Sim City 4 Deluxe Edtion and Windows 7

Simcity 4 has 2 discs (well my version has)
You need to properly install simcity 4 before you can install rush hour.
If you downloaded this from a torrent, search for Simcity 4 CD 2.

I have a legal version just bought it yesterday. I installed both cd's but it never came up with a choice to not intall rush hour. And it never said "installing rush hour". It just installed the whole game. I wish everyone with win 7 was experiencing the same problem, cause then EA would probably do something about it. New patch or something. I'm going to download windows xp mode. maybe that would help? :'(

It's ironic that I should hear that Sim City 4 is not "fully" compatible with Windows 7. I just thought I would add that Sim City 4 Deluxe Edition is the ONLY game I have been able to run on Windows 7 without any kind of problems. I have not been able to keep any other game running for very long without it crashing, despite the fact that they are supposedly fully compatible with Windows 7. But Sim City 4? No problems at all.

I believe that if the graphics options and effects are set too high the game will not load again. This is not as compatible since settings equivalent to cards and OSes several generations older are not possible. Resolution shouldn't matter much for real-time strategy. At least building draw speed needs to be lower. With care, the experience seems the same however.

Had this problem that when i started the game, it started but just went back to the desktop, pushed the game window, went in, but went back to the desktop after 1 sec.

My solution for that was to put -w in the shortcut. To do that, just make an shortcut on desktop, right click, properties, and click on shortcut tab, there you should see something called target: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe". You should put -w behind that, like this "C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -w push apply, then ok. then run the game. I also changed Compatibility to run this program in compatibility mode for win xp sp3, and disable visual themes.

The -w means that the game will run in window mode.
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" depends on wich harddrive u installed it on.

I wonder if those 3 mods are needed, and for what, such as monitor resolution. I just realized that SimCity 4 Deluxe may be non-standard in having started from Disk 2 before. I need to click the start menu icon instead of the run.exe when the disk is inserted. Visually it is fine as is for me, but it might be better with compatibility?

as far as i can remember, it has always started from disc 2. If the game runs fine, there is no need to do anything rly. But on the other hand, i belive its safer to run in windows xp mode than not run compatibility at all. Since the game is kinda old. But i can run the game without compatibility set to xp, and i dont need to disable visual themes either. Only thing i need to do to run the game, is to force the game to run in window mode.

It appears a better option is to use software rendering (equivalent to Virtual PC), provided that the CPU is 2.4 GHz or higher. That is with details and texture at high and visual effects and sims at medium. There is some uncertainty about the system restore performance, which was great in Vista. This is probably due to hardware changes at restore points. It is best to shut down and restart, rather than use the on-board keyboard, after swapping keyboards or changing USB slots. Even an old MS Precision Pro game controller does not suffer such ambiguity in the host. Perhaps you sacrifice panning for more sims or effects.

I found that the solution to this problem is the same as for other older games which won't work properly under Windows 7 such as Master of Orion 2. If you disable Explorer before playing the game, it runs without issue; or at least I haven't had any problems with it thus far. Create a batch file (name it whatever you want, SimCity4.bat, etc just so long as you make sure to save it as a bat file, not txt or anything else) with the following lines

taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
SimCity4.exe
pause
Start explorer.exe

Place this batch file in the same directory as SimCity4.exe, (Note, you must rename Sim City 4.exe so that it does not contain any space ie SimCity4.exe) and edit the icon on the desktop so that the target points to this bat file instead of the game exe file. When you finish playing all you need to do is hit the space bar to start up Explorer again. I use this same batch file to run Age of Empires 2 Gold, MOO 2, and Pharaoh Gold. I have never had any problems with them since doing this. Before I started using this bat file, none of those games would work under Windows 7 either. The problem is tied to Aero and it's inability to properly handle colours resulting in a variety of graphical glitches and crashes. Killing Explorer before starting the game resolves these issues.

Well, I see you can't delete a post. Disregard what I said above. It does work for the games I listed, and I thought it was working without any issues with Sim City 4, but I just found an issue. While it prevents the video glitches and crashing, it also prevents the windmills from appearing correctly. They still work, but they only appear as white circles on the ground. I apologize for wasting everyone's time with this lapse on my part. I have never before run into a situation where this fix did not work.

Originally Posted by jamesloker

There are 2 discs with SimCity 4 unless you got the dvd version. Rush Hour has only one disc.
When installing SimCity 4, if it asks you for disc 2, it does mean it needs disc 2 for simcity not rush hour.
If you downloaded this game, try finding simcity 4 disc 2 from where you downloaded from.
You need to install SimCity 4 completely (ie both discs) before you can install Rush Hour.

No, this is only true for the orginal game, SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition comes with Rush Hour bundled together on the original game ( still 2 discs )

So installing the Deluxe edition you have no option to install just SimCity 4 and then "upgrade" to Rush Hour, its all one shot during the 2 disc install, you get both products in Deluxe, so what you posted does not help the people, myself included, to attempt to fix this problem in Windows 7 32/64, it just does not work cause rush hour is installed right from the get go.