All save file I/O broken on Windows 10

Hi everyone

I've been playing my steam copy of C3C for a while on my windows 10 machine and today when I tried to load it up it no longer works?? The only change that has happened since the last time I played and now was installing the Win 10 Anniversary Update. Anyone else having problems with the game since this update?


When I try to load any game I get a dialog box that says "DataIO operation System Error: GAME" and I get booted back to the main menu.

When I start a new game and attempt to save it I am told that the save failed - but the game spits out a 2025KB save file? (most of my save files are roughly 200KB...)

So is there a corrupted component on my end? I already tried verifying my files on steam and doing a full delete/reinstall but no luck here. Also tried restarting my computer and redo-ing all of the above. Note that I haven't installed any mods and I only set KeepRes and SkipIntro in my conquests.ini and replaced popheads.pcx... I am also loading C3C saves in a C3C game. I have no idea what's going wrong, anyone have any ideas on what I can check?

EDIT: Here are screenshots of the problem

EDIT2: Yes I have tried compatibility mode for XP SP2&SP3 as well as run as administrator. Doesn't solve the problem unfortunately. Also Civ IV loads and saves properly so I'm certain that the drive itself is fine.


EDIT3: Solved! I had C3C installed on drive F: which is an exFAT filesystem on my large game storage HDD. I wiped the game clean and reinstalled it on my NTFS C: drive and this appears to solve the problem - but I am genuinely puzzled as to what broke the game in the first place. If anyone else stumbles on the DataIO operation System Error: GAME message in the future, try moving it over to your C drive.

That's an interesting problem; can't say I have a guess why it stopped working. The underlying file system should be handled transparently by the operating system as long as you aren't running into a limitation of it (such as 4 GB files in FAT32), which Civ3 shouldn't be.

It could be that something in the update broke that transparency in some corner case you hit. I'd have to look through the release notes to see if there's anything specific to exFAT in the Anniversary Update - but Microsoft's release notes for Windows 10 are not as good as for previous versions, and I stuck with 8.1/XP, so my motivation to do so is not high.

Out of curiosity, was there a particular benefit to going with exFAT in the first place? For HDDs (as opposed to flash) I'm not aware of any particular benefits over NTFS, unless exFAT is more compatible with another system the drive is connected to occasionally.

The computer is a windows/hackintosh dual-boot, exFAT is for the data partition that's shared by both operating systems since OSX doesn't play nice with ntfs.