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Sunday, September 21

Cool

Well, That's A Surprise

Now that I have a working PC again, I wanted to get some games reinstalled on it.  The Sims 2 already went on - thanks to a utility that recovered my license keys from the registry on my old PC.

I wanted to reload SimCity 4 as well, because you need it to create custom regions in The Sims 2.  I had my whole games directory from my old PC backed up, but clearly there was no way SimCity was going to work without the correct keys in the registry.  And while I had all the disks, I couldn't find the license key for the original game.  (I did find the box, manual, and key for the Rush Hour expansion pack.)

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I restored the directory and tried it.  And it worked.  Perfectly.  First time.  Under Vista 64, an operating system undreamt of when the game was released.  So points to Maxis and to Microsoft on that one.  (Part of the reason it worked is that SimCity 4 was designed to run on Windows 95/98/Me, which didn't have a registry at all.  But part of it has to be good coding.)

SimCity 4 was the thing that lead my to build my previous PC, because the machine I had at the time couldn't cope with its absurd memory requirements.  I had a whole 512MB, and as my city grew, the game would grind to a halt.  Surely it couldn't be using all that memory?  Surely it was.  So I added another 256MB - all the motherboard could take with the modules available then - and it ran better, briefly, before I collided with the Windows Me 512MB memory limit and the machine corrupted its own operating system and fell down and died.  (I later rebuilt it with 1.25GB and XP, used it as a development box at work, and eventually gave it away.  As far as I know, it still works.)

Anyways, the last time I played SimCity 4 in any depth was on a 1.2GHz Athlon with 512MB of memory and a 128MB GeForce 4600.  I now have a 2.6GHz Athlon 64 X2 with 8GB of memory and a 1GB GeForce 9600.

It's pretty darn zippy.  I'd love to see a SimCity 5, but this will do for now.  (Maybe I'll try SimCity Societies some time, but reports are that it's pretty much an abortion.)

I've also got Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3 on here.  Expect productivity to plummet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:21 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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