Hi everyone.

I had a lot of difficulty some months ago trying to find a version of the original Civilization 2 that would work on modern Windows. I quickly realized that it was impossible to run it on 64-bit windows and that most people recommended to just play the Multiplayer Gold Edition instead.

The Multiplayer Gold Edition introduces a lot of changes and additions to the game and I didn't really like the idea of being forced into playing it before the original.

I decided to make an easy-to-use package that made me play vanilla Civ 2 on 64-bit Windows. This is done by running the game through a Windows 3.1 emulator. The solution isn't perfect of course, but through testing I've gotten it to work quite smoothly and with the original CD music aswell.

Here is a download link:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/f4s3i8uvfoe5p5i/Sid_Meier%2527s_Civilization_II_-_64-bit_Compatible.rar/file

Credit to Edward Mendelson for Win31DOSBox, an easy to install Windows 3.1 emulator.

Let me know what you think :)

Interesting. Another option is installing it on a Virtual Machine running Windows XP or older. But you do need a Windows CD or a copy of such for that to work.

Your solution could be more elegant if it works well.

The Multiplayer Gold Edition should definitely be avoided if you want to play single player.

I have the original Civilization 2 in the box, I've not gotten it to work in years. Lets see how this works.

The timing of this post couldn't have been better. I've been playing Civ 1 in Dosbox for a few months now but was craving Civ 2 but couldn't find a tried and true (and easy) way of doing it without a lot of hassle.

Thank you so much for this. Works like a charm!

Great work Dreamia, Civilization II (vanilla) is the best version of this game. Right now i'm trying to figure out, how to get this working in full resolution.

I've updated the archive to run in fullscreen by default :)

Sorry, I was away from gog for a while. The file is now up again.

This is fantastic, thank you very much. I do have the MGE available to play on, but the changes in it just aren't to my liking. My only issues with this one is the screen size, it's playing in a small window on my screen. I've tried editing the dosbox.conf file to make some changes, but nothing seems to be making any difference. Has anyone managed to increase the size of the play window?

EDIT - Ok I figured it out, for a start I was editing the wrong conf file (the correct file to edit is dosbox-x.conf and NOT dosbox.conf.) So what I did was with the game running, I pressed the windows key to undock the mouse (ctrl-f10 wouldn't work to do this), and from there, I was able to play around with the dosbox settings to achieve full screen. While I was there, I changed the video output to OpenGL, and turn frameskip off.) However, dosbox wouldn't write these changes to the settings file, so I had to make them manually by editing the dosbox-x.conf file (this was easy as now I knew what to change.) While editing the conf file, I fixed an issue with the mouse sensitivity in the file (the file had two separate entries for sensitivity, whereas the game expects one single line, with x/y values separated by a comma.)

So this gave me everything perfect, full screen, no frameskip, more suitable mouse sensitivity, and the ultimate package for vanilla Civ II. Thank you again OP. I'm not able to post links to my modified conf file, so here is the text of it (just replace part of yours with this):

[CONF]
[sdl]
windowposition = 100,100
display = 0
output = OpenGL
clip_paste_speed = 30
mouse_wheel_key = -1
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=desktop
windowresolution=original
output=OpenGL
autolock=true
sensitivity=40,40
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=Win31DOSBox.map
usescancodes=true
showmenu = true
titlebar=Windows 3.11

[dosbox]
fastbioslogo = true
startbanner = false
dpi aware = true
quit warning = auto
show advanced options = false
hostkey = ctrlalt
mapper send key = ctrlaltdel
machine = svga_s3
captures=capture
memsize=16
nocachedir = false
synchronize time = true

[render]
frameskip=0
aspect=true
euro = -1
[/CONF]

As the OP mentions vanilla Civ2 is 16bit and doesn't run on modern 64 bit systems however Civilization 2 MGE runs just fine on them IF you install either the 64 bit patch or the Civ2UIA addon which includes said patch. Civ2UIA would be of more interest to you guys as has options to disable the MGE features people don't like (eg the over aggressive betraying AI) and adds a bunch of other cool features too. Some people may also need the indeo video codec to get the videos working too. That way you can play Civ 2 in HD, nice and fast, with all the addons without having to deal with virtual machines and the headaches of transferring files into it (ie scenarios and mods).

