Simcity Windows Xp
Roxine Denison
So it turns out SimCity Classic runs just fine in 32-bit Windows 7. I had it running on my Atom netbook for quite a while. Problem is, the default window layout and settings suck donkey dick. Games start on Fast speed, windows overlap, there is no tile function, and they're just kind of piled up. Sure, the game wasn't designed with widescreen in mind, but still.
I attemped to change the settings to my liking and clicked on Save Options. I also poked through the CFG file in hopes that it would let me define window dimensions. No deal. Worse still - the next time I loaded the game and started a city, NO WINDOWS showed up. No options were available from the menu. Pretty much all I could do was exit. I wondered if this was the result of Win7's quirky permissions, but to my surprise the same thing happened to my Win98SE computer.
The game was designed for Windows 3.1, so Win98 is already a lot different. Issues regarding window size might show up with these titles, like Nightmare 3D hangs if you try to run it in full screen in any Windows version other than 3.x and Fury3x can't go full screen on any Windows based on NT.
Starting the game with a resolution higher than what the game expects may be causing the game to load up a "blank layout". Try lowering your resolution to 640x480. In Windows 7 or XP, I think you might be able to do that in the compatibility mode options, or perhaps with Resplendent Resolver.
This is why I mentioned LinCity and Micropolis. Micropolis is in fact based on the original SimCity source code and should run easily on all modern systems, and presumably will even play exactly the same as the original. It seems you can get it at .
It's an Atom netbook (basically an underpowered P4), so I imagine it's powerful enough to run a game made in 1993. I'll go out on a limb and say all x86 netbooks are similarly capable. My concern was whether it's still compatible.
It is powerful enough. The window problem happens because Win7 AND Win9x deals with them a lot differently than Win3.x. If you do what Jorpho said, plus lowering the colours to 8-bit mode and disabling visual themes there's a chance you may get rid of the problem. If not, there are some few more things to try using Microsoft ACT 5.x. Simcity 2000 still complains when running with more than 256 colours and some animations do not play correctly.
In 1990, Maxis made the first and legendary Simcity, a city construction simulator. Starting in 1900, no buildings exists and you have to create road, create industrial and residential zones, school, police stations and much more to make you city grow.
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The review on MobyGames says it all"The Good:The original SimCity is a classic, and this is but a translation of it to the Windows environment. The gameplay is familiar, system specs need not be powerful (unlike for the newer Sim installments), and gameplay is a bit smoother than on the standard DOS version. Building a city from scratch is fun, and allows a person to experience the joys of being a ruler. Build cities "organically" like London, or build your city according to a larger over-all plan, like Washington DC. The Bad:While the experience of playing SimCity is fun, the overall game is rather pointless. There is little to do once you find that happy middle ground of taxes and spending- wait for enough funds, tweak your city a bit, wait for some more funds. Some have said that to "win" you must lay out your city for mass public transit (with no roads) which strikes me as a lopsided statistical modelling job. Granted, Will Wright could mold the game in any fashion that he desired, but SimCity seems a weird place to trumpet one's own ideological utopian vision. The pre-planned scenarios aren't very fun- once a grasp of the basic concepts of the game are in hand, demolishing buildings to build police stations in hot spots or bulldozing districts to stop the spread of fire just feel like boring puzzle games. The use of windows in this game, while allowing more flexibility than the DOS version, can get unwieldy.
The Bottom Line:It started and defined a genre that no other series has ever been able to touch- city planning games. In retrospect, the game is a lot like Balance of Power: the ideas are awe-inspiring, and the execution creative, but the game itself leaves a bit to be desired. The fun in this version of SC is akin to the fun one gets with a paint program, not necessarily a game program. Future SC entries improve on this, and are worthy as game and social experiment... but this one is just a very well-done curio."
thanks dude for providing your infos!
actually i haven't tested it on my win7 x64, BUT i try to run it now successfully under wine on my macbook (osx 10.6). it runs anyway fine under wine as well as simcopter (wherefore sc2k win itself acts weird). one thing i'm still wondering about, what is the difference between the patched .exe and the original? further could this method you used to install the game prob. used for other obsolate programs/games as well?
