SimRefinery EXISTS! Let's play it!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 มิ.ย. 2020
- Playing the long lost Maxis game Sim Refinery for the first time! On a retro MS-DOS PC, of course. This obscure SimCity spinoff thing is a prototype developed for Chevron in 1992, with the goal of helping employees learn how the business works.
Here's that awesome Phil Salvador article:
obscuritory.com/sim/when-simc...
Play it in your browser or download it here:
archive.org/details/simrefinery
archive.org/details/sim-refinery - เกม
The SimRefinery Tour Book/instruction manual has also now been found and archived! Check out a scan of it here, it explains a ton about the simulation:
archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mode/2up
Can you get him to finish the game or publish the code?
Do you know games with a realistic and complex chemistry and physics implemented that do not suck?
...and LGR is the PERFECT channel to review/tour this game!
Jan Girke “kerbal space program”
I love your Roland speakers. Seriously. If you get tired of them, I'll send you my address.
*Clint:* Do you suppose any of the cheat codes that this variant of _SimCity_ was built from work, or are there any cheat/developer codes at all?
Oh no, Premium octane got set to 47. My SimCorvette is going to run like ASS.
Is that 98 or 102 in RON? Or does a Corvette run fine on 95?
The one before (91) was already around 95 RON, going down to 47? That's like driving with isoheptane.
*SimASS
47 octane would destroy a Diesel engine from pinging and would still be too inert to be ignited in a two-stroke engine. A more useless fuel you'd be hard pressed to find. You'd probably want to make lubricants or solvents out of it.
@@Rutherford_Inchworm_III diesel engines cannot "ping" (preignite) as fuel is not injected during the intake stroke, but rather right at TDC of compression stroke. Gasoline engines, in contrast, are much more sensitive to their fuel as it must resist combustion until the spark event. This is one reason diesel engines are superior, as they shift the precision and consistency requirements from the recurring consumable (fuel) to the engine.
"Volume name of A: is FARTDICK"
Never change Clint, you absolute diamond.
First thing I noticed too! Laughed my ass off!
@@hackmasterjay3085 Same.
Clint does not have an Inner Child because he never grew up. He just pretends to be an adult when he needs to.
That does not sound like a comfortable sensation.
@@hackmasterjay3085 me too, and I run to th comments ;p
I grew up as the son of a chemical engineer at Chevron in a refinery town in CA. I fully remember this when I was a kid, playing it on my dads office computer. I think I had just discovered sim city for Mac at the time. What a blast from the past.
Also, I never realized until now how much I picked up on how a refinery works, just being a kid in a refinery town where we could visit for community days once per year. I had an internship there before college, after graduating high school, where I worked in IT and had to put on a Nomex suit and traipse out to different corners of the refinery to track down PCs that hadn’t auto-updated on the network. Just an 18 year old finding my way through some processing plants to various control rooms, looking for neglected computers to run an update on...I never realized how fun and cool it was, at the time.
Richmond, CA?
drgribb El Segundo, CA
Did it let you do anything or was it this same version shown here?
Crazy to think oil refineries will be a thing of the past in the not too distant future.
I came to the comments to hear a story like this. Awesome.
There's something oddly eerie about an unfinished 90s-era game. You never quite know what it's going to do.
Dude, I worked at Maxis (in the 90s) AND Chevron Corp. and this is the first time i'm seeing this. This may have been just a model of the Richmond Refinery.
What work did you do SimCity 2000 or 3000? :D
StigDesign1 I was there for all the stuff no one wants to play or totally forgot. Sim Golf, Streets of Sim City, Sim Copter and Marble Drip. There was also an unreleased Diablo clone another studio was working on (Crucible) and at the time internally The Sims was still refereed to as Dollhouse. Everyone was focused on SC 3K but it was terrible. I forget if it was DX 4 or DX 5 but it was in a bad state. All that code was scrapped when EA took over. There was also the fact that installing one of those early 3D games from Maxis had about a 5% chance of tanking your computer.
