Help! Desperate to play Civ 2

[Taylor1985]

Hello All,

So I had an urge to play Civ 2 again and sad to say after 3 days I am hitting a city wall with coastal fortress and Sdi defence! I have Windows 10 and have managed to download good edition, I've used a patch which says is applied and good to go. Go to install and select yes. Error message, missing XDaemon.dll manage to get that added to the folder which has civ, double click it and wheel spins then nothing, not even the do you want to allow program message. If I run as administrator it gives me this message but same thing, wheel then nothing. Tried virtualbox but it's beyond my capabilities despite the YouTube guides. Had it working fine in my old Windows 7 laptop (rip) any help is appreciated. Had a look on here but nothing seems to work

 

[pennaedux]

Wish there was/is a simple download to re play Civ 2 on Win 10, I'm not computer savvy almost age 70 now ha ha had this game for ages and would like to play it again, have disks bought twice and downloaded paid also it's very frustrating. Surely there must be an easy wat these days to get this game running again?

 

[mpescatori]

Hi.
I ran into the same problems.
Apparently the glitch lies in the fact Civ2 was born as a 16-bit game created to run on 16-bit OS, such as Win95 and Win98.
Civ2 will run happily on 32-bit Win7 because 32-bit OS was engineered to be backwards compatible.
not so Win8:11, it's a 64-bit incompatible with 32-bit software capable of running 16-bit games for the pleasure of 8-bit pioneers who learned their ropes by compiling on 4-bit BASIC. Really, a 2-bit experience...

OOOKEY so having waded through that old programmers' joke, how do we solve the problem?
My son found this website of abandonware and I downloaded a patched version that runs on Win.10 64-bit

Moderator Action: Abandonware site link removed. Please see the quote below from the site rules and consider voting for it to be added to Steam & GoG - Blake00

Piracy
We have zero tolerance for piracy. This includes posting pirated material, linking to pirated material, telling people how to avoid copy-protection etc, or even advocating piracy. We also consider "abandonware" to be piracy, as it has no official legal recognition. Please do not link to abandonware sites.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Hi.
I ran into the same problems.
Apparently the glitch lies in the fact Civ2 was born as a 16-bit game created to run on 16-bit OS, such as Win95 and Win98.
Civ2 will run happily on 32-bit Win7 because 32-bit OS was engineered to be backwards compatible.
not so Win8:11, it's a 64-bit incompatible with 32-bit software capable of running 16-bit games for the pleasure of 8-bit pioneers who learned their ropes by compiling on 4-bit BASIC. Really, a 2-bit experience...

There is also an MGE patch plus a 64-bit patch available. The MGE patch changes the game to 32-bit.

 

[tootall_2012]

Have you tried FoxAhead's Civilization II MGE User Interface Additions (CIV2UIA) patch? In addtion to providing many UI enhancements, I believe it is also designed to resolve many OS compatibility issues.

The download can be found at the end of his post #1 here.

 

[slobi]

Moderator Action: Abandonware link removed. Please see the quote below from the site rules and consider voting for it to be added to Steam & GoG

Piracy
We have zero tolerance for piracy. This includes posting pirated material, linking to pirated material, telling people how to avoid copy-protection etc, or even advocating piracy. We also consider "abandonware" to be piracy, as it has no official legal recognition. Please do not link to abandonware sites.

1 Locate a Civ2-MGE v1.0.bin file.
Moderator Action: Please don't give people text directions to locate an Abandonware copy either!

2. Mount Civ2-MGE v1.0.bin to virtual drive (I use UltraISO)
2a. If you still haven't figured out how to create virtual drive or mount iso and bin files, well... Anyway, there are probably 1000's of instructions online how to do it and which programs to use, like the one I'm using or PowerISO, DAEMON Tools, Alcohol 120%...

3. Go to virtual drive, run SETUP.EXE ¡¡¡as administrator!!! (this is very important to run as administrator or SETUP.EXE will give error, well at least for me), open Task Manager> Details, find setup.exe, right click 'Analyze wait chain' and end process of program that is blocking SETUP.EXE (in my case it was Scheduler. exe). Run SETUP.EXE again. If install process still doesn't start repeat steps. For me it was another program that was blocking setup.exe, this time nvcontainer.exe. Here is an example -

https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/452lyf

https://imgur.com/a/UOQB4
Finish installation, you can chose exact destination folder, unlike Civ2 vanilla. Don't eject contents from virtual drive just yet.

4. Download patch v1.3 (civiimge_uccupdate3.exe) from
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ2-multiplayer-gold-edition-v1-3-us.52/ or

Civilization II: MP Gold Edition v1.3 US Patch file

This is the latest official patch for Microprose's Civilization II: Multiplayer Gold Edition.

www.moddb.com

run it and install in the same folder where game is installed, obviously. This patch will update game to version 5.4.0f which will be essential for step 6

5. Now, if you want all in-game videos to work, like 'high council', 'world wonders' or interaction with other civs under Advisors> Foreign Minister - return to virtual drive, open 'Civ2' folder and copy 'Kings' and 'Video' folders to main installation folder. Now you can eject contents from the virtual drive. Additionally, you will have to enable Indeo 4 codec. To do this, install K-Lite Codec Pack from http://www.codecguide.com/ , then run Codec Tweak Tool (you can find it in Start> K-Lite Codec Pack). Under 'Codec and Filter Management' enter ACM/VFW (x86) and enable Indeo 4 codec from '*DISABLED CODECS'

6. Download FoxAhead's Civ2-UI-Additions from here https://github.com/FoxAhead/Civ2-UI-Additions/releases (latest version so far is 1.20.1 Build 723) and follow instructions

Note - I'm using Windows 10 Pro 22H2 build 19045.3031 and Civ2 MGE with FoxAhead's additions works flawless

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

I actually bought an old XP laptop just to play old games.

 

[slobi]

I hear you, when I bought new pc in 2014, I kept old one with XP just for Civ2... And about that moderator action, ok let's say it's piracy, but I believe 99% of people who visit this forum have ben playing Civ2 from 90's and own physical copy of the game, one version or other. I myself have been playing on PS1, then I bought some strange vanilla copy for PC in 2007 from 'Sold Out' software company.