Download Simcity 5 Google Drive
Lora Ceasor
For myself, I installed my SC2000 off the floppy disk version that I own and had no probles. The game is directly installed onto the harddrive. What error do you get when you reach the neccessary file on the CD-ROM? If it is an old disc, it may be damaged.
Try copying the contents of the CD to another directory and mounting that as a separate drive. Otherwise, use a program to run a virtual image of the disc. My version is signifigantly older than yours so my readme probably can't help you but here it is anyway:
Let me know if this works. Please note, I did this in one session without closing DOSBox, so everything remains the same. I suspect that your frontend is doing something to mess you up, regarding driver letters / paths etc, so try the above first. You mention it "installed the game for you". Perhaps it is just copying the files, and not setting upi the game's config file properly.
I keep it simple, use DOSBox without any front end and mount all 4 of my drives (C D E F) as C D E F in DOSBox. I know that is a no no, but I'm used to dealing with DOS since DOS 6.22, so I know what I'm doing......... ?
bellarmine - THANK YOU. I ultimately want my games as user-friendly as possible for the sake of my wife and kids, and as close to possible to plug and play. So, yes, not having to mess with the actual CD or mount a virtual drive is what I'm ultimately trying to do. I've never had so many problems with getting a game to work (other than Pandora Tomorrow, which I eventually just got for XBOX). I'll post whether I have any further problems. And thanks for the utter lack of condescension - which is difficult to find on tech forums.
It didn't work because you didn't install the game correctly, as evidenced by the audio and video files on the C: drive. What you should try again is to follow the 60-Seconds Guide -- keeping the cdrom mounted and not changing the default paths in the setup program is a natural part of that.
The procedure bellarmine describes is basically what is in the 60-Seconds guide; although the guide is a bit more thorough, such as the step of making the cdrom drive the default drive before running the install. The stuff about manually copying files and changing paths is optional, and I generally don't recommend that kind of thing to someone having problems getting a game to work. BTW, if you use an image of the cdrom then you're already running everything off hdd.
1) Created a folder for the game - A:\Video Games\PC\1986-1990\SimCity Enhanced.
2) Mounted the disc image to my D drive using Daemon Tools.
3) Started DOSBOX without any frontend.
4) Entered the following commands:
Z:\>mount A "A:\Video Games\PC\1986-1990\SimCity Enhanced"
Z:\>mount D "D:\" -t cdrom
Z:\>A:
5) Entered the following commands (and why I had to enter Z:\A: above is beyond me, but okay)...
A:\>D:
D:\>dir /w
D:\>install
6) So now I'm at the "SimCity CD_ROM Setup/Configuration Program." It's asking me to enter the install path, and says that I can change it to anything. The 60 second guide gives me little guidance here. Am I supposed to leave the install path at "C:\SIMCITY"? Does that make sense if I've already set up DOSBOX to go to my A drive for this game? Do I have to create a folder on my C drive to begin with? Because I'd really rather keep my games on my external hard drive at A...
Although Windows 3.1 was never really an operating system for games, the video performance is not far from the DOS version. The game even evaluates the graphics performance when a new Windows video driver is loaded and optimizes its drawing routines (EDIT: This is actually a WinG optimization module):
Besides allowing higher resolutions, the version for Windows does not care about the color depth selected in the operating system. Unlike the classic Mac OS or the X Window System, Windows does not require a programmer to care about the output color depth of the hardware. A program can work expecting a 256-color screen and Windows will convert the bitmaps during the drawing if a 16-color driver is used.
When the title screen appears, it is clearly visible that the system palette has been changed by the game asking for different colors. As a result, even the Windows GUI elements have changed their colors. However, the intro artwork looks much better than with the standard VGA driver:
Before I ran the game in an emulator to take all the screenshots, I installed the game on a Toshiba T2200SX laptop from the year 1991. I like this one because of its compact size. It has a 20-MHz 386SX, 10MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive, so not a very fast machine even in the 386 class. Its Western Digital WD90C22 VGA chips could have supported more than 16 colors at 640480 resolution, but Toshiba only installed 256KB of video memory (the 256-color mode at that resolution would require 300 KB).
I installed the game from a parallel port ZIP drive and installed the palette driver. Unlike in the emulator, a laptop sometimes changed the palette and made the whole graphics look corrupted. I found out that this can happen only when the game toolbar on the left is drawn over the main game window, so the problem can be avoided.
More interesting is the 256-color driver. I know that Windows 1.0-3.0 are designed to run in 320200. Early programs can work with that because it was the default resolution that Windows used when running on certain CGA cards. However, Windows 3.1/3.11 is too new and so is SimCity 2000. You can run the game, but the toolbar is so large that there is no way to play it properly.
I recently built my hometown in the new SimCity to see whether the game's city infrastructure capabilities could model real-life. The virtual version of Northenden turned out scarily similar to the real thing, with traffic bottlenecking in the same place along the high street.
I carried the experiment out during the beta for the game, just before it was released to the public. Of course, as we know now, SimCity is a game that not only has some pretty awful DRM issues, but also numerous bugs and problems with traffic not using the optimal routes, but instead filing through smaller roads to get from A to B as the crow flies. I noticed a fair amount of this latter point while I was modelling Liberty City a couple of weeks ago.
Among the various complaints I've seen online, I've witnessed numerous people claiming that even past SimCity games could model traffic far better than the new game. This would be damning evidence indeed that the underlying system behind SimCity's traffic infrastructure simply isn't good enough to model real-life in the way that we've been led to believe.
