simcity 4 deluxe won't start

[reble]

  The game is on a Gateway laptop model NV570P-18U, OS Win 10 Home 64bit.
I got this Sim City 4 Deluxe on eBay. The game install's just fine. But the game just won't run.  I click on  "SimCity 4.exe" and the blue circle goes around 1 maybe 2 times and that's it. I tried compatibility mode, thinking it mite work on one of the earlier versions of Windows. That didn't work ether. I also tried uninstalling the game and re-installing the game. I am still stuck with a non working game, and I am out of ideas as to what to do.

Steve

[Durfsurn]

Have you tried launching the game using a SimCity 4 launcher? You can find a couple on the STEX (and possibly on the LEX).

- Billy

[mgb204]

The disk-based version of SC4 (and many, many other games from the same time), will NOT work under Windows 10. Technically the code works just fine, but disk versions require a driver, removed from Win 10 to validate the on-disk DRM. Without this, you can install the game, but when running it, it quickly closes again with no error whatsoever. Full details behind this in this thread.

Your only realistic solution would be to get a digital edition which doesn't suffer this issue. Origin may give you a free digital copy to replace the one you bought if you provide them with a genuine CD Key.

[art128]

Origin may give you a free digital copy to replace the one you bought if you provide them with a genuine CD Key.

Doesn't Origin give you a version of the game that isn't patch-able?

[Andreas]

I was approaching the EA support when I switched to Win10 and got a free digital copy of SC4 Deluxe via Origin when I provided my serial number. It looks like the EXE is fully patched, and shows a slightly higher version number than the patched EXE from the CD version. AFAIK, the unpatchable vanilla SC4 was (still is?) only issued when you bought the game via Origin.

[Tarkus]

AFAIK, the unpatchable vanilla SC4 was (still is?) only issued when you bought the game via Origin.

That's correct. 

I've had a couple random people in the past year or so try to tell me Origin fixed the unpatchable ones again (they actually for a brief time did, after I sicced PC Gamer on them in 2014, but they reverted back when no one was looking).  But I've yet to see any proof of that, and suspect they might actually be people with the free CD Key redemption copies.

Free copy from CD Key Redemption = Version 1.1.641 (fully patched)
Copy purchased from Origin Store = Version 1.1.610 (unpatched, and unpatchable, due to DRM replacement changing the checksum)

-Alex