Help installing Civ 2 on Windows 8

[jackikakooza]

Hi. I love Civ, I wasted most of my childhood playing it. I was so excited when I ordered the cd rom and it arrived today, but I didn't realize it's not compatible with newer laptops. I have Windows 8 (I think... the laptop is 5 months old).

I've read some of the other threads but I don't even understand the technical jargon... I don't know what a 'vm' is for example I'm desperate to play Civ... could anyone talk me through what to do in simple terms? I'm hoping I haven't just wasted £11 and got my hopes up for nothing!!

 

[Blasph23]

VM is acronym for virtual machine.
It's an emulation environment, where you have an application on win 8 (or 7) which allows installing win xp within it - in a separate environment - with all the standard applications and devices. It uses normal disk space and requires considerable system resources. It installs from cd image of a win xp system and permits sharing specific selected folders between the virtual machine and your current system.
Like I said, it's in the form of an application so when you want to get back to win 8, you just minimize it to tray.

As far as I know, certain (but not all) versions of win 7 and 8 support VM. Probably the "professional" variety. You might want to look around MS website for VM which should be downloadable for free if your version of the system is indeed compatible.

The installation is fairly simple and doesn't involve rocket science.
This could allow you to run civ2 with compatibility patches in a win xp environment.
I have yet to find out if my version of civ2 works under win 8 but I'm trying to postpone migration from the very satisfying win 7 for as long as possible.