Civ and Vista

3

3rdoffive

Chieftain
Joined
Jul 11, 2007
Messages
3
I was digging through an old box when i stumbled upon my civ floppies. being an old fanatic that i was i went to install it on my computer which has vista on it. initially i could not find where it installed so i just ran it off the disks...having to insert different disks at different times. after searching i found out where civ installed to, i ran the app file, it ran untill i built my FIRST city then it crashed to desktop. so i ran the batch file...same thing, can anybody tell me why it is doing this and how/if i can fix it. i tried the civ1 thing but this had no effect.

help would be much appreciated:)
 
Is this windows or DOS version of the game??

In the case of dos, you should use DOSBOx, excellent DOS emulator. Civ DOS is not supported by Vista.

I never checked if Civ worked with Vista (I have Explorer CD somewhere with both DOS and Win version). I remember there was a update that comes with Civ Win. I'll check that.
 
I don’t have vista but you problem intrigued me. Looking around the web for comments about 16bit programs and vista. Some say they are not supported. Putting that aside what you should look at this Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 free from Microsoft.


I down loaded it, and installed it on a XP machine (an old slow one). Luck for me I never throw out old soft ware. That’s not to say I can ever find it. I got DOS 6.0 to run on the Virtual PC. Loaded civ dos it ran. I have to get a mouse working.

You didn’t say what CIV version but even if it is Win CIV you can get win95 or 98 running on a Virtual PC. On a modern fast machine this maybe the answer.


With ms-mouse 8.02 it runs somewhat slower than dosbox, but on a modern machire this should be good.
 
For Virtual PC you should have some extra memroy to get better performance (if not, system will use page file and everything will be very slow)

You can install Win3.11 on DOSBox. (there were examples on DOSBox forum)

Also you can simillar to me get an retro-box. (I actually have quite few of those) :goodjob:
 
I think I’m running a “retro-box” now. Where is the cutoff point between retro and current? And is there a middle ground of machines that are neither.

I guess it depends on how much space one has for multi machines and how much need one has for running old programs.

I do have some old hard drives with win98, win95 and dos7.10, which will boot and run on my current machine. But that seem to happen less often.

I do have civ dos on a bootable cd, when I boot that I’m always amazed at the speed. I’ve mostly been using dosbox lately I think it’s slower than a 486. I can’t remember how civ played on a 8088.
 
Bjeli said:
For Virtual PC you should have some extra memroy to get better performance (if not, system will use page file and everything will be very slow)

You can install Win3.11 on DOSBox. (there were examples on DOSBox forum)

Also you can simillar to me get an retro-box. (I actually have quite few of those) :goodjob:
Click to expand...

I did a little experiment. Installed Windows 3.1 on DOSBox and installed CivNET for Windows and it runs as it was natively :).
 
Even I have many old DOS/Win computers, I have to disagree with this.

DOSBox is the way to go in this case.
 
Bjeli said:
Even I have many old DOS/Win computers, I have to disagree with this.

DOSBox is the way to go in this case.
Click to expand...

I second this sentiment. I played Civilization on a dedicated mid-90s era DOS machine until recently, but DOSBox is mature enough to make such an act highly questionable, and that's factoring in available hardware and expertise. I wouldn't even consider recommending genuine hardware to someone without experience with early Pentium systems and DOS driver and memory management.
 
Point taken, it is true that if a person has no experience with Dos...

But hey, I just can't help it, it just has a better feel to it when you play on an old dos-based computer, especially with a true VGA monitor, with pixels the right size for the coarser grained graphics.

I do have dosbox, I'll go refresh my memory and try Civ Dos on it again.

:scan:
 
Even on my genuine DOS machine I piped the output to a large main display via KVM switching for much of its lifespan. DOSBox's full screen appearance seems identical to the dedicated box, scanlines and all. One welcome aspect of DOSBox is adjustable screen sizing; 21 inches of 320x200 graphics is just too much for me.
 
Oh, I won't have this problem, I run my modern machine on a pesky little 14 inch flat screen. :sad:

The only thing that bothers me in running civ doc in dosbox is the sound, I just don't get the original sound. It seems that the civ dos detects Adlib instead of Sound Blaster on my modern machine ?
 
Do you refer to Civilization's Sound Blaster driver? If so, it's notoriously broken. In fact, the driver probably works better with Adlib than any Sound Blaster manufactured beyond 1990. The updated drivers that support SB16 and General MIDI work great on my DOS machine, but I haven't played Civilization's sound once through DOSBox, though other OPL2 games sound fine.
 
Very interesting,

I do recall having seen some kind of sound patch for Civ1 dos, some while ago, on a french website. I'll have to go look this up. At the moment, I have two versions of civ dos. One is the 05 version in english and the other is the 01 version but in french language. I have no idea if they have the patch on or not but I'll try to find this out.
 
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