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Who ever wanted to drive around in the city that they created in SimCity 2000. It's a idea that sounds awesome until its actually seen in action. At least this is in the case of Streets of SimCity. However, I can't crap on the game too much. It was very ambitious. We take open-world games for granted now, but this wasn't the case on middle 90's hardware. While GTA 1 and 2 were open world, they conformed to the limited top-down view for performance reasons. Driver on the PS1 had to make many sacrifices in order for it to be playable on its hardware. While later games like the PC port of Driver, along with Midtown Madness 1 and 2 greatly showed the potential of open-world driving, they would always be limited by the capabilities of there host hardware. This was the case with SOSC. For what it is, it's quite intriguing, despite its many massive issues, which were there due to limitations of the hardware.

I tried to play SOSC on 86Box with the Win95+Pentium1 (75-90MHz) Combo (both with and without Voodoo). Performance left a very lot to be desired for. That was a no go. Once my AMD FX-4300 host bit the dust and I got my new Ryzen 5 5500 setup, I gave SOSC a try again on the Win98+Pentium (166-233MHz) Combo (again, both with and without the Voodoo). While it ran better, it still left a lot to be desired for. However, with SoftGPU, I decided to try the game again. This time, SOSC was actually quite playable!

SoftGPU actually shoes both the potential as well as the limitations of SOSC. The ability to drive around the city that you created in SC2K was the stuff of imaginations. The fact that the game engine had massive performance issues rendering that world showed the limitations at hand. The Fog adjuster was there so that one could control the draw distance depending on the hardware you were playing the game on. Nowadays, you can have it on the lowest setting and there would be no issue. Even then, SOSC still had a short drawing distance. On SoftGPU, for some reason, vehicular combat didn't work. I could collect the ammo, but I couldn't use it against the other opponents. Driving seemed very odd as well, not like a traditional driving game. Yet, I was able to see my city up close did provide for a different perspective. The graphics wasn't the best, but that would be expected for a game from this time. SOSC had no performance issues on under the Win98+SoftGPU+VBox setup though. For what SOSC was trying to accomplish was a bit too ambitious for the hardware of their day, but the fact that the Maxis team tried nonetheless, and still created something that could function still gives me respect for these developers.

VirtualBox 7.0 is virtualizing a multimedia gaming configuration with a single CPU core allocated to it (host is an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 6-Core Processor Running at 4.2HGHz), 512MB's of RAM, a VESA 1.2 Compatible Display Adapter with 3D Acceleration enabled via Passthrough with SoftGPU. An AC'97 Intel 82801AA Audio Device is installed with the appropriate drivers. Also installed is an AMD PCnet NIC. Windows 98SE is installed in the VM.

SoftGPU by JHRobotics (GitHub)
https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu

Songs Used:
Blue Fog By Brian Salter
And Uploaded By Whisthorn5096
(WebTV RMF File)
(Slowed To 85% Of
Playback Speed)
Recorded Using Beatnik

Software Used:
Recorded With OBS Studio
Composed In Kdenlive

Hardware Used:
PC equipped with a
AMD Ryzen 5 5500 CPU
6 Cores Running At 4.2GHz
AMD Radeon RX570 GPU
Windows 11

Headspace RMF Collections
Uploaded By Whisthorn5096
https://archive.org/details/headspace-rmf-collections