StigDesign1 I remember loving SimCopter...but man it truly was a mess of crashes and terrible performance. Honestly though I really enjoyed it!
@@NoshAbroad It was awesome loading up my SimCity 2000 cities into SimCopter and flying around seeing what I'd built.
@@NoshAbroad every game you mentioned is a fond memory for me. Nicely done, friend.
I live in Richmond, CA, where Chevron's refinery is. The intro map looks like a pretty close approximation to how their Richmond refinery looks, and that's really cool!
I suspect you could not print out maps of these refineries for security's sake. Wondering that perhaps that these maps were based on actual real-world sited refineries.
@@tsarstepan Google Maps walks into the room...
@@tsarstepan Clint should try to hook up a printer and see if the option becomes available
The secret sauce is inside the tanks, like minimum temperatures and catalyst formulas.
Having low/zero NOx burners in your crackers will reduce fuel usage and the amount of “scrubbing” you need for your exhaust.
@@aturchomicz821 google itself didn't exist yet back in 1992, neither did the ability to just hop online and look at glorious satellite images of everything and everywhere anytime you want like we have today. widespread home internet was still in its baby steps.
OK I could be wrong, but having worked at a similar type of chemical plant, it looks like it was being developed as a training tool for new employees. The training where i was took weeks before you were even able to go to the production areas to start your on the job training, even for people with degrees in the field. I would love to see this finished tho and I am so glad to see a video on it done by you.
That's what it was! The full story is here:
obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/#pt2
mike silva
Girl whaaaat?
Yeah, this is correct. My father worked at the Chevron Richmond Refinery where they were basing it on and beta tested it. Apparently Chevron thought it was too expensive, and had a very limited market. Chevron was paying for all of the R&D costs and eventually decided they were no longer interested.
They just don't train 'em like they used to
@@LGRBlerbs thank you I am going to read this!
It seems like this game could use some refinement
I'll see myself out
Ta dum tiss
That was slick.
@@adventureoflinkmk2 👍
@@Dark.Shingo 🤣🤣🤣
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I mean, seriously.
Plot wist: Game Actually connects to a real refinery
“ Ender’s Oil Refinery Game”
Slow clap
may as well, would explain why the prices go up and down like an idiot is in control of the refinery.
War games
I worked as an environmental consultant for Chevron at one of their former refinery sites up until fairly recently and I am getting so many flashbacks to actually being on site. This is surprisingly accurate, but that shouldn't really be that much of a surprise given that it's Maxis.
So the refinery isn’t doing anything initially. You need to click on a valve, in the crude unit window, for the raw oil to start flowing to the refinery. At that point it starts resembling a bit like factorio and you can set cut off points and see the numbers go up or down between the different parts of the refinery.
When you were just aimlessly clicking around I had a flashback to when you blew up an airplane sitting still on a taxiway and kept waiting for another explosion.
It says “argentina heavy”... old kids will remember when this country used to export crude
Why did it stop to do that?
Guess they ran out of it
I asked Chevron for this, and they told me "Chevron’s training materials are considered proprietary information and company confidential, and are not distributed outside the company." I'm excited to try it out. Thanks for the vid, Clint!
I have a feeling that's why SimRefinery can no longer be found on the Internet Archive anymore...
@@AssaulteedOne As if oil companies don't need to polish their public image.
You know, on one hand, I'm so genuinely happy this was found and that SimGeeks will be able to play with it. On the other hand, just looking at it is making me go crosseyed.
It is quite complex and yet incomplete :L
Having worked as a lab tech in a refinery, many of the things they have "implemented" (crude, LPG, blending of different petroleum products) as concept in the game tickles my fancy. I am confident that the different oil types have different properties. From my time in the business I remember that oil from Venezuela was quite low quality. Lot of sulfide and Mercaptan. One could always smell if the ship currently docked had carried Venezuelan oil before they came in to get new oil from us...
