sc2kfix

What does this do?

sc2kfix is a plugin that patches the Special Edition release of SimCity 2000 for Windows 95 to work properly on modern Windows systems (Windows 7-11 and Wine/Proton) as well as fixing several original game bugs, adding quality of life features, restoring missing game content, and optionally enabling new gameplay features. While the game itself was always capable of running at high resolutions, oversights in the game's programming and techniques designed for use with 256-colour SVGA cards common in the mid 1990s cause problems with animations on truecolour displays. There are also a number of other bugs in the game ranging from minor rendering issues to major gameplay-damaging bugs that sc2kfix fixes.

For the most up-to-date information on how to install and configure sc2kfix, as well as a full list of features, check out the plugin user guide on the sc2kfix website: https://sc2kfix.net

Bugs fixed

The following game bugs are patched by this DLL:

• The old, non-functional installer is no longer needed as sc2kfix will prompt for a default mayor and company name on first launch, as well as associate .sc2 and .scn files with SimCity 2000.
• Multiple crash and corruption bugs related to the load and save dialogs have been fixed.
• Palette cycling based animations have been fixed to work on truecolour displays and are no longer frozen.
• The WillTV and intro cutscenes have been restored along with the Maxis Presents intro slide.
• SimCity 2000 now properly launches when started from Steam or other game launchers.
• Music that was included in the game but was never added to the random playlist has been restored.
• SCURK now works properly on Windows 11 24H2 and newer.
• Military bases now grow properly instead of staying as empty, unusable military zones, and the intended growth of army and naval bases has been restored.
• The military will make multiple attempts at finding a location for a base instead of permanently giving up after the first try.
• Rail and highway neighbor connections now work after a saved city is loaded.
• Sign rendering has been fixed to use the originally intended font.
• City and mayor names are now properly preserved when saving and loading cities.
• The "Add All Inventions" option in the game's hidden debug menu has been fixed.
• Many miscellaneous display bugs have been fixed.

New features

sc2kfix adds the following quality of life and optional gameplay features to SimCity 2000 Special Edition:

• A settings dialog for configuring sc2kfix's optional features has been added to the main menu and the in-game Options menu.
• The New City dialog has been updated to allow you to specify a different mayor name when starting a city.
• Higher quality copies of the transit, pipe, and power construction sounds, as well as the Reticulating Splines soundbite have been ported from other versions of SimCity 2000.
• City growth is now displayed in real-time instead of in batches.
• The full in-game date is now shown in the title bar.
• The floating status widget from the Macintosh and DOS versions of the game has been reimplemented and can be enabled in the settings dialog.
• The game's music engine has been rewritten with multithreading that can run in the background and can play MP3 versions of the soundtrack if present, as well as supporting the use of FluidSynth to play MIDI files with a user-supplied SoundFont.
• An advanced query dialog that shows game state information for tiles has been implemented and can be used by holding the Alt key when querying a tile.
• The middle mouse button now acts as a shortcut for the centering tool, similar to how the right mouse button works in the DOS version of the game.
• A number of message box strings have had grammatical fixes and/or better wording added to them.
• An update checker has been added to gently inform the player on the game's main menu if a new version of sc2kfix has been released.
• A debugging console has been added for experiments and advanced troubleshooting, as well as an sc2kfix.log file for informational and error logging.
• A crash handler has been implemented to enhance the sc2kfix team's ability to hunt down potential game or plugin bugs.
• Multiple cheat codes from other ports of the game have been restored.

Additional enhancements

sc2kfix implements multiple hooks and a work-in-progress framework for detouring and injecting new code into the game. These are documented in the hooks/hooks.md file. These are currently being used to assist in reverse engineering various components of the game's code, but attaching them to eg. a scripting language of some sorts in the future is planned. A framework to enable loading gameplay mods written in C/C++ (or any language that can produce Win32 DLLs, though currently only C/C++ are officially supported) has been implemented, with intent to expand the number of places in the simulation engine that hooks can be inserted over time.

There is also a debugging console that can be enabled by passing "-console" to SimCity 2000 or by enabling the console manually in the in-game "sc2kfix Settings" dialog. While the debugging console generally tries to stop you from doing anything too dangerous, it will happily let you probe any valid memory in the game's address space, which could have adverse effect on any loaded cities. Please be careful when writing to arbitrary memory addresses.

Several parts of the SimCity 2000 simulation engine have been reimplemented in sc2kfix for better performance and the ability to more easily fix bugs and hook into and enhance the original game's code. Functionality has been replicated through months of reverse engineering efforts, and these reimplementations of the game's internal functions provide a higher quality experience that is still accurate to the original game.

Third-party components

sc2kfix includes API bindings for version 2.4.7 of the FluidSynth real-time software synthesizer library (https://www.fluidsynth.org). FluidSynth is made available under the terms of version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL 2.1); a copy of this license has been included in the sc2kfix project as thirdparty/fluidsynth/LICENSE. You can download both the bindings and the requisite compiled version of the FluidSynth library to use them at https://github.com/FluidSynth/fluidsynth/releases/tag/v2.4.7.

sc2kfix includes the Lua embeddable programming language (https://www.lua.org). Lua is made available under the terms of the MIT license; a copy of this license has been included in the sc2kfix project as thirdparty/lua/LICENSE. Lua is copyright (c) 1994-2025 Lua.org, PUC-Rio.

How do I use it?

1. If you are installing the game from scratch, copy the SC2K folder from your CD (under the WIN95 folder in the Special Edition CD) to your hard drive.
   • Make sure to copy the SC2K folder somewhere writable, as the game stores its saves in a subfolder of that directory.
2. Download the latest release or build it from source. The whole plugin is a single file called winmm.dll.
3. Copy the winmm.dll to your SC2K folder. It should end up in the same folder as your simcity.exe executable.
   • If you're running the game on Wine/Proton, you'll need to set a DLL override for simcity.exe to use "native, then builtin" load order for the winmm library, otherwise Wine/Proton will not load the local winmm.dll.
   • If you have any mods to install, place them in a subdirectory named mods in the same older as simcity.exe.
4. Play the game! On the first run of a new install, the game will prompt you for a default mayor and organization name. This simulates the original SimCity 2000 installer.

You can configure different aspects of sc2kfix by clicking on the "sc2kfix Settings" button on the game's main menu, or while you're in a gameplay session by selecting the same option from the Options menu. Settings marked with an asterisk require restarting the game for them to take effect. sc2kfix defaults to providing a "vanilla plus" gameplay experience with bug fixes and minor quality of life improvements; gameplay-modifying features are opt-in through the settings dialog, and quality of life features can be opted out of the same way.

Known issues

• WARNING: MIDI playback support on Wine/Proton is unpredictable. Native Linux installations of FluidSynth or TiMIDity++ may result in playback errors, and using Windows builds of FluidSynth in Wine/Proton can occasionally cause freezes on some distros. We recommend using MP3 playback on Linux if possible.
• NOTICE: The 1995 CD Collection version of the game is now deprecated. Please use the 1996 Special Edition version of the game going forward to receive the latest updates.
• DEBUG: Experimental support for the 1995 Interactive Demo of the game has been added. This is not intended to support the full feature set of sc2kfix, and is only meant to help with ascertaining differences between the demo and release versions of the game.