Running SC4 on Windows 10

[Miss Cuddly 52]

Does anyone know how I can get SC4 to run under windoze 10?

Thanks for any help

Miss Cuddly xx

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

3 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

Does anyone know how I can get SC4 to run under windoze 10?

Yep, if it's a digital version such as the one from Gog or Steam. The disc version will not run. And stay away from Origin's digital version.

[Miss Cuddly 52]

Oh poop, it's a disc version that I last had running on a Windoze 7 machine.

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

Well, phooey. There is technically a way to get the disc version to run on 10, however it requires you to digitally sign a certificate and is complicated to do and highly not recommended for security reasons.

The Gog one is the very best to get and it goes on sale a few times per year for $4.99 USD.

[Miss Cuddly 52]

I have been looking at Skylines, will that be okay on 10?

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

4 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

I have been looking at Skylines, will that be okay on 10?

I can only guess it will be fine since it's a digital only download. However, it wouldn't hurt to create a new topic in Cities: Skylines General Discussion and ask the experts. (I don't play it so I can't say for certain.)

[Miss Cuddly 52]

Okay thanks for your help 

  Edited February 15, 2019 by Miss Cuddly  
Typo.!!

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

My pleasure.

Things to consider (ask about) is if your comp has enough oomph to run CSL. One person I used to chat with a lot played the game and because they had oodles of custom assets required 32 GB of RAM and still 45 minutes to load the game. (The good side of SC4 is that it has better graphics and 16 years of tried and tested custom content. Ofc, I only play SC4 so consider my opinion biased.)

[Miss Cuddly 52]

I think that I'll get the digital download of SC4 and stick with that.

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

11 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

I think that I'll get the digital download of SC4 and stick with that.

I presume you've play SC4 in the past and enjoyed it. It's like a comfy pair of old shoes that just feels good.

[Cyclone Boom 17,031]

14 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

I think that I'll get the digital download of SC4 and stick with that.

As someone who's still into SC4, I think that's a very good choice. There's still a helpful active community here for the game, and also 16 years worth of custom content on the STEX makes it possible to tailor things specifically to your liking. I would recommend taking it slowly with new items, but there are endless possibilities.

For the GOG game, I concur with recommending the GOG version which is a digital download and fully compatible on Windows 10. As an aside, purchases made from our affiliate link means ST gets a small sales commission from the purchase price. As @CorinaMarie said, they do have regular sales where the game retails at 75% of the current retail price. These usually happen during seasonal events, and so this is most likely to next happen during Easter. There are are also "spot sales" which can happen any day of the week, so it might be worth checking up to see if you can pick up the game at a bargain price. Of course it's fine to buy it now, but just something to inform you about.

There is a GOG price tracker site with some historical data which gives a general idea of the regularity. (Although it hasn't been updated for a while.)

[Miss Cuddly 52]

Yup, but without the money tree I'm lost...

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

4 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

Yup, but without the money tree I'm lost...

Either SC4 or CSL will need you to water that money tree.

Feel free to research either game and make your decision when the time is right for you. (I do know we have a good following on ST for CSL so that means many peeps enjoy it.)

[Miss Cuddly 52]

The machine I'm planning to use has a 2.4GHz quad core processor and 16Gb of RAM and Windoze 10.

Can you tell I don't really like Windoze, my own machine runs on Linux but I'm 'borrowing' my other half's laptop to play on.

Incidentally do you know if it will run on Linux with the WINE emulator.?

 

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

2 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

Incidentally do you know if it will run on Linux with the WINE emulator.?

I've no idea about CSL, but there is this topic for SC4: How to use Wine with SC4D, NAM, Modding Tools.

[Miss Cuddly 52]

3 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I've no idea about CSL, but there is this topic for SC4: How to use Wine with SC4D, NAM, Modding Tools.

Well that's tomorrow taken care of...

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

1 minute ago, Miss Cuddly said:

Well that's tomorrow taken care of...

It might likely be that the disc version will work fine under Linux. I've not personally tried it, but check and see before you go buying the digital version.

[Miss Cuddly 52]

Just now, CorinaMarie said:

It might likely be that the disc version will work fine under Linux. I've not personally tried it, but check and see before you go buying the digital version.

That's the plan, trying that won't cost me anything, I might lose a few hairs though if things don't go right...

[CorinaMarie 29,895]

4 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

That's the plan, trying that won't cost me anything, I might lose a few hairs though if things don't go right...

 @Handyman peeks in on things here on ST quite often and I've found him to be quite friendly and helpful in both public posts and private messages so I'm sure if you have questions he'll be likely to respond.

[Miss Cuddly 52]

2 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

 @Handyman peeks in on things here on ST quite often and I've found him to be quite friendly and helpful in both public posts and private messages so I'm sure if you have questions he'll be likely to respond.

That's good to know...

[rsc204 21,866]

27 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

The machine I'm planning to use has a 2.4GHz quad core processor and 16Gb of RAM and Windoze 10.

The clock speed (2.4Ghz) is quite a meaningless figure, since it's only comparable with CPUs of a similar generation. To be sure you can run Cities Skylines, we'd need to know the model name of that processor, for example Core i7 4770. Likewise, to play Cities Skylines requires a decent dedicated graphics card, so we'd need to know if you have an Intel, AMD or NVidia card in your system and again the model number. This may be more complicated, since modern systems often have one integrated one, possibly with an additional "dedicated" card.

