sc2kfix

What does this do?

This is a DLL that patches the Special Edition release of SimCity 2000 for Windows 95 to work properly on modern Windows systems (Windows 7-11 and Wine/Proton) as well as fixing several original game bugs, adding quality of life features, and optionally enabling new gameplay features. While the game itself was always capable of running at high resolutions, oversights in the game's programming and techniques designed for use with 256-colour SVGA cards common in the mid 1990s cause problems with animations on truecolour displays. There are also a number of other bugs in the game ranging from minor rendering issues to major gameplay-damaging bugs that sc2kfix fixes.

Bugs fixed

The following game bugs are patched by this DLL:

• The old, non-functional installer is no longer needed as sc2kfix will prompt for a default mayor and company name on first launch.
• Multiple crash bugs related to the load and save dialogs have been fixed.
• Palette cycling based animations have been fixed to work on truecolour displays and are no longer frozen.
• Military bases now grow properly instead of staying as empty, unusable military zones.
• The military will make multiple attempts at finding a location for a base instead of permanently giving up after the first try.
• Rail and highway neighbor connections now work after a saved city is loaded.
• Sign rendering has been fixed to use the originally intended font.
• City and mayor names are now properly preserved when saving and loading cities.

New features

sc2kfix adds the following quality of life features to SimCity 2000 Special Edition:

• A settings dialog for configuring sc2kfix's optional features has been added to the main menu and the in-game Options menu.
• The New City dialog has been updated to allow you to specify a different mayor name when starting a city.
• Higher quality copies of the transit, pipe, and power construction sounds, as well as the Reticulating Splines soundbite have been ported from other versions of SimCity 2000.
• An optional feature to play music when the game is in the background has been added.
• A number of message box strings have had grammatical fixes and/or better wording added to them.
• A debugging console has been added for experiments and advanced troubleshooting, as well as an sc2kfix.log file for informational and error logging.

sc2kfix implements multiple hooks and a work-in-progress framework for detouring and injecting new code into the game. These are documented in the hooks/hooks.md file. These are currently being used to assist in reverse engineering various components of the game's code, but attaching them to eg. a scripting language of some sorts in the future is not entirely unlikely. There is also a debugging console that can be enabled by passing "-console" to SimCity 2000. While the debugging console generally tries to stop you from doing anything too dangerous, it will happily let you probe any valid memory in the game's address space, which could have adverse effect on any loaded cities. Please be careful when writing to arbitrary memory addresses.

How do I use it?

1. If you are installing the game from scratch, copy the SC2K folder from your CD (under the WIN95 folder in the Special Edition CD) to your hard drive.
   • Make sure to copy the SC2K folder somewhere writable, as the game stores its saves in a subfolder of that directory.
2. Download the latest release or build it from source. The whole plugin is a single file called winmm.dll.
3. Copy the winmm.dll to your SC2K folder. It should end up in the same folder as your simcity.exe executable.
   • If you're running the game on Wine/Proton, you'll need to set a DLL override for simcity.exe to use "native, then builtin" load order for the winmm library, otherwise Wine/Proton will not load the local winmm.dll.
4. Play the game! On the first run of a new install, the game will prompt you for a mayor and organization name. This simulates the original SimCity 2000 installer.

You can configure different aspects of sc2kfix by clicking on the "sc2kfix Settings" button on the game's main menu, or while you're in a gameplay session by selecting the same option from the Options menu. Settings marked with an asterisk require restarting the game for them to take effect. sc2kfix defaults to providing a vanilla gameplay experience with bug fixes and minor quality of life improvements; gameplay-modifying features are opt-in through the settings dialog, and quality of life features can be opted out of the same way.

To-do/known issues

• NOTICE: The 1995 CD Collection version of the game is now deprecated. Please use the 1996 Special Edition version of the game going forward to receive the latest updates.
• 1995 BUG: Clicking the "Load Saved City" option and then canceling the dialog box crashes the game
• 1995 TODO: Fix animations in SCURK 1995
• BUG: Something may have changed in Windows 11 24H2 that breaks SCURK's pick-and-place tool; this is being investigated.