SimCity 3k in 4k

Summary

SimCity 3000 is the best SimCity. It's built upon a souped-up version of the Sc2K engine. It features isometric art, crafted pixel by pixel. It strikes the right balance of features and complexity; it feels like it could be mastered but without coddling you. It also has a high resolution Jazzy/new age OST. Running it on modern systems takes a few tweaks but is certainly doable. By "modern" I mean Windows 10 LTSC 2021, Ryzen 5 3600, Radeon Rx 7600, 48 GB of RAM, 4K monitor. I first installed SC3k from its CD ROM. I've had this Scholastic Edition CD all my life, I actually purchased it at a school book fair in a primary school building that no longer exists. But the disk still does, and I will not pay for the same game twice. The installation completed without trouble on 64-bit Windows 10. The game launched but it wasn't very playable: There was no widescreen support The resolutions supported were relics like 800x600 and 1024x768 The game was laggy when scrolling The game accelerated when scrolling There is a big slowdown after loading a city The music doesn't play without using the CD, and some of it was missing! Some tiles had missing graphics for a few seconds before their contents were drawn. Not to worry. There are remedies for each of these. By the end of this article, you will have a SimCity 3000 game that looks just like this: Behold, SimCity 3000 in 4K! Risky biscuits: building 1WTC and 2WTC but no hospitals or fire stations. I like to tease fate. 1. GOG Patched EXE The patched EXE will enable widescreen support. It also acts as a No-CD patch. GOG.com contributed this patch and have shared it for a public download: Download: From GOG. Mirror. MD5: 638eb5b3e7de9ada9b61a1ea40d276a4. Download this and replace the original EXE with it. Now you can start the game and choose a larger resolution. However, the mouse acceleration will now be too much. Also, the game will appear horribly askew if you've chosen a resolution that has a factor of 8, which is very likely b...