All of this information can be easily got from Windows, click on the Start button, type in "device manager", then open up the section "Display Adaptors". The items listed there will be any graphics cards your system has. Then under "processors" will be listed your CPU, note here it may list your CPU many times (4 or 8), because it see's each core as a separate device.

Personally, I think Cities Skylines is a briefly enjoyable but very flawed game, but everyone's mileage varies with these things. However, the sale prices are usually very reasonable, but as some have warned, add a lot of mods to the game and you'll soon be needing a seriously expensive machine to keep up.

27 minutes ago, Miss Cuddly said:

Incidentally do you know if it will run on Linux with the WINE emulator.?

17 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

It might likely be that the disc version will work fine under Linux. I've not personally tried it, but check and see before you go buying the digital version.

There is nothing to stop you running the disc version under Wine, nor Windows 10 for that matter. The issue relates to a driver which MS removed from Windows 10, "secdrv.sys", then subsequently disabled via an update to Vista - 8.1 systems. You can restore the driver easily under those older versions, but for Windows 10, it requires you to manually digitally sign the driver, or Windows will refuse to load it. It's not highly recommended, because there is a security risk to having that driver running, hence it's removal. The problem being, that driver is needed to validate the on-disk DRM that was used not only by SC4, but by thousands of games of that time. In one foul swoop, all such titles were rendered coasters by this change. Under Linux though, there is no real risk, because any malware designed for Windows, simply can't take hold of a Linux system. Since Wine will happily load the driver you need, it should be quite possible to work around the issue this way. You'll find a copy of said driver on the SC4 disks FYI.

I think Cities Skylines will work under Linux, but I got the impression it's not well optimised for it. That may have changed though in the intervening years since release.

[Handyman 791]

I did run the SC4 disk version for a few years in wine but my disks wore out and I had to buy a digital version (Gog). There are some quirks to deal with when installing it into wine, but nothing too technical. However, if you plan to run it on a laptop, you will likely need a system with a decent AMD or NVidia graphics system (in Linux NVidia is preferred because their driver support is much better). You stated above that you currently use a Linux system so you know you do not normally need a graphics driver, but for SC4 you will need directx so you can run it in ' hardware mode '.  So if your laptop has Intel graphics, it would be a non-starter, in my opinion.

So I will let you digest this for now and if you would like to give it a try, post your graphics specs and we can go from there.

[Miss Cuddly 52]

28 minutes ago, Handyman said:

I did run the SC4 disk version for a few years in wine but my disks wore out and I had to buy a digital version (Gog). There are some quirks to deal with when installing it into wine, but nothing too technical. However, if you plan to run it on a laptop, you will likely need a system with a decent AMD or NVidia graphics system (in Linux NVidia is preferred because their driver support is much better). You stated above that you currently use a Linux system so you know you do not normally need a graphics driver, but for SC4 you will need directx so you can run it in ' hardware mode '.  So if your laptop has Intel graphics, it would be a non-starter, in my opinion.

So I will let you digest this for now and if you would like to give it a try, post your graphics specs and we can go from there.

Hiya, thanks for your time. I'm attaching a screen shot of my system info.

[rsc204 21,866]

Just for some context, I have a laptop with a first generation i5 / Intergrated Graphics which runs SC4 just fine. Albeit you need to turn the shadows to medium, but otherwise it works pretty well. I'm not sure how good the linux drivers are, since I run Windows, but I guess try it and see is all you can do.

[Handyman 791]

10 hours ago, Miss Cuddly said:

Hiya, thanks for your time. I'm attaching a screen shot of my system info.

Hi, happy to help if I can. I have not used Fedora (learning opportunity for me) so I will have to check into it, see how it compares to my experience with Ubuntu. I will get back to you soon.

9 hours ago, rsc204 said:

I'm not sure how good the linux drivers are,

I'm not sure either, it's been a number of years since I looked into that, I don't recall coming away happy. Will look at that again and see if things have changed.

[Miss Cuddly 52]

I have installed SC4 on my laptop, and it was working fine for a while then it crashed on me, and I have no idea of how to restart the game.

I have opened the SC4 folder, and selected RunGame.exe and then open with Wine Windows Program Loader but nothing happens, the disc whirs but that's it.

 

HELP..!!!!

  Edited February 16, 2019 by Miss Cuddly  
adding info

[tfcjohn 4]

On 2/14/2019 at 7:02 PM, CorinaMarie said:

Yep, if it's a digital version such as the one from Gog or Steam. The disc version will not run. And stay away from Origin's digital version.

I have the Origins version.... Is that the reason I am crashing now every 2min? :/ fml!

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

31 minutes ago, tfcjohn said:

I have the Origins version.... Is that the reason I am crashing now every 2min? :/ fml!

Unless you redeemed a disk version at Origin and got a fully patched download in return, then you almost certainly have a primitive and unpatchable version that won't work with the NAM or much else. In that case, I hope you can get your money back (persistence helps).

[tfcjohn 4]

6 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

Unless you redeemed a disk version at Origin and got a fully patched download in return, then you almost certainly have a primitive and unpatchable version that won't work with the NAM or much else. In that case, I hope you can get your money back (persistence helps).

Nah it was digital.... But it wasn't much....

 

So I am better off with the steam version then with all these add ons? 

[Miss Cuddly 52]

2 minutes ago, tfcjohn said:

So I am better off with the steam version then with all these add ons? 

From what folk have said the Gog one is best, and that's the one I'll probably go for.