 512K game into 20K a game full of artificial intelligence and hugely complex algorithms.. a nightmare. But I think it came out OK. Won awards and stuff. And the original programmer even said he preferred it over the C64 version (a disk-only game with three times as much memory as mine). I was and still am proud of that 'un.
I think he goes in more detail somewhere on the
Stairwaytohell forums. Can't be fucked to find it though.
The way people used to find ways to push systems to do crazy things is always interesting. Developers are a bit spoilt for resources nowadays.