Civ 3 Conquest Disc no longer works

Immortal7777

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Joined
Sep 20, 2012
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I am using windows 8.1 with a Conquests CD, Game has been working fine for years but now It won't even run. When I click the Icon I see it appear in my task manager for about 2 seconds then it just disappears. Tried reinstalling it from the disc and changing compatibility settings but nothing is working. I am not even getting an error message so I haven't been able to look up this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
 
Most CD editions of Civ3 use(d) the SecuROM copy-protection system, which was/is dependent on the secdrv.sys driver, which M$ (initially) disabled way back in late 2015, 'coincidentally' breaking an awful lot of CD-based game-installations (many, if not most, game-CDs published between about 1998 and 2008 used SafeDisc/SecuROM).

At the time, that security update could still be refused or rolled back for all affected Windows-versions up to 8 (but not Win10 or later). See here for more details:


Is it therefore possible that Win8.1 has now also been updated to remove that driver finally/ permanently? If so, you will likely need to repurchase the game as a no-CD version (see the thread above), and possibly also look here for various fixes to run Civ3 on modern systems:

 
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It appears you are right, I saw that post in relation to windows 10 so I ignored it, Same with Steam specific problems, Well I got the Digitial GOG version and its working for me. So I guess my disc is just ruined, Way to inconvenience everyone but the pirates, Firaxis.
 
All of a sudden today my ConquestsEdit.exe has stopped working and is giving me an error message "cannot find Civ3PTW" I click abort and it gives me a second message "cannot find Conquests". I've googled and found the issue from years ago and it required a registry edit. I tried the registry edit and that didn't work.

Is anyone else having trouble with the Civ III editor not running?
 
All of a sudden today my ConquestsEdit.exe has stopped working and is giving me an error message "cannot find Civ3PTW" I click abort and it gives me a second message "cannot find Conquests". I've googled and found the issue from years ago and it required a registry edit. I tried the registry edit and that didn't work.

Is anyone else having trouble with the Civ III editor not running?
@Gary Childress : a) first of all, your question does not seem to be related to the topic of this thread (Civ disc not working due to out-dated copy protection), so why do you ask it in this thread? New topic -- new thread.
And b) if you used the Search button with something like "Editor not working", you will find that this question has already been asked three times in the past, so no need to start another thread for it...:

Perhaps one of these has some useful information?
 
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