It is difficult to give you assistance when you are not describing exactly what you are doing.

Have you followed the 60 Seconds Guide?

would "unable to play intro.mve" indicate quicktime is needed ?

If it's a DOS game, then Quicktime is irrelevant. The error message more likely indicates something was not mounted correctly.

Also, most Quicktime movies were .mov back then.

.Mve means "Interplay Multimedia Video Codec" , MVE is not quicktime-compliant

Is it a special edition CD?

There is a seperate executable for the intro movie and the game itself. You can just skip the intro movie by running SC2K.exe instead of SC2000.bat

The whole point to Interplay's SimCity is that there are cutscenes during the gameplay.

Geek_Guy2001 wrote:

.Mve means "Interplay Multimedia Video Codec" , MVE is not quicktime-compliant

Oh, you're still here. Did you solve the problem? Otherwise,

Jorpho wrote:

It is difficult to give you assistance when you are not describing exactly what you are doing.

Never mind, I confused Simcity 2000 with the original version...

Not the SC2000 Special Edition CD , it's Interplay and This is not Simcity 2000 , We're talking about the 1994 version of SimCity Classic (CD version)

So... Followed the 60 seconds guide yet? Otherwise this thread will fast turn into nothing

You have to tell us exactly what you did (installation, mountings, commands on the prompt..) or we can't help you...

Hi Geek_Guy,

Did you ever get this solved? If you didn't, or anyone else wants to know, I can give you the low down on how to get SimCity Enhanced CD (by Interplay) running.

Bellarmine

bellarmine, if you're still around, I definitely want to know.

I've done everything to try to get this working, but I get hit with the same problem that GeekGuy described in his step 2. I first tried setting up a shortcut to the game through DOSBOX (yes, I understand the 60 second instructions, and probably a little more beyond that). That's when it tells me that it's unable to play the intro movie, and to run the SimCity setup executable. Okay, fine... I use DOSBOX to run the setup, and it gives me some information about my system, including where it expects to find the video and sound files. They have the wrong default paths, so I correct them. But I still get the game hanging up at the intro movie, and not moving past it. Either the game isn't recognizing my video and audio paths, or there's something else I'm missing.

bellarmine, if you're still around...

Jorpho wrote:

It is difficult to give you assistance when you are not describing exactly what you are doing.

Lol... I thought I DID describe exactly what I tried. I was hoping someone could give me the steps they took to get the game running, rather than my having to describe every failed attempt I made. Well, let me painstakingly go through just one of my many attempts that gave me the exact same results.

First I turned on the computer.

Then I carefully placed the SimCity Enhanced CD Rom into the drive.

Then I moved all of the files into D-Fend Reloaded, a handy frontend. It installed the game for me.

For the sake of simplicity (usually, I install games to an external hard drive), I installed it right to C:\SIMCITY.

Then a SimCity CD-Rom Setup/Configuration screen came up. It told me that my digital sound board is a Sound Blaster (correct) and the Sound Blaster info is: "Addr:0220h, IRQ:7, DMA:1" (I have no idea if this is correct). It also gave me a path for the Video as "D:\SIMCITY\VIDEO" and Audio as "D:SIMCITY\AUDIO". I changed the path to C:. I verified that the video and audio files were indeed at C:\Simcity\Video & Audio. It also had "Digital Sound Status: Enabled," "Video Playback Status: Enabled," "Full Screen Video: Disabled," and "Audio Help Status: Enabled." I didn't change any of those settings.

When I then hit a key, the screen goes black, it changes to a typical old-game resolution (so I know DOSBOX is doing SOMETHING), and then it tells me "unable to play intro.mve," and that I should check the Setup/Configuration screen I had just exited.

I went through a few hours of variations of the foregoing steps, and consistently wound up with the same results.

So, now, could someone who has successfully gotten this game running please tell me the steps they took? I really appreciate whatever insight someone could give me.

(I don't mean to sound obnoxious, Jorpho, but bellarmine offered the "low down" on how to get this game running. Seems to me he, or anyone else who's successfully done this, doesn't need to hear the details of my failed attempts to describe to me what they did).

There is *nothing* challenging about installing and running the game in DOSBox: just follow the 60-seconds guide.

bacchuspup wrote:

I changed the path to C:

Why did you change that? The game looks for its audio and video files on the cdrom (D:), so don't change those paths and keep the cdrom mounted when playing.

If you install the game the way you're supposed to, by running INSTALL.BAT on the cdrom (D:) drive, the AUDIO and VIDEO files are NOT copied to the C: drive, and the setup program explains this:

The video and audio files will remain on your CD and must be accessed from
the CD itself, not copied to the hard drive.

bacchuspup wrote:

bellarmine, if you're still around, I definitely want to know.......

