> Maybe 20 or 30 tiny sprites at a time, but they navigate the road network, queue behind each other at intersections, and generally look like a living city. Yes, it was a bit buggy because sometimes they would drive through each other, but it was good enough to just give some sense of life to the map. All that on a 25 MHz 386 CPU.

is that much of anything for a 25MHz CPU? We're talking about something cycling 25 million times per second, surely that's not such a big deal for a 386?

Thank you for writing effectively what I was curious about. "Simulating traffic" can mean a lot of things, I remember on the old SimCity they just "colored" each road-tile as red/yellow/green, (no doubt from a ternary flag) and the visuals just sort of blended between the states (car density.)

Being able to do millions of things each second should enable all sorts of behaviors, especially for a game of the era when you asked the OS to kindly step aside while you run your program.