Theo Bombas yes, Venezuelan oil is bad, very heavy that's why the "Orimulsion" was invented, to make it a bit more useable. Curious to see someone knowing about that :)
@@Phobos11 well, as I said, I worked as a lab tech so you just kind of learned a lot of different kinds of stuff on oil when you analyze the stuff for a living :)
"sour"
According to the article they started with the codebase of SimFarms to make this, so that would explain why it seems so similar
Try out the SimFarm cheat/developer codes, see if any of them work if at all.
Very neat. I can kind of see why this didn't take off in a big way for Maxis, though, especially if the target market was real-world training. I worked on an industrial training simulator project years ago. Our customers wanted accuracy so much that our simulator solution ran connected to real control-room HMI units as the front end. Sim Refinery definitely looks much more like a game. Basically the difference between MS Flight Simulator vs a real 747 simulator that pilots train on.
Now we just need to find Sim Mars
That'd be great. And The Mindwarp!
www.gamesthatwerent.com/2010/09/the-mindwarp-a-lost-maxis-game/
Sim earth let's you terraform Mars that's as close as I've ever seen
And Simsville.
*Elon Musk beams into the chat*
We need to talk to Will Wright about releasing his unreleased Sim games!
This isn't a prototype for SimFarm. It's a prototype for Factorio.
"SimRefinery EXISTS" that got me chills down my spine
I've never seen a KAO floppy going bad. So I'm not surprised it still worked.
My thoughts exactly... When he said "these things often go bad" I was thinking "But it's a KAO!, of course it works!"
@@joshmbrown42 KAO is a Japanese cosmetics company that made floppy disks for some reason.
Nintenloup Wolf (FR) KAO 4 L1FE!!1111
5:52 "External Events" is likely the analog of "Disasters" from Sim City. Aka random "bad" stuff will happen, likely ala oil shortages/embargoes, oil spills, changes to legislation, etc...
5:23 "Trajectory headings for multiple-impact re-entry vehicles" - What does that mean? I don't know. But it's GREAT!
8:20 those candle looking objects are flares and I used to design control systems for them!!! Back in the old days before Honeywell purchased the company. Also John Zink and Zeeco all based in the Tulsa, OK area.
Woah! What is their purpose?
Anyone notice that the backdrop for the title screen is roughly similar to the one used for the SNES version of SimCity?
Ah, this is exciting! Awesome!
Ah, Raptor himself!
So it looks like someone needs to decompile this and complete.
Meanwhile Maxis is too cucked and too woke via EA to put out anything as interesting as this... 😒
@@JaysMissingKidney pretty sure maxis is dead at this point
@hi there Imagine not starting a sentence with a capital letter, despite editing your comment at least once already. You sad, sad loser.
@hi there bet you had to suppress a "yikes" lol
You can't just decompile and complete. How the hell do you "decompile" a program? It would be easier to build our own new game called SimRefinery 2.
This is my favorite kind of stuff lost media is so interesting.
Mine too I love anything lost or obscure
Not lost have a copy from 90s floppy disk full version. Already forgot where my dad got it in the 90s I can do all build something and bulldoze it too might release it on internet for ev1 to enjoy and send the might be only surviving copy to LGR
Love it when its video games like Sega Saturn. Hopefully one day we get a dump of Sonic 3D for Saturn
@@Honeybearsphone It's mind blowing that this little bit of data sitting on a dead format for over 2 decades was finally able to reach the current internet, so it can duplicated and worked on forever now.
@@powerfulshammy yeah, now you don't, nice try though.
When anything is recovered like this, it makes me smile with absolute joy! Sometimes it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to recover something and I am eternally thankful to the people that do these kinds of things!!!
I knew after reading an article this morning that I could count on you to put something out ASAP. Thanks!
Literally just read the article and popped on TH-cam to search if anyone had uploaded anything. Checked my sub box first and here it is!
Watched Phil's livestream last night and it was amazing to see the game in action and hear more behind the research that went into the article and finally the discovery of the floppy. Glad to see you playing it on your channel!
