It's pretty trivial to run the original in DOSBox or Wine too... an open source remake has some appeal but when it requires many gigabytes more of memory to run when the original can do with 1MB, it's really a bit of a showstopper.
It's a bummer—I don't know about showstopper, though. The usual first goal for remakes like these is to get around the limitations from DOS and whatnot. Things like resolution and map size are easy targets and improve gameplay a bunch.
Perhaps some tools and ideas from this project will spark interest in a native OSS remake.
Early versions of CityBound[0] were written in Electron until the author had a re-think and restarted the project C++, then a few months later, again in Rust.
