I've put together a Wine wrapper for SimCity 4, allowing it to be played on Linux almost like a native game & with no Wine knowledge required.

Simply run the build script to create the wrapper. If the installer files are not alongside the wrapper build files then the path to them will need to be specified either by passing it as an argument to the build script with -respath="<path>" or by setting an environment variable named WINEWRAP_RESPATH containing it. You can change the path to build the wrapper in and the name of the wrapper directory with the -buildpath= and -dirname= arguments. The build path can also be set with the WINEWRAP_BUILDPATH environment variable.

The output will be a directory containing the game set up within a preconfigured Wine prefix, along with its own copy of Wine, extracted game icons, documentation, and start script(s). From there simply run the start script to play. The start script also includes options for creating a shortcut, configuring the wrapper etc.

(to uninstall simply delete the game directory and any shortcuts you created, and the game's user data directory in ~/.local/share if you don't want to keep your saves & settings)

User data is stored under ~/.local/share/simcity4

Full details are in the readme.txt and release notes. Here is the download link:

simcity4_wine.tar.xz
(37.2 kB, SHA256: 57302bf3d43393724aa383d7761af14796a8b236b313f4e5265a4d293b185deb)

Last updated 2021/07/11

The wrapper uses Wine 6.0. Wine and Winetricks will be downloaded automatically if not present; to avoid redownloading for other scripts the downloaded Wine package will be stored in ~/.cache/winewrap

This hasn't had a lot of testing yet but seems to work ok so far. If anyone encounters any problems then post in this thread, Adamhm's Linux Wine Wrappers - News, FAQ &amp; Discussion and/or The "Judas&trade; does this run in Wine" thread v1.173.

For more of my Linux Wine wrappers check out post 3 in this thread: Adamhm's Linux Wine Wrappers - News, FAQ &amp; Discussion

What flavor(s) of linux have you run it on?

Linux Mint 19.3

Bro. Thanks. I really appreciate it.

Just tested this quickly but it seems to be storing user data in ~/Documents/SimCity4 ?

I double checked just now and there's no way that should be happening. Have you previously tried installing/running SimCity 4 via something else? If so then it may be a leftover from that.

When using my wrapper the user data can be found in ~/.local/share/simcity4 by default - it shouldn't be putting it anywhere else unless it's been configured or altered to do so

Quite possibly, if you had done it without using the script and before the script had initialised the prefix. The script offers options for running custom commands as well as configure the prefix (you can also do "./start.sh run : bash" to get a Bash terminal with all of the environment variables etc. set for it) If you set a virtual desktop via the script it will use its resolution as the game resolution. Otherwise you could do:

./start.sh runwine : "SimCity 4.exe" "-CPUCount:1" "-CustomResolution:enabled" "-r1920x1200x32" "-f"

Replace 1920x1200 with whatever resolution you want the game to use.

Thank you, much appreciated :)

The virtual desktop setting worked.

Man, I struggled with PlayOnLinux for SO LONG trying to make SimCity 4 work. Then I came across your script and it worked, first try, out of the box, with no annoying "first try this and if that doesn't work, then do XYZ assuming that ABCD is still intact after you tried step 1 which could break your entire system..." things. It just worked. I'm using Kubuntu 20.04.

You had to write 800 lines of code to make this work (?!) No wonder I couldn't figure it out!!!

Note: The start.sh script had one hangup when I tried to start it - it turned out the package "zenity" wasn't installed. So, if you run start.sh, and don't know why you don't see ANYTHING happening, that might be it.

Thank you so much.

@His intelligence adamhm
I have Linux but I'm not a computer nerd. Could you explain how to do this in English? Thanks.

So I ran the scripts and have Sim City 4 running. I am able to use hardware rendering too! My issue is I am unable to add more than about 2gb of plugins. Once I go over a certain amount the game loads to a messed up region views where all the tiles are flat and nothing is playable.

My assumption is that this has to do with the fact that the game is a 32 bit game. If I'm correct, I see that the script patches the exe with large address aware. Ive tried patching the exe with the 4gb patch and it did not work. I've also tried to run the installer script with the WRAP_WINEARCH variable set to 64.

I am not sure what to try next. Anyone have any ideas?