Weird - does SimCity 2000 insist that your CD be drive D: (I've got a few systems with multiple hard drives
where the CD is E: (or F:)

Perhaps there's a way during the game install where you can tell it what drive is your CD?
- Or perhaps it "knows" what drive it was installed from (assuming it came on CD) and uses that

SUBST is pretty low-level and just redirects file system access .. I use it all the time in Win7/64
and haven't had trouble with big files. WFW3.11 is kinda "on top of" DOS, so perhaps there's another
factor in this case ... but ...

I suspect it's actually using CD audio which has to be at a known location on the optical media
and SUBST couldn't work anywhere. Perhaps in DosBox with a mounted CD image...?

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-06-19, 12:45:

Weird - does SimCity 2000 insist that your CD be drive D: (I've got a few systems with multiple hard drives where the CD is E: ( […]
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Weird - does SimCity 2000 insist that your CD be drive D: (I've got a few systems with multiple hard drives
where the CD is E: (or F:)

Perhaps there's a way during the game install where you can tell it what drive is your CD?
- Or perhaps it "knows" what drive it was installed from (assuming it came on CD) and uses that

SUBST is pretty low-level and just redirects file system access .. I use it all the time in Win7/64
and haven't had trouble with big files. WFW3.11 is kinda "on top of" DOS, so perhaps there's another
factor in this case ... but ...

I suspect it's actually using CD audio which has to be at a known location on the optical media
and SUBST couldn't work anywhere. Perhaps in DosBox with a mounted CD image...?

I'm not using the CD (The first sentence of my post says "I've managed to get SimCity 2000 Special Edition working without the CD").

But the game expects the video files to be in a \DATA directory that MUST BE in the root folder of a drive (like C:\DATA or D:\DATA). It doesn't matter what drive letter it is, I can tell it whatever drive I want.

I'm currently using SUBST to make the E: point to the SC2KWIN directory so the game directory becomes E: and the C:\SC2KWIN\DATA directory becomes E:\DATA. If the game doesn't detect the videos in the root DATA directory it shows a message about no CD being found and skips the videos entirely.

However when SUBST is loaded and Windows for Workgroups 32 bit File Access is enabled, WFW will throw up an error message up starting about SUBST being incompatible with 32-bit FA and will disable 32-bit FA.

I want to know: Is there a different program I can use to point a drive letter to a specific directory? Something from within Windows that won't complain about 32-bit FA?

Sleaka_J wrote on 2025-06-20, 10:35:

I'm not using the CD (The first sentence of my post says "I've managed to get SimCity 2000 Special Edition working without the CD").

I did get that - I thought the problem was that various audio/video features were not working.

I want to know: Is there a different program I can use to point a drive letter to a specific directory? Something from within Windows that won't complain about 32-bit FA?

It's WFW - can you mount a local directory over the network causing it to appear as a drive?

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-06-20, 10:56:

It's WFW - can you mount a local directory over the network causing it to appear as a drive?

That's actually a pretty good idea, I'm pretty sure you can do that, but curious how well it will work here

maxtherabbit wrote on 2025-06-20, 13:24:

That's actually a pretty good idea, I'm pretty sure you can do that, but curious how well it will work here

I'd be curious to know as well ... I guess it all depends on how "smart" Winblows is - How far down the driver chain it goes
when accessing a resource that actually on the same network node.

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-06-20, 10:56:

It's WFW - can you mount a local directory over the network causing it to appear as a drive?

No. Typing a local directory gives the error message "The computer name specified in the network path cannot be found".

https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?ti … _Archive/106266

I wonder if emulating the CD using one of the utilities included with SHSUCDHD might be an option (the one allowing to load an image into RAM might be worth considering).

Another related option could be to use a ramdrive .

I am not exactly sure how/if that would interact/interfere with 32-bit file access.

Yet another option would be to either repartation your boot drive and create an extra logical drive or add another physical drive and store Simcity CD files in that.

darry wrote on 2025-06-22, 09:54:

I am not exactly sure how/if that would interact/interfere with 32-bit file access.

It wouldn't interfere, I believe.
VFAT/VCACHE don't touch CD-ROM drives, or ISO9660 filesystem in general.
It's up to SmartDrive to provide caching, up to MSCDEX to provide drive letter.

The interesting thing is, however, that CD-ROM devices are provided via network drive API.
MSCDEX uses the network redirector (?) to provide a drive letter to an otherwise unsupported filesystem (ISO9660).
(DOS knows FAT only, merely DOS 4 from 1988-1900 had support for an IFS, installable filesystem).

Jo22 wrote on 2025-06-22, 10:33:

It wouldn't interfere, I believe. VFAT/VCACHE don't touch CD-ROM drives, or ISO9660 filesystem in general. It's up to SmartDrive […]
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darry wrote on 2025-06-22, 09:54:

I am not exactly sure how/if that would interact/interfere with 32-bit file access.

It wouldn't interfere, I believe.
VFAT/VCACHE don't touch CD-ROM drives, or ISO9660 filesystem in general.
It's up to SmartDrive to provide caching, up to MSCDEX to provide drive letter.

The interesting thing is, however, that CD-ROM devices are provided via network drive API.
MSCDEX uses the network redirector (?) to provide a drive letter to an otherwise unsupported filesystem (ISO9660).
(DOS knows FAT only, merely DOS 4 from 1988-1900 had support for an IFS, installable filesystem).

My main concern was about SHSUCDHD's need to access the image on the hard drive possibly causing issues with 32-bit file access rather than the MSCDEX redirector part. I don't know enough about this stuff to really have a worthwhile opinion. The RAM based options are even less likely to interfere, I would guess.

A dedicated logical or physical drive would be pretty much guaranteed to work, AFAIU and unless I'm missing something.

Sleaka_J wrote on 2025-06-22, 07:22:

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-06-20, 10:56:

It's WFW - can you mount a local directory over the network causing it to appear as a drive?

No. Typing a local directory gives the error message "The computer name specified in the network path cannot be found".

Did you use the full UNC path of the shared directory including the NetBIOS computer name of the local computer?