-- Unlimited city funds at 0xBA4 in Micropolis *.cty files.
Recently the sourcecode to the game Micropolis (SimCity) has been
licensed under the GPL. You may find it
here.
A bug exists that prevents the tiles from appearing in some display configurations.
Download the patch here
(even though the patch name indicates OSX, it works for Linux systems too). Once
everything is compiled and installed you should be able to play Micropolis.
Poking at the the city save files with a hex editor shows that they are
binary files of fixed length. Each
square of the land and what is placed on it is represented in a fixed number of bytes
at an absolute position in the file (you should see a lot of patterns of repeating
values). This should allow to do some custom map-making outside
of the game interface, but I have not yet experimented with that.
An interesting value in the save file is the amount of funds at offset 0xBA4.
This is a signed 32-bit integer, so it tops out at 0x7FFFFFFF or $2,147,483,647. That much
is probably overkill for the game (and may lead to an overflow that will
drop your funds to $0 if your fund gets too high in the game). Set a sensible value such as
0x000F4240 or $1,000,000 to get your city growing quickly and help pay for all those
police department the citizens are always wanting.
You can save and quit the game at any point and increase the funds this way as often
as you want. It will also allow you to set your tax level at 0% which will
encourage people to move in even more.