Hi BacchusPup,

No problem, thanks for asking. I can see you've been taking a lot of flack about this, let me try and make everyone's life simpler. One good thing is at least I've seen what you've been up to, so I can see what you've tried already. 😎

First, it is perfectly possible to run this off the HDD, WITHOUT the CD, so there. I've done this for years, and I have just tested this all out in DOSBox not 5 minutes ago, so here is what I did:

• - Run DOSBox 0.74
  ---------- I don't know any experience with front ends, so at least to begin with let's keep it simple and use DOSBox the ordinary way.
  - When you get the prompt, mount your favorite drive as C, D, or whatever.
  - Next mount the CD drive that your Interplay CD is in.
  ---------- One note, is the CD drive mounted as a CD, or just a regular MOUNT command? Type INTRO CDROM for details.
  ---------- This works for me: mount d: d:\ -t cdrom -usecd 0 -ioctl (Replace d: and 0 with your CDROM)
  - Install the game using INSTALL.EXE, to C:\Games\Simcity if you wish, or anywhere else
  - After the install is finished, it should run the game and play the intro movie.
  - After this, if desired you may copy the AUDIO and VIDEO folders to the HDD. For example, using DOSBox, make folders C:\Games\Simcity\Video and C:\Games\Simcity\Audio. Copy ALL the audio/video files from the CD to these 2 folders.
  - Then, run SCSETUP and change the paths to C:\Games\Simcity\Video and C:\Games\Simcity\Audio, respectively, or whatever paths you wish.
  - Now the game will run WITHOUT the CD in the drive.

Let me know if this works. Please note, I did this in one session without closing DOSBox, so everything remains the same. I suspect that your frontend is doing something to mess you up, regarding driver letters / paths etc, so try the above first. You mention it "installed the game for you". Perhaps it is just copying the files, and not setting upi the game's config file properly.

I keep it simple, use DOSBox without any front end and mount all 4 of my drives (C D E F) as C D E F in DOSBox. I know that is a no no, but I'm used to dealing with DOS since DOS 6.22, so I know what I'm doing......... 😎

Hope this helps, any more questions anyone let me know - Cheers! 😀

Bellarmine

Thanks to both Ripsaw8080 and bellarmine. I have to go to work, but I will try out both of your solutions when I get home.

Ripsaw8080, I'm pretty certain one of my attempts to get this game to work did involve keeping the D path as-is. It still didn't work for me. Shrugging. I will try it out again tonight just to see if I missed something the first time I tried. And I still appreciate the (somewhat condescending) help.

bellarmine - THANK YOU. I ultimately want my games as user-friendly as possible for the sake of my wife and kids, and as close to possible to plug and play. So, yes, not having to mess with the actual CD or mount a virtual drive is what I'm ultimately trying to do. I've never had so many problems with getting a game to work (other than Pandora Tomorrow, which I eventually just got for XBOX). I'll post whether I have any further problems. And thanks for the utter lack of condescension - which is difficult to find on tech forums.

bacchuspup wrote:

Ripsaw8080, I'm pretty certain one of my attempts to get this game to work did involve keeping the D path as-is. It still didn't work for me. Shrugging. I will try it out again tonight just to see if I missed something the first time I tried. And I still appreciate the (somewhat condescending) help.

It didn't work because you didn't install the game correctly, as evidenced by the audio and video files on the C: drive. What you should try again is to follow the 60-Seconds Guide -- keeping the cdrom mounted and not changing the default paths in the setup program is a natural part of that.

The procedure bellarmine describes is basically what is in the 60-Seconds guide; although the guide is a bit more thorough, such as the step of making the cdrom drive the default drive before running the install. The stuff about manually copying files and changing paths is optional, and I generally don't recommend that kind of thing to someone having problems getting a game to work. BTW, if you use an image of the cdrom then you're already running everything off hdd.

Okay, so following ripsaw's suggestion and using the 60 second guide (and I'm going to try to do this with an image file, because I'd really rather not deal with the real disc):

1) Created a folder for the game - A:\Video Games\PC\1986-1990\SimCity Enhanced.
2) Mounted the disc image to my D drive using Daemon Tools.
3) Started DOSBOX without any frontend.
4) Entered the following commands:
Z:\>mount A "A:\Video Games\PC\1986-1990\SimCity Enhanced"
Z:\>mount D "D:\" -t cdrom
Z:\>A:
5) Entered the following commands (and why I had to enter Z:\A: above is beyond me, but okay)...
A:\>D:
D:\>dir /w
D:\>install
6) So now I'm at the "SimCity CD_ROM Setup/Configuration Program." It's asking me to enter the install path, and says that I can change it to anything. The 60 second guide gives me little guidance here. Am I supposed to leave the install path at "C:\SIMCITY"? Does that make sense if I've already set up DOSBOX to go to my A drive for this game? Do I have to create a folder on my C drive to begin with? Because I'd really rather keep my games on my external hard drive at A...

I might be ready to move on to bellarmine's solution... 😀