WineHQ

SimCity 4

SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition from the CD

Application Details:

Version: CD - Deluxe
License: Retail
URL: http://simcity.ea.com/
Votes: 15
Latest Rating: Gold
Latest Wine Version Tested: 7.18

Maintainers: About Maintainership

Test Results

Old test results
The test results you have selected are very old and may not represent the current state of Wine.
Selected Test Results

What works

The game works, create a city and start to play.

What does not

The copy protection of SimCity 4 Deluxe Retail locks the disk drive and this makes it impossible to install the game from 2 disks.

Workarounds

Create ISOs out of the disks and mount each one to it's own drive.

After that you can just swap the drive letter in the setup.

What was not tested

Mods

Hardware tested

Graphics:

  • GPU: AMD
  • Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Wineprefix must be 32 bit or else the game won't start.

selected in Test Results table below
Operating systemTest dateWine versionInstalls?Runs?Used
Workaround?
RatingSubmitter
CurrentArch Linux x86_64Nov 21 20227.18No, but has workaround Yes YesGoldMasteryOff 
ShowManjaro Linux 18.1.5Feb 11 20205.0Yes Yes NoSilverEray Erdin 
ShowDebian GNU/Linux 10.x "Buster"Aug 26 20183.14N/A Yes NoPlatinumGrĂ©goire Seux 
ShowVoid LinuxFeb 20 20183.1Yes Yes YesSilverpfudke 
ShowLinux Mint 18 "Sarah"Sep 18 20161.9.19Yes Yes NoPlatinuman anonymous user 

Known Bugs

Bug # Description Status Resolution Other apps affected
22692 Multiple apps fail to update progress bar during lengthy copy operations (missing CopyFileEx progress callback support)(Total Commander 8.x, SimCity 4 installer, Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup installer) STAGED View

Show all bugs

HowTo / Notes

How To Install
The easiest way to install the game is to copy the first CD to a folder on your hard drive, put the second CD in your CD drive, and run the installer from the folder you copied. This has worked for me all the time. Also, if you have two CD drives, just put one CD in one of the drives and the other in your other drive and it should work (haven't tested though), just make sure that noth are set up in winecfg. And by the way, the game probably won't start unless you have a NoCD crack. I'll let you find that on your own.
How to speed up the game

I got this from the Howto on the SC4 Rush Hour entry and it sped up mine considerably:


Open regedit with the command "wine regedit" (no quotes) to change the values.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
"VideoMemorySize"="NNN"

Replace NNN with the amount of VRAM your card has.

By default wine guess you have only 64.



[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Direct3D]
"DirectDrawRenderer"=""

gdi - Use GDI to draw on the screen (slow but reliable) (default) 
opengl - Use OpenGL (fast but not all programs work correctly)]


Since most user do not have a clue about debugging wine, you can set the following variable:

WINEDEBUG=-all

wine will have no verbosity and will not display any debugging information.

Also, adding -d:opengl to the end of the launcher can increase performace, but TBH I don't notice that much of a difference between that and software rendering. I personally use -d:software, which to me works best and is most playable, but you can try opengl if you want.

Here's the command that I use to start simcity 4:

WINEDEBUG=-all wine C:\\Program\ Files\\Maxis\\SimCity\ 4\ Deluxe\\Apps\\SimCity\ 4.exe -d:software -intro:off


 


 


If you have a lot of plugins and the game isn't working right
Try this, I had 1.2 GB of plugins and my game just wouldn't' work right, this fixed it nicely: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=4051.0 You might need to add a few dll files, read the readme file that comes with it. You'll need to be registered and logged in to the BSC LEX/
If your game is crashing randomly...

If your game is randomly crashing every ~20 minutes or so, try adding this to your launcher:

-CPUCount:1

It seems to be an issue with dual core CPUs that previously didn't cause problems (by the way it has problems with dual core CPUs in Windows too sometimes), and I tried taskset and it didn't seem to help, but so far adding -CPUCount:1 seems to have fixed it.

How to use custom resulutions

By default, SimCity 4 only allows you to use resolutions up to 1280x1024, but it's very easy to use any resolution you want, just add this to your launcher/start script:

-CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32

Replace 1920x1080 with your desired resolution.

Comments

The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. WineHQ is not responsible for what they say.

If your game is crashing randomly...
by Grégoire Seux on Sunday August 26th 2018, 12:18
If using the technique "CPUCount:1" make the game super laggy. The alternative is to ping Sim City to one cpu only.
It does not solve completely the bug (or at least the game keep crashing every ~1h instead of ~10minutes) but keep a very good performance of the game.

Before launching the game, run this in a terminal:
> sleep 300; taskset -c -p 0 $(pgrep SimCity\ 4.exe)

and launch the game.
Changing Discs
by Intrepid on Monday July 25th 2016, 11:09
I was researching how to install from the disks when I learned this technique:

Insert CD1 and start the installation (usually browse to the CDROM drive and double click setup.exe). Once you get to the "Insert Disc 2" message, open a terminal window as root. Inside the terminal, type the following:

wine eject

this will pop the disc tray open allowing you to insert disc 2 into the drive. You should then be able to go back to the insert disc 2 message during installation and continue the installation.

This is only a possible fix, but this worked for me.
Back