Quintillus, I am having major problems with the Complation, both the DVD and the download. I do not have the latestand greatest computer set-up. I am running Civ3 on an IBM laptop running Windows NT. The DVD will not run on it. It also cannot contact the Internet. I can download the Compilation on one of my Mac laptops, but they cannot run the Windows exe commands. The one piece of the download is too large to but on a flash drive to try to move it to the Windows laptop. Basocally, I cannot get into anything.
Which version of Windows NT?
If you mean the NT 4, the DVD not running would be due to the 7-Zip version included on the DVD requiring Windows 2000 (NT 5) or later. In that case, if you are able to transfer 7-Zip 9.20 to the IBM laptop
from the download page, I think it should work. That is the most recent version before the minimum requirement was increased to Windows 2000. There are even older versions available here on SourceForge; I used 4.65 for quite a while back in the day, and the oldest one, 3.13, is almost as old as 3.11 which is the last one in the 7-Zip change log to specifically mention NT (pre-2000) support.
If you mean the DVD won't show up at all, rather than the scenarios not being extractable, that's a trickier problem, and probably means the media format is too new. I haven't yet tried these discs on my late-20th-century DVD player, but from past experience older drives are more picky about home-recorded discs. I went with the Taiyo Yuden discs to maximize the chances of longevity and compatibility, but they can only do so much.
Although if it's only a CD player and not a DVD player, then it would make sense why it doesn't work. My desktop also has a DVD player than has ceased to read DVDs, though it still reads CDs; another possibility.
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Perhaps the other angle, decompressing via a Mac laptop, is easier. There is now a Mac console version of 7-Zip (
direct download link from official website), and running "7z x Scenario.7z" should extract the contents, allowing you to copy over by flash drive just what is needed.
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Another alternative would be, if there are specific scenarios you'd like to play, downloading them the more traditional way. The
online readme from the disc includes links to the CFC threads for each scenario, and I believe they all are downloadable, or were last year at least. Part of the goal of the compilation was to make it easier to access them, as for some of them you have to hunt back a few pages for a link, or apply several patches to get the latest version, and I think at least one of them is via a site that sets the download speed to pretty-slow-by-today's-standards. But if it's making things more difficult instead, there's no reason not to just download them the old-fashioned way.
It's also worth noting that the downloadability state of scenarios is actually improved over a few years ago. Several people have chipped in to re-post missing scenarios, notably Node60 and Blake00, and Thunderfall has helped out by allowing more and larger scenarios to be (re)hosted directly at CFC. Some are still missing (and in general, I don't have those locally, either), but while a bunch of the links in the first post of scenarios are still not up-to-date, most if not all of the ones in the collection were available the last I checked.
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As someone who has had a bit of a retrocomputing hobby as well, this is an interesting challenge. You have at least one potential advantage over the old computers I've had a chance to play around with in that it supports a flash drive; I always had to rely on optical media (or when it worked, Ethernet) due to lack of USB support. But it's probably limited by FAT32 file size limits (4 GB, maybe less if it's FAT16), either on the flash drive or locally or very possibly both, which is yet another reason it may be necessary to split things up in order to transfer them.