In the last post of this series we talked with Hajo about the first years of Simutrans. However, many of the players reading this today have never played a Simutrans version from Hajo's era. If you ever wanted to take a taste of one of the earlier Simutrans releases, today is your lucky day!
The first demo version
A screenshot of Simutrans demo version 0.50, with text in German.
The first of the versions we have made available is not the actual first release, but it is pretty close. This beta version was released on 02/05/1999, while the history.txt starts just two months before (06/03/1999). As the "demo" name suggest, this version has practically no content, and crashes frequently, since it was just a version to show up the Simutrans engine working and a little more. Because of this and the need to use a DOSBOX, we recommend you to skip this version and try the next one if you want to truly play an early Simutrans.
The first playable version
A screenshot of Simutrans beta version 0.78.7 with the minimap and some toolbars and windows opened.
Thanks to the donation of user Khaki we got our hands on one of the firsts playable versions of Simutrans, beta version 0.78.7 (released on 14/06/01, two years after the previous demo). As you can see in the image, this version has already some basic working tools (rail, road, ship and terrain tools). The minimap is also present, with a familiar view.
You can play this version natively on Windows or with WINE under Linux, although you might find some game-breaking bugs (particularly one with pop-up windows).
The Museum and other versions
In the SourceForge Museum you can find the versions mentioned in this post and other versions from Hajo's era (beta versions 0.80, 0.84.01, 0.84.04.1 and 0.84.10) which were recovered thanks to Markus Pristovsek. Do you have any other previous version of Simutrans not listed there? Please share it with us!
And of course, you can still download (and compile) any version of Simutrans since it became open-source on SourceForge.
Schedule of the Simutrans 25th Anniversary Posts
Talking about Markus Pristovsek, join us two weeks from now as we will interview the lead developer for the 25th Simutrans anniversary!
- 2022-06-30 - A look back at our shared history. The Simutrans Timeline.
- 2022-07-15 - An interview with Hansjörg Malthaner, the Founding Father.
- 2022-07-30 - The Simutrans Museum
- 2022-08-15 - An interview with Markus Pristovsek, the Adoptive Father
- 2022-08-30 - ??
- 2022-09-15 - ??
- 2022-09-30 - ??
- 2022-10-15 - ??
- From 2022-10-30 to 2022-12-31 - ??