Thanks for LGR Blerbs, this is the type of thing I originally subscribed to LGR for and I'm glad to see these types of videos come out where it's just random interesting stuff that you get excited to talk about.
There's some discussion on reddit about how there might be a finished version of this on a floppy disk some where
The first thing I thought when I saw these news that was you gonna love it! Thanks for making the quick video about the game!
I've been binge watching your stuff, not in any order and not that it pertains to any of my daily life but I love your content. Keep it up.
Sometimes you can find fun or interesting things in these old programs, either on purpose or for debugging, but taking this one apart for a quick glance didn't seem to show much other than what it's supposed to be. I'm betting the developers didn't have a lot of fun making it.
Very cool vid! Glad to see ya so happy. I was never a fan of any SIMS type games. But, Still stoked that you enjoyed it. All the best!
I’m a Pipefitter, and I did a Turnaround on Small Refinery in Mississippi. This is really neat, I never knew that this existed, and the Unit Names are real to those in a Refinery. The Crude Unit is where I worked installing new piping around old equipment, I talked to a Operator about how it worked a little once. Light, Medium, Heavy Diesel, or Crude. He said that light was closest to what ends up in your Car if I can recall. Anyways Operators are always out in Each unit taking Samples to check Chemical Makeup for Flaws or Possible Hazards. Some Units used Sulfuric Acid, not mention H2S Gas that may be present. Just this is really awesome, need to try it out
This is so good LGR, thanks for the video. I'm still waiting for Sim City 2000 windows 95 special edition to come out. It had the extra zoom and special and extra buildings.
It already is out
@@everythingpony Prove?
@@everythingpony where?? I can't find it anywhere.
dabbing my oils to this vid, thank you for your golden voice BTW always soothing retro/vintage PC content thank you Clint
I'm really enjoying the Blurb channel LGR, its nice to get the extra content, really appreciate it!
I love how these old games and programs still pop-up.
I had no idea this channel existed. LGR should advertise this on his main channel. I saw this from an Engadget article.
Yeah, Blerbs has become the channel that carried forward the mentality of the early LGR videos. There are games, there are review, and they are lazy. It's great.
*urmie:* You also know about the *LGR Foods* channel, right?
@@Christopher-N That I do good sir.
@@JcGross93 I like more researched video but those one are really chill and I'm enjoying too.
This is freaking awesome, I need to try it myself.
The lack of the catchy SimCity SNES theme song on the title screen made me sad though 😞
Lol, yeah, that music...
Meanwhile you've just reminded me of the awful SNES port of Sim City 2000...
(well, Super Famicom)
It's... Terrible. XD
And it was released in 1995...
Yet it doesn't even support the mouse released in 1993...
... Even though you play it by manipulating a cursor with the d-pad... >__
@@KuraIthys
I remember really enjoying it, altho that may just be because it was the first place i played 2000
Heck yeah, as soon as i saw the announcement i was giddy to see you feature it :D
0:23 You almost turned into the Christmas Clone there!
I worked on a big construction project at a chevron refinery around 2015. Workers there seemed genuinely happy and seemed like Chevron treated everyone relatively well. This was probably a very cool way for people to learn about their new job!
Having grown up in Wilmington, CA during a portion of my childhood something like this would have struck all of my curiosity buttons, especially since Wilmington and parts of Long Beach are just brimming with refineries and oil stuffs...
Literally just read this in the news. Glad you posted.
I can't wait to try it out. Sim City and and Sim Ant are two of my favorite PC games from that time.
Being corrected by your future self has the same vibes as those narrator memes.
“Aw, it doesn’t look like it has fire animations...”
Narrator: “It actually did.”
I love the content please keep it up you have a good channel here
I'm now convinced your Blerb idea was a good one. Some things are not enough to justify putting the time and effort of script, in depth ressearch and multi-camera production, but are still worth sharing.
