Hi Hajo, It's 4.45am on the 6th Sept here. I've been playing Simutrans since about 11am yesterday. I was looking at the beautiful graphics that we now have and it got me wondering about earlier versions of the game.
I may be a bit out on the dates but I seem to remember playing the game in late 1995, early 1996. I pulled the game from the now defunct Australian PC User magazine.
I remember playing PAK128, (don't remember the version) and later PAK64.
I was thinking about the then forum and who was around then. I know you were of course, also Napik (Tomas) who ran the "Home of Simutrans" website. I'm sure Prissi and Isaac were there, but I can't remember anyone else.
So I'd like to invite all the old members from that era to give us their memories of the game.
Actually I ran first across simutrans 2001 on the c't CD (when I was in Japan). This was one of my favourite game there, although the institute there blocked the download webseite (but not the betas from the simugraph forum). I did not posted there at that time, and my attention was distracted by CivEvo, for which I also made some addon and a little later by my now wife ;)
Returned to Berlin I really started on add-ons and made the first Japanpak. Around that time there was discussion about the acceleration of vehicles, and Hajo asked me, if I would not like to program those ideas into the real code. I did so, and the result was nice. At the same time I also started a unicode translation for japanese, and started to introduce Unicode to simutrans. Well and this aparently convinced Hajo, that I was able enough to take on with SImutrans (with Hendrik and Dario at that time).
And the rest is history ...
I told you my memory was fading ;D I can't remember who was around then, I can't even remember if there was dedicated forum.:-\ I'm pretty sure that Napiks web site was up and running though. I remember that I gave up playing CIV3 to play Simutrans. I haven't stopped since.