drivetheory

If you live in Europe you can pickup lossless ALAC versions of SimCity 3000 & SimCity 4 Original Videogame Music at qobuz.com for the typical cost of a CD. http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/simcity-3000-ea-games-soundtrack/0067003071451 http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/simcity-4-ea-games-soundtrack/0067003071055 Sadly us lowly Americans can not purchase this music (store checkout geo-locking prevents purchase, probably IP based)

as i tell everyone when dealing with computers.... "Be Patient!" if the installer is truly hung, confirm it using 2 great tools by SysInternals; procexp & procmon. SCS worked fine on my PC for months, then, for no noticeable reason decided to just stop working, i happened to notice this post while looking for solutions to my problem. Sad to say my uninstall experience with SCS at first made me think it was stuck as well ( Intel Q9550, 4GB DDR3-1333, dual WD Raptors RAID0 array on a LSI Logic 8704ELP), turns out it was just a very slow uninstall process (but not as bad as Adobe CS3 Master Suite!) maybe uninstalling & reinstalling SCS will fix my problems. Hopefully my mention of procexp & procmon will assist you in the future! and, last but not least, SCS is a piece of $&@%$! compared to SC4, it looks pretty but it's designed for the intelligence of a monkey... i hope the next release in the series will go back to the way Maxis did SimCity.... UPDATE: Reinstalling the game fixed my random crashing problem... deleting the SCS folders in the user profile made no difference, only reinstalling the game fixed the random crashing...

How about framerates? my PC is old but when i bought it it was top of the line. I did however buy a new video card until i put together my new PC when Vista SP1 comes out. All of the following refers to running at 1600x1200 with all settings at maximum: In the game If nothing is on-screen and im looking into blank space (tileset/map is just off-screen) my framerate is 500+, but if i look at the map (with anything on it, be it trees or buildings) at any zoom level FPS drops to 5-20... I've contacted ATI about this issue in the past with my old video card and now with my new video card. ATI's tech support is a complete joke... however ATI makes great, reliable hardware (my Rage3D from the 1990s still works to this day on my Pentium II based linux box i use for my FTP server) Changing quality settings in SC4 or ATT (ATI Tray Tools) has little impact on performance, little meaning framerates change +/- 10fps. As well, changes in resolution have the same proportional effect. Moving the map stutters horrible when you scroll the screen sideways. The clock goes and stops and goes and stops and goes.... Basically im not getting the performance from my card /system that i should be and i can't figure out why. HOWEVER, if i change to Software Rendering i get 20 FPS and less stutter but the stutter isn't completely gone. System Specs: Intel P4 3.0GHz HT Intel D865PERL (800MHz FSB) Crucial 2GB DDR400 (512MBx4) ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS Pro Platinum Seagate 300GB SATA-150 HDD (250GB Free; 4092MB SWAPFILE) Why doesn't the new GPU increase performance since CPU usage doesn't seem to ever go above 50%? (I've extensively logged system environment using a handful of tools from SysInternals...) Why do i as well remember getting better performance from my OLD video card and OLD drivers?

How about framerates? my PC is old but when i bought it it was top of the line. I did however buy a new video card until i put together my new PC when Vista SP1 comes out. All of the following refers to running at 1600x1200 with all settings at maximum: In the game If nothing is on-screen and im looking into blank space (tileset/map is just off-screen) my framerate is 500+, but if i look at the map (with anything on it, be it trees or buildings) at any zoom level FPS drops to 5-20... I've contacted ATI about this issue in the past with my old video card and now with my new video card. ATI's tech support is a complete joke... however ATI makes great, reliable hardware (my Rage3D from the 1990s still works to this day on my Pentium II based linux box i use for my FTP server) Changing quality settings in SC4 or ATT (ATI Tray Tools) has little impact on performance, little meaning framerates change +/- 10fps. As well, changes in resolution have the same proportional effect. Moving the map stutters horrible when you scroll the screen sideways. The clock goes and stops and goes and stops and goes.... Basically im not getting the performance from my card /system that i should be and i can't figure out why. HOWEVER, if i change to Software Rendering i get 20 FPS and less stutter but the stutter isn't completely gone. System Specs: Intel P4 3.0GHz HT Intel D865PERL (800MHz FSB) Crucial 2GB DDR400 (512MBx4) ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS Pro Platinum Seagate 300GB SATA-150 HDD (250GB Free; 4092MB SWAPFILE) Why doesn't the new GPU increase performance? Why do i remember BETTER performance 4 years ago with an OLD ATI card and OLD drivers? I feel your pain jabezscratch!!!

I've owned SC4 since it came out, same for SC3000