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-ii-mge-user-interface-additions-civ2uia.623515/

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/indeo-codec-troubles-with-civ2-solved.362336

Eventually I want to post a video about how to do all this too..

.

Hello,

Apologies in advance for the newb ramble.

Have been using the dosbox emulator package in the OP for a few weeks now - very much appreciated, btw!

I was a player of plain old CivII (guess it was "vanilla", don't recall there being any MGE or TOT qualifiers on the title, and timing checks out as this would've been the period where most of my free time was spent on my Compaq Presario '95 playing this, Warcraft II and Doom II ...my sequelae holy trinity, so around 96-97) and was hoping to share the joy of the full experience including charming quirks like the animated High Council with my nine year old. He got Civ V on his switch and likes it, but...so many of the classic elements from my childhood tragically seem to have been dropped from the series.

Anyway, everything works great (after getting the codec tweak tool and enabling Indeo 4 anyway) but one feature that I was really hoping would function is the Map Editor. I had assumed that it was just a matter of finding a patch to get it to work, as was the case with a similar emulation package I found of another game I still have the disc and jewel case for but can't play - classic WCII (because to heck with Reforged), which was easy enough to scrounge up online and since then my kiddo and I have been creating maps and emailing each other a new .pud file to play weekly.

Unfortunately, progress on my search has stalled - predictably, opening the Civ2Map.exe file in "C Drive -> CIV2" from Windows 10 gives a "this app can't run on your PC" error (as of course would attempting to run civ2.exe itself from that folder, instead of the dosbox-launching version in the main directory), and when I tried launching it from within Dosbox it says "this program must be launched from Windows". So off to the internet to find a patch or a standalone downloadable version of the original map editor that will run via emulation on modern machines. Nope, nothing like that anywhere. At least for me; might be a missing magic word to refine my search.

Leaving aside the chaff of some "age of civ II" mobile game (with its own map editor apparently) cluttering up results if not filtered out, everything just pointed back to some very old downloads provided by Mercator. I got his ToT (but supposedly cross-compatible?) editor .zip that includes "Civ2Map.exe" (with the correct old yellow hand holding a blue globe icon and everything - Auspicious!) MPGame, MPLabel, and MPRead. I tried running it and got a message that XDaemon.dll was missing, so, cool went and found/downloaded that and extracted into the same folder. Now, however, double-clicking does - nothing. Nothing launch, not a blip in Task Mgr, no error even.

What exactly am I missing here? I still see people talking about making maps for Civ II - so, how? Are those people playing with the actual CD and running rigs built in the 90's or...? I'm sure the solution's something very obvious, so kindly excuse a nostalgic and hopeful dad's ignorance and thanks in advance for letting me throw myself on your mercies. :D

Thanks very much for this - Civ 2 by far my favorite version (of course I have ben playing it since it first came out so might be little prejudiced ;)
Thanks much enternow- the settings changes worked like a charm

You Dreamia and enternow are the kind of heroes the world needs! I've dreamed of playing Civ II for years and messed with different Win 3.1 and Win 95 solutions to the best of my (pretty low) abilities with no luck, but this one works absolutely perfectly after the conf tweaks. Thanks a million to the both of you!

Very nice. I just stumbled upon this thread by happenstance. I've tried a number of times getting Civ2 to run without success, and I just gave up at some point.

It's been so long since I played I thought I would actually like it more than some of the later games, but, honestly, some of the quality-of-life features of the newer entries in this series are sorely missed: resource/info overlays, easy civilopedia link-nesting, tooltips. In Civ2 it just feels like a ton of unnecessary extra clicking just to get some of the most basic information. *shrug* Maybe I just need to give it some more time. Actually, I'd recommend for people to keep frameskip on as without it the throne room upgrade selection goes so abysmally slow it's unbearable.

So the game runs just about flawlessly, however I have a problem with the music. It only seems to be able to play two of the tracks (the shining path and hammurabi's code [I think]) before the music stops playing entirely. When I select "pick music" it gives me the message that the CD must be inserted in order to play music. Does anyone know why this might be?