Windows ME. Millenium does work, but there is one oddity with the the game's option menus. After the game has been loaded once it creates a file
"My Documents\My Games\CIV 4\CivilizationIV.ini". If that file is not deleted then only the first tab of the game options menu will be drawn. The second (graphics) tab goes as far as printing "screen resolution" but is otherwise blank. The other tabs are entirely blank. However, all the option settings are preserved, even after erasing the .ini file that apparently contains them(!). #
I'm going to cut and paste the menu problem into a new thread, so please look for it if you want to talk about that so we don't derail this thread.
The rest of my spec: Athlon "Thunderbird" (yes, that old thing) 1400MHz
1GB RAM (you need to tweak system.ini to make Windows Millenium work with 1GB)
Radeon 9600 Pro 128M
(drivers from wme-8-03-98-2-041020a-018705e.exe)
Ancient Soundblaster Live! Player 16 bit sound card.
2GB hard disc space as a fixed size page file
The game plays quite acceptably, but a little slowly on a normal size map. There's nothing wrong with the graphics or behaviour in any particular during the main game other than the low speed. Graphics options don't seem to make much difference to the speed - not surprising since the limiting factor is probably CPU. Zooming out to the globe view (with the cloud animations) causes an enormous drop in frame-rate, which makes it impossible to play in that view - again, that's because the clouds take too much CPU to animate.
So the game is working pretty well on Millenium. On the other hand it loads to the main menu very slowly indeed and the progress window background is missing (some quirk of Python threading behaviour means only the progress bar parts of the window get updated). The game menus are fine, except for the options menu as described above.
The only other problem I have is that the wonder movies have stuttering sound. I've seen this stutter before with a few games. It's related to that creative labs sound card, the Bink video library, specific movie encodings, high CPU load and lots of moving 3D objects while the Bink movie is playing. Generally after a patch or two the stutter is cured.
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