Battledrome Round 3: SimCity

This week we’re not only going old school, not even pre-school, but we’re taking it pre-natal with a game that was released before I was even born. The game is SimCity for MS DOS which can be downloaded for free here. The goal for the Battledrome is to have the highest population by January 1910 (ten in-game years, about 15-20 minutes depending on your speed setting).

The settings are easy difficulty, with disasters disabled (when the game has begun, click on the ‘disasters’ button and select ‘disable’.

Post your population in the comments of this post and the most impressive city populations will be compared on the next NZCast.

“What the hell is MS DOS?”

If you’re familiar with DOS games and how to use DOSBox ignore the rest of this post and get playing!

MS DOS is the operating system that SimCity ran on. You won’t be able to play SimCity on a modern computer without the help of software like DOSBox, which emulates the OS. It’s free to download and can be found here. Download and run the .exe file and you should see a window that looks like this:

Now we need to tell DOSBox where the game files are located. We do this by ‘mounting’ the drive location containing the files you extracted. I extracted mine to the desktop, so I use the command shown below in the screenshot. Be sure to amend yours to reflect the location of your files. We then navigate to the drive by typing its name and hitting return (in my case it is simply c:). To run the game just type the name of the executable, hit return, and the game will start!