Show HN: Cartopolis – OpenStreetMap rendered like it's 1999
9 hours ago
- Cartopolis is a modern static website that renders present-day OpenStreetMap data in the visual style of late-1990s web mapping services like MapQuest, using a 216-color web-safe palette and jagged, high-contrast graphics.
- The style emerges from deliberate rendering rules rather than post-processing filters, including cut geometry for jagged polylines, flat tints, hard bands, and fixed zoom steps.
- Cartopolis differs from the original MapQuest by using square-pixel Web Mercator projection, horizontal labels, and more aggressively simplified geometry, while retaining the visual language of flat fills, haloed labels, and a red star marker.
- The project supports panning, zooming, offline search, and poster mode up to 8000×8000 pixels, all from static files without a tile server or database.
- An offline compiler converts OpenStreetMap extracts into compact binary vector packs, and the browser rasterizes and LZW-encodes pixels in JavaScript, imposing dial-up-era limitations.