This entire video is very analogous to how I felt when Pokémon Gold's 1997 beta was discovered, dumped, and showcased to the public and how I got to try the ROM myself. I totally understand your awe and excitement here Clint, I love it.
I worked for engineering at a biopharma production facility for a while.
The similarities in overseeing and management in this game are pretty close!! Looking forwards to playing it myself. Really love the balancing in this, super exciting.
Duuuuude, I have been hoping for this for so long!
NICE, DOWNLOADING NOW, WANTED TO PLAY THIS FOR A LONG TIME
Wow, I've been waiting for like forever for someone to unearth this treasure!
At roughly 13:14 that "barn" at the top right corner definitely gives off the SimFarm vibes. Even the foliage feels similar.
You can hear the excitement! It's so awesome!
This is super cool to finally see!
so many uploads, you must be having fun! I love this channel.
Someone's isolation life isn't so boring lol
Wow I just saw this on Reddit and was wondering when you were gonna make a video on this!
ohhhh that brings back old memories from when oil prices were above zero
Very cool!
You can take a course right on your computer the fun way to learn about the refinery. I like it.:)
This is amazing! Makes me wonder what else got made for corporate contracts? Maybe there was a dungeon crawler RPG for Amway salespeople
That is really cool. I had never even heard of that game and I'm an inspector in the oil and gas industry.
Apparently Chevron still regards it as a proprietary secret, so they were never that open about it
I was waiting for this!
Playing a mythical oil game on a wooden PC
The irony is strong with this one...👌
Maxis, Bullfrog, Nova Logic, Microprose from the 80s and 90s, I'd love to hear about all these companies
This is really neat. Thanks LGR.
Clint's joy brings me joy.
Absolutely
beautiful puristic graphic style, somehow this always creates this special atmosphere. The restrictions of that time created some of the most focused graphics. Feels totaly "on point".
Man I'm loving these Blerbs
Very cool this was finally found!
I purchased a copy of SimEarth when it was released. Just recently I got a virtual machine up and running on Windows 7 that is dos 6.2. The SimEarth disks from 30 years ago were readable and I made images of the disks and was playing simearth in the virtual machine. I have also original Doom diskettes that were readable too and was playing Doom in the virtual machine too. So, yea, diskettes can be read for a long time.
Lgr blurbs is great and I think you should keep this channel going
speaking of sim farm, do you have any plans to make videos about it in the future?
I really like this channel
Hello I just viewed your video on SimRefinery, I followed the link you posted, and when I got to the Internet Archive site the file had been taken down. I even tried to use the link embeded in the blog posting with the same result. Is this file protected by some sort of copyright because it was developed for use at Chevron? Is there anywhere else one can find the file?
That's seriously fucking cool! Nice one Clint!
Wow I'm happy to see this amazing
Extra kudos to you for the throwback computer setup. Go big or go home
Two fun LGR videos in one day. Epic
05:10 I really liked the part he set the octane value of premium to 47 RON... Epic...
That'd be AKI judging by the regular being 87 (91RON I believe), but that's still a damn low octane lol
I hope when I get older there’s a pill to make my floppy recoverable.
There is it is called bluechew.
"...Yeah I've been seeing a woman.
She's an author;
wrote the book on men's sexual dysfunction.
You've probably read it."
The refinery fire disaster option must be wild.
Would it be possible to find a later, more finished version of the prototype, or is this the latest one?
Wait I didn't know this channel existed 🤩
I wonder if the map will work with Sim copter or streets of Sim City? Or is it only SC2 maps? I can't remember
Now somebody finish this game in cooperation with the original creators and their vision. This is amazing.
It was removed from the internet archives. Does anyone have a link to a copy?
Wow. Cool. I have to try this.
This looks very interesting, as well as a great piece of Maxis history. Although now I want a fully working version where I can build a oil refinery company from the ground up, and then promptly destroy it with all the available disasters at once.
It is all sim but not so simple. Great find
wow didnt know, i have a little netbook dedicated to maxis games, cant wait to add this,
I wish you'd get excited more often about making videos about playing games