Will Civ4 work with Win98?

The requirements don't saay 98, but will it anyway?

I have seen a couple of guys post and say they managed to get it to run, but not too well.

Its not officially supported by the game, you need a baseline of 2000 or xp

Regards
Zy

It runs, but not particularly well. My main complain is that huge maps are laggy. Globe view tends to be laggy as well.

Lag problems are indicative of the memory issue in Civ IV - tho not always. You could try the Harkonnen patch which addresses memory issues (it touches not game code), its easy to deinstall it if it does not work for you. Bare in mind if you run on Win 98 the game does not officially support Win 98

Regards
Zy

I am playing Civ4 on Windows 98 First Edition and it works fine. The 1.09 patch and Harkonnen's patch also work. I am sometimes getting crashes to desktop because of my Radeon 9800, but haven't got any ctd's with my Ti4200 on another machine. The game is a bit choppy, the globe view is extremely laggy (unusable in fact) and wonder movies stutter, but these are problems that WinXP users are also having.

Re the 9800, try the Omega Radeon drivers, there have been a number of reports that they have made it more stable for a significant number of people. You should follow the ati deinstall instructions tho to completely remove all traces of ati from the PC before loading. Dont forget to zap the Civ IV cache as well before running on the new drivers.

Regards
Zy

I'm using Harkonnen's patch, it still lagging on huge maps though (better than without patch, but still). Unfortunately, even with all tricks Win98 is limited to 2Gb of RAM, so I can't just throw few 4Gb sticks on it

Zydor said:

Re the 9800, try the Omega Radeon drivers, there have been a number of reports that they have made it more stable for a significant number of people. You should follow the ati deinstall instructions tho to completely remove all traces of ati from the PC before loading. Dont forget to zap the Civ IV cache as well before running on the new drivers.

Regards
Zy

Click to expand...

I am using Omega drivers, but the last version made for Win98 is rather old... Recently I have been getting more and more of these CTD's, where the game just throws me to the desktop, but everything is ok, no resolution or color changes but when I try to launch the game again, I get the 'failed to initialize' thing and I have to reboot.

The failed to initialise error was one of the first hassles to get identified. Firaxis posted a procedure to get rid of it, and by all accounts it seems to have worked. However, Win 98 is not supported by the game, so whether it will work for you - or even if its the exact same problem - I dont know. If you not already had a look, its at:

http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/support_ati.htm

Its a bit of a Dirty Harry job "Do ya feel lucky?" Its a benign fix as such, and if you decide its not for you having had a go, you can always reload to get back to where you were if it doesnt work, its just time and effort involved, no risks.

Regards
Zy