You're welcome! Like I said, the patched .EXE is what you get after applying the "Voodoo Rush Patch" that Maxis released in 1997 to fix some Glide/3DFX problems. The patch is a 16-bit installer and you can't hack it to run on modern systems, so I supplied the STREETS.EXE file with the patch already applied - snagged from an older machine.
And yeah, I think this method would definitely work for other games with 16-bit installers.
Thanks for the comment!
thanks that sounds good.
i forgot to note that both games run absolutely fine with wine. no joke, i played in simcopter all 30 missions without a single error message, of which i know that they will even appear under the best conditions (and as faster the machine is as more often they happen, simcopter runs with win7 x64, but you can't play 10 seconds without a error and also streets seems not to fail) in a original windows environment, this was really surprising. i really wonder to what this issue is bound and wished not only because of streets or copter that wine would exist for windows, even if one could think it's useless. and yes, to have a x86 machine with a win '98/ME can be handy for a gamer...
I did everything you said to do but sadly no matter what, after about a few minutes of playing the game it says "Streets of Sim City has stopped working". This is an error message from windows not the game itself. No matter what it happens no later than 5 minutes into the game. I'm not talking about the "Streets of Sim City has an unexpected error and must close", I remember that from back in the day. Is there anything to fix that?
If you followed the steps, I sadly don't have any more advice for you. Everyone's computer is slightly different! Too bad the game is so buggy. If you do ever figure out a fix, though, be sure to share it for future reference!
Using your patched .exe worked to get the installer operational for both Streets and SCURK. However, for whatever reason the 'load game' and
'player's choice' options do not work on my home menu. Not sure if this is some weird fluke or if there's a fix available...
i got news for you, recently i play "Streets" and "SimCopter" with the hep of "DXWnd" which is a good all in one solution. it's ordinally ment to play fullscreen games in a window, but it also helps to run old games. it reduces the "unrecoverable errors" to a minimum and for "Streets" you can get rid of the bumping cars with a limitation of the framerate. set to the proper dx version it opens in a free scalable window in mostly proper colors (apart from the text). it's overall now real fun to play these old games.
check out my clips:
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Hey man. Just wanted to thank you for this blog (I know it's been a really long time, hope you still read this). I used the 2 steps above to get Streets working on my Windows 8 computer! This brings back so many memories when I was growing up!
I am trying to run Streets of Sim on an HP Compaq Presario C700 laptop OS Win7 Home 32bit. I went through the simple instructions above. I got as far as setting up Fraps. But Fraps won't let me change the "loop buffer lengh". Also after getting to this point. Streets of Sim still will not load from the hard drive. I have copied over the whole cd to the hard drive and the hacked versions of ensetup.exe and streets.exe and the game is still looking for the files on the cd in the drive and giving me an error message that it can't find the cd in the drive and stops. Ether I am doing something wrong or there is a problem with your setup.
I've tried adjusting all my settings as everyone has stated here and am still gettin the same message. The only thing I haven't tried is to copy C:\Windows\Repair\Autoexec.nt back into root as I don't know how to go about doin that. any suggestions or help would be appreciated.
I have been having trouble installing this game as well. I copied C:\Windows\Repair\Autoexec.nt to C:\Windows\SYSTEM32 as ross said, but now, the InstallShield pops up, completes 100% setup for installation, but nothing happens after that. Any other help as to why that is happening?
I put the disc in, the autorun works, I click install SC3000 and the installer loads up, 99... 100% - Excellent! Up loads an installer called Kyro, click next and... bang! the error message says the installer file C:\cvr3w2k\drivers\kyro.inf could not be found? I have no other options from there as it shuts itself down!
Interesting question which believe me I would love to answer! My main problem is that I know little of the jargon needed to get around this problem and worst of all, the set up doesn't even open for me to get a chance!
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