Civ III works fine with Vista but not 129f patch

billby

Chieftain
Joined
May 21, 2008
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45
Location
Auckland
The title says it all really. I'm running Civ III on a Vista fairly plain vanilla desktop. The program runs fine. But I simply can't get the 129f patch to install. When I try to install the patch I get a message asking me if I want to remove it!
 
Welcome to CFC billby!

What Civ3 are you running, vanilla, Play the World (or Gold), or Conquests (or Complete)? Are you running the administrator account on your computer, or a user account, and where did you install Civ3 to? It makes a big difference, especially if you installed Civ3 to its default folder in Program Files. User Account Control will most likely block you from running any .exe files that modify anything under Program Files, even if you are the administrator.
 
Plain vanilla Civ III. I thought I WAS running as administrator, but it turns out that I'm not. The program is installed to the default location.

I just changed to running the program as an administrator and found it lost all the saves and settings. Finding them again was... interesting.
 
Are you running the 32 bit or the 64 bit version of Vista?
Atm I try to get C3C running on the 64 bit Vista but I still have some font problems (cant start the programm because of it...) Vanilla Civ works fine till now..

edit:
now I got the whole thing running after solving the Error 28....
 
This has nothing to do with 32 or 64 bit versions. User Account Control (UAC) protects your Program Files folder to keep it from getting hacked. File virtualization means that all your settings and save games would be in a shadow folder in your Users directory, and .exe files would be blocked. If you want to patch up to 1.29f, log in as Administrator, right click on the patch and click on Run as Administrator. That will have it patch the game up to 1.29f.

If you want to get around the whole UAC issue, install Civ3 to a folder like C:\Games\Civilization III, that way it doesn't touch it. Another thing is to always log in as Adminstrator when you are installing things, and always check the option to make the game/software available to all users.
 
Yes it worked. It's quite a palaver.

First I had to uninstall Civ iii. Then I had to create an Vista administrator account (and NOT recommended by Microsoft). Next I installed Civ iii, followed by the patch. When I switched back to my normal Vista account and loaded the program I realised I had deleted the modified (ie keepres=1) .ini file. Editing this required using Notebook as an administrator and navigating from Notebook to the file. All-in-all about 15 to 20 minutes of non-game time. But eventually everything worked fine.

I've just noticed Vista is downloading service pack 1. Here's hoping that doesn't mess things up.
 
Well, I'm glad that you got around your issues.

It's a little off topic, but...
I don't know about the Microsoft not recommending using administrator accounts. When you first install any Windows OS or set it up initially, the system automatically makes the first user the administrator. As far as I know, you actually can't run Windows as a user if there is no adminstrator account in the first place. It can be hidden and accessed only through safe mode, but its there the whole time. If you are the only person using a computer, I would recommended that you just use the administrator account instead of going through the hassle of setting up a user and then figuring out why things aren't working later.

I'm puzzled as to why your computer didn't have an administrator account in the first place. Did you build the computer yourself and set up Vista, or did you buy it from somewhere? The only way you could possibly have a user without an admin account is if the OS was preconfigured like that by a manufacturer, or if you set it up like that on purpose.

Service Pack 1 shouldn't do anything to it. I have Vista Ultimate with SP1 and everything runs just fine on my laptop.
 
No. It was a retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. I just followed the prompts during the setup and created a user account with my name.

Like you, I assumed the main user account WAS the administrator account -- that was certainly the case with my earlier Windows XP installation and is still the case on my XP laptop, but it wasn't until I jumped through the hoops described in my earlier post that I could get the CIV upgrade patch working.

It's a tad confusing because under my main account the UAC would often kick in, darkening the screen and asking for various clicks before installing other programs and performing other system tasks. But that wasn't working for CIV and the patch -- even if I right clicked on them to 'run as administrator' -- it ONLY came right when I created a separate administrator account.
 
I bought my laptop from Dell, and after setting it up my account was automatically an admin. Same with my PC, I got Vista Ultimate for that and it made an admin account first. Funny, you would think that the same piece of software should install the same way on most computers.

Did you upgrade to Vista, or format the hard drive to do a clean install?
 
I wiped the drive and clean installed. At some point I had to create a user account, but I can't remember the details.
 
After I had installed the patch & the game, it asked me to insert the 1st disk...then wouldn't read it!
Any thoughts?
Help
 
Well sorry about that....look I just want to play the f'ing game i got for Christmas! I can not be held responsible for the illegal actions of others, but I will apoligize for asking a question!!! shshsht.
I guess I will have my nephew install this bs game
 
Not sure what all of it is but I have read all the posts and attempted to do what they suggested. Still, however, when I go to runthe game it requests the disk#1 and wont read it. "wrong disk"
 
I have uninstalled and reinstalled the program. I was also able to update teh directx and Adobe reader programs to no avail. It is running as the admin. Ihave set the compat. mode to WIn XP (service pack 2) -whatever that means!
My bro-in-law suggested that for some reason the comp is not reading the initial security codes on the disk? Shoot, I don't know.

Still though I blame VISTA! it sucks!
 
I have uninstalled and reinstalled the program. I was also able to update teh directx and Adobe reader programs to no avail. It is running as the admin. Ihave set the compat. mode to WIn XP (service pack 2) -whatever that means!
My bro-in-law suggested that for some reason the comp is not reading the initial security codes on the disk? Shoot, I don't know.

Unfortunately, I, too, am at a loss. :dunno:

Still though I blame VISTA! it sucks!
:lol: At least you still have some smarts! ;)
 
Not sure what all of it is but I have read all the posts and attempted to do what they suggested. Still, however, when I go to runthe game it requests the disk#1 and wont read it. "wrong disk"
Are there two disks in your distribution? Some distributions have two disks and have them labelled backwards, so instead of disk 1 you need to have disk 2 in the drive. Or "install disk" instead of "disk 1".
 
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