I couldn't stop wondering whether older SimCity games could, in fact, model cities better than the latest version -- so I decided to find out. I dug out my old copy of SimCity 2000 (the best SimCity, obviously) and proceeded to install the game and boot it up (at which point it wouldn't work on Windows 7, so I was forced to buy the compatible version of the game from GOG.com instead.)
A recap of my home town: Northenden is a very small town that you can drive straight through in around five minutes. The town mainly consists of residental housing, with a strip of shops that is known at the center of the town. And yet, considering the low number of people who live here, coupled with the low number of reasons to want to be driving around the town, you still wouldn't want to visit during rush hour. We're talking standstill traffic that you can sometimes expect to sit around in for up to an hour.
(I'd also suggest reading my previous article before you continue reading this one, as many of the comparisons made here between SimCity 2000 and the new SimCity refer back to the original article.)
Turns out that I already had that sound card for Twentieth Century. It was in a tub of stuff my dad had brought over a few months ago. Even better, the card is from the actual 20th century. It even has good MIDI, too! I picked up a bunch of drive cables from home, so I was able to connect a floppy drive and flash the motherboard BIOS to accept bigger hard drives.
So I've started installing things on it. With a 40 gig drive instead of a 2 gig one, running things without the CD becomes very possible for everything. So I've been playing some of my personal classics on it, starting with SimCity 2000. Good thing too; I was getting bored.
The Maxis digital marketing team opted to extend a promotional offer in order to drive more pre-orders of the game on SimCity.com. The offer was displayed as a banner across the top of the pre-order page and as part of the ad creative in paid media buys. This prominent placement put the promotion in front of many potential buyers, but according to the Maxis team, was not driving the increase in SimCity pre-orders they had expected.
The Maxis team hypothesized that simply moving the call-to-action higher on the page by changing the way the promotional offer was displayed could drive more purchases and increase revenue generated from SimCity.com.
As EA prepared to release the new version of SimCity, they released a promotional offer to drive more game pre-orders. The offer was displayed as a banner across the top of the pre-order page. But according to the team, the promotion was not driving the increase in pre-orders they had expected. The team decided to test some other options to see what design or layout would drive more revenue.
Most people believe that direct promotions drive purchases, but for EA, this turned out to be totally false. Testing gave them the information needed to maximize revenue in a way that would not have been otherwise possible.
Review - GameSpot (1997)
"Some games are so precisely targeted at a specific group of gamers that they have almost no appeal to anyone else. Maxis' Streets of SimCity is such a game. This driving and auto combat game lets you tool around the streets of a SimCity 2000 metropolis in an arcade-style atmosphere. You can head out for a calm, uneventful excursion, pick up and deliver packages, race against other drivers, or blow your fellow motorists to tiny bits with rockets and machine guns. The game includes over 50 SimCity maps and comes with the SimCity 2000 Urban Renewal Kit, which you can use to create your own maps.
If you've ever played Activision's Interstate '76, you'll no doubt notice its influence in Streets of SimCity. The game loads up to a funky 70s-style theme. It utilizes a channel-changing metaphor for selecting scenarios and tells you all about the "stars" of each "show." And of course, there's the obvious similarity that both games involve a lot of fast-moving firepower. Unfortunately, this isn't half the game I76 was, except possibly for die-hard SimCity fans who want to see their creations from street level.
Streets of SimCity lets you drive five different vehicles, including one that resembles the VW Bug, a Ferrari-style sports car, and a large utility van. You can customize your car (or truck) with a meager array of weapons and modifications, such as armor, airfoils, and radar detectors.
The game includes 30 scenarios that are arranged into five pseudo-campaigns. The stories for these are pretty well done and often humorous: One has you playing the role of a granny who must race and fight her way past a group of invading aliens. The gameplay for all scenarios is pretty much the same, however, and you must win one scenario before proceeding to the next. Money you earn in one scenario can be used to upgrade your car for the next. You can also pull into a garage during missions in order to get repairs and supplies.
As you drive around town, you'll see a number of objects on the streets. These can be power-ups (ammo, armor, repairs), packages (which can be delivered to earn money), and targets (cows, mailboxes, signs). You'll see pedestrians, too, but they are immune to your attacks and your driving - this isn't Carmageddon, after all. As you pick up certain items, you'll get status messages and clues regarding a scenario's objectives. These flash quickly into the top corner of the screen and can be easy to miss. Occasionally, your character will say something of importance to the mission at hand, but again, these utterances are easily missed.
The graphics in this game are decent but are not spectacular by any stretch. Even with 3Dfx acceleration, Streets of SimCity doesn't look quite as good as I76 without it. Also, the game runs sluggishly, even with the acceleration. Since the cities are SimCity 2000 maps, the streets are angular and turns are sometimes difficult to handle. On top of that, the game controls make it all too easy to oversteer, which often leads to overcorrection and the inevitable crash. Also, the steep ramps leading to bridges in this game almost always cause your car to catch air - even when you're just coasting.
Streets of SimCity includes some nice touches, including the cool-looking Hunter car, an enemy vehicle that resembles Jesse "The Body" Ventura's car from the "Jose Chung" episode of the X-Files. Also, the game's racetrack editor is handy and fairly intuitive. But the game's negative points far outweigh its merits. The first-person dashboard view makes it difficult to predict upcoming turns, while the third-person camera angles often block your view with trees, buildings, and other objects. Also, the in-dash radar is a blocky low-res display that is difficult to read. This game also crashed quite a bit and displayed the occasional glitch - such as cars resting on their sides atop high buildings.
There's no question that this game will appeal to SimCity fans who are eager to take a spin through their virtual cities. For those users, this game can be quite fun. But if you're just looking for a good auto combat game, you should stick to I76."