SimRefinery Recovered
Interesting! The game reminds me a bit of another industrial simulation game called "Oakflat", a nuclear power plant operations simulator for MS-DOS (and later Windows).
The DOS version can be played on archive.org, but I'm not sure if it's possible to get the Windows version anymore.
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Oakflat_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
There's still a huge pursuit around this in most of manufacturing. Operational engineering groups are pushing for high fidelity digital twins to test out process control code before it hits the physical plant. The merge between simulation games and simulations gets even more blurred now that some software companies are replicating the entire plant in a 3d "game engine" and using VR goggles for immersion for operator training
I wonder if it supports negative oil prices.
While on the subject of old games, does anyone have access to a working version of "Vogon Poetry"? This was a shoot-em-up game bundled with Sidekick Plus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1988/03/21/s...
Did Maxis just lose the game? Why didn't the company have a copy of their own game.
Didn't take long but LGR has just released a video of him playing it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6Cqn5rTfs
Great work! Is there a place I can checkout for good quality non spammy "business simulation" games?
Clinging through to the Archive.org link...
Not sure if it's nostalgia, but the Maxis logo still looks really good. It doesn't scream 1992.
Some of the best strategic sims: Sim City -> Theme Hospital -> Game Dev Tycoon -> Kerbal Space Program -> Factorio
This is so cool that someone recovered it. Reminds me of all the crazy burned CDs I have with random software from the days of yore.
Here's the previous discussion where it was shown / talked about but thought to be lost:
A weird error happens if I try to run the embedded javascript dosbox emulator on iOS Mobile Safari. It launches the PKSFX INSTALL.EXE but most (but not all) files fail to extract with a CRC error. Emulation bug or a flaw in Mobile Safari's javascript engine? It seems strange that it can interpret the entire pksfx x86 code without crashing while still yielding corrupted CRCs? If there are bitflips or miscalculations you would think the interpreted x86 cpu would crash long before even printing the pksfx banner. On a different computer, unzip -t validates the INSTALL.EXE zip contents.
It was litteraly developped by the BS division.
>From 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games.
What they built feels like the business simulation holy grail where it transcends to being fun as opposed to setting triangle distributions in Arena (example of an old-school business sim software we used at some point to simulate ambulance times).
Now if only there was interest for other types of simulations like: SimClimate, SimSociety, SimPandemic.
Awesome!
Now i only need to find out what game i have played.
It was also a Simulation, one person in a house and you were able to buy a tv and something with insurance was also happening.
Interesting how some assets are never released to the public.
Very neat, although I very much wanted the lets-play
Wondering about the cheats in this game :)
Does it simulate Hubbert peak ? :-)
Ok
How much of your credits do you have to spend on media outreach to challenge the science of climate change?
For those who wondered like me who this software was built for, the answer is in the full article:
> The operators at the refinery sometimes had trouble getting a big picture for what was happening at the plant beyond their particular area of focus. “The whole goal if this was to teach operators that they are part of a bigger system,” Skidmore said. “Their concern at the time was that operators tended to be very focused on their one plant, and their one thing they do, and so [they] weren’t keeping in mind that what they do affected other parts of the plant. So they wanted a training tool that allowed operators to manipulate inputs and outputs of the various pieces of the refinery process to see how they impact.”
> The non-technical staff at the Richmond refinery needed to know how it worked too. The people in human resources and accounting weren’t chemical engineers, but it would help their work to see how the different areas of the plant were networked together, how one department affected another department.
https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/