Also, Fabian Wesner's posted about using Claud Code to analyze the original micropolis repo's code and documentation to generate a new version.

Here is a deep dive "podcast" he generated (presenting Claud's analysis in a conversational format) that describes the work. I listened to it, and it got the important trademark and licensing issues right, was quite comprehensive and technically accurate, up until the end where they said maybe there's something to learn about city planning from SimCity! ;)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SGAkLIb4CQMPKU7TJ2sRdEjc0Dh...

It pretty much parallels the analysis docs in his repo, which are also quite accurate:

https://github.com/FabianWesner/micropolis/tree/master/docs

This lightning talk I gave at HAR 2009 goes into what you can actually learn from playing SimCity/Micropolis (and reading and extending the code), thanks to Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's philosophy of Constructionist Education, and it's much wider and more generally useful than just city planning:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...

To save you the indignity of LinkedIn scraping your browser extensions, here is a copy of Fabian Wesner's post and my response with the link spying urls resolved:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fabian-wesner_micropolis-simc...

Fabian Wesner | CTO | Passionate about AI and Entrepreneurship | 1 month ago

Claude Code is extremely good at documenting legacy software. That's a huge blessing, especially when the original developers are no longer around or are finally ready to retire.

If you haven't tried this, you might be missing out. So I did it for you.

#Micropolis is the open-source release of the original #SimCity, published by Electronic Arts in 1989. EA released the source code under GPLv3 in 2008 for the One Laptop Per Child project. The codebase is decades old, and there's likely no one left who knows it inside out.

SimCity was one of the very first games I played, back in 1990 on my father's 286. Just a few months after the Wall fell. So this one is personal.

I let Claude Code read the entire codebase and write a full documentation. As far as I can see, it looks correct and complete. I'm no expert on this particular codebase, but that's exactly the point: there might be no expert left on earth. I have tried this on other software where I am an expert, and the results are surprisingly accurate.

You can find the resulting docs and the prompt here: https://github.com/FabianWesner/micropolis/tree/master/docs

I also converted the docs into a podcast episode for easier consumption:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SGAkLIb4CQMPKU7TJ2sRdEjc0Dh...

Enjoy!

I know I’m not the first to use Claude Code on this treasure and - of course - I already rebuilt the game with JavaScript.