unable to play a game

[davy crockett]

I've played civilization 3 on my win 7 computer. There was no problem until I had win 10 on another partition, then the game stopped working on win 7. Now I have disconnected the drive with win 10 and reinstalled win 7 to get the game back. Today I got round to catching up with all the updates after reinstalling win 7. I also reconnected the win 10 disk in the pc, and now the game doesn't work on win 7 again.
I'm not sure if it stopped working because of an update or because of the win 10 disk. I disconnected the win 10 disk but it made no difference as the game still won't work on win 7.
I'd like to know if there is a way to get it to play again without reinstalling the whole win7.

 

[Mellon Head]

Civilization 3 uses an old form of copy protection. Microsoft issued an update in September /15 that broke older games that use that form of copy protection. Civ 4 has the same problem. There is a work around. See the instructions in this thread:

http://www.sevenforums.com/gaming/389244-fifa-14-doesnt-work-after-windows-reinstall.html

See especially post # 4. It gives you instructions on how to make older games work.

 

[davy crockett]

Great. Now my game works!
A couple of questions - the command prompt windows were closed and the game ran ok. Should they remain open?
Also, you posted another command to close/disable the secdrv after the game is played - is that required or can they be left running all the time?

 

[Mellon Head]

It's OK if the command windows close. In fact, I prefer them to close, myself.

You can leave SECDRV set to run if you like, but Microsoft has apparently discovered some security exploits with it, and that was the reason for the patch. For that reason, it may not be a good idea to leave it enabled when you are doing things on the computer other than Civ or other older games which require it.

I have mine set up as a couple of batch files on my desktop. One for open and one for close. It makes it really easy. If CIV3 is the only old game you play, you could add CIV3 to the opening batch file and it would automatically run CIV3 when it enabled SECDRV. There's lots of potential for ease of use there.

 

[davy crockett]

Sounds good. It's been a while since I did batch files, I'll have to brush it up.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Mellon Head]

No problem. Glad you got it working.

 

[Alejandro85]

Microsoft has apparently discovered some security exploits with it

Is it know what are the exact vulnerabilities of that? What consequencies does it have and how to mitigate them? (without trashing the system as MS did, of course).

I would also argue against starting the driver and the game within the same bat file. Reason is simple, starting/stopping drivers require administrator privileges, and games must never run with an admin account (there is no good reason for ever doing that). You can do that in two bat files, running the game in-between to mitigate that issue.

 

[Mellon Head]

I'm not sure what the exact vulnerabilities on that are. Microsoft has been kind of vague about it. To my knowledge, they have only "identified vulnerabilities". Not very descriptive.

I would disagree with the idea of not running a game in Admin mode, and while that is true for most of them, it is not true for Civilization IV. If it installs where it likes to (C:\Program Files (X86)), it helps to have Admin privileges. It also reads and writes to the user and appdata folders, and won't do so properly without elevated privilege.

It's the only game I have that has to be run this way, and if you want to use mods for it, you have to.