Reconstitution . . . .

[Exile]

Alas, the winds of change found my computer at long last. Troubles came and my hard drive went.

Now . . . . I must reconstitute my Civ2 files.

There is a lot of stuff I want.

Gareth?

Send me everything you've done.

Does someone have a copy of Panzer Battles on the River Chir?

Is the Spanish Civ2 site down or offline? Most of the very best scenarios were there.

Undoubtedly, I'll have more requests as the coming weeks pass in review. I'll place them in this thread.

Thanx in advance.

[Exile]

First two difficulties;

It's been a long time since I took care of these things.

I've forgotten how it's done.

I need to install 2 things;

the 2.42 patch

and

the vbrun thingie that makes civcity and civtweak function.

Instructions?

[jim panse]

Hullow Phenix,

I´ve got *some* of those things you posted ...

* those patches you´d need are available @ CFC - IIRC there are also instructions what to do there.

* Your scenarios - well, I can post them all here (though I guess using the search option in the Poly database to recover your own release threads might prove useful too)

I hope you can get all back, if I could be of any help, just shout!

[fairline]

Phenix - I've e-mailed AoC and AoB as requested. I'll zip up some gfx and send them on.

What is it about us lot that causes so many computer problems? I make that you, me (twice) and Steph in the last couple of years or so

[Exile]

Thanks Gareth and Jim. I've already been to cfc, acs, and cdg and dl-ed quite a bit of stuff.

I'm still wondering how you set up the 2.42 patch. I unzipped it and the files are just . . . there. Am I supposed to just drag n' drop these patch files on top of the regular files in the civ2 game? It seems as if that'd be too simple. Might well be the case though.

The vbrun 600 installed itself, but the vbrun 300 just sits there. It came with a text file, but no instructions in that text file. This is the one that civtweak and civcity NEED to run.

And I have no idea why we get hit with this stuff. In my case though, it was partly my fault. I got hit with various malevalent things and tried to clean 'em up myself. Didn't succeed. Had to take it to professionals who then did the job. But cleaning meant CLEANING and that meant that all the stuff on the HD was gone. Ah well, a lot of it I never used anyway.

It IS sad that, at the very same time, acs/Scen League got hit and lost most of its stuff too.

[Mercator]

Don't you have MGE? The 2.42 is for Civ2 classic, so you wouldn't need it... But if you also have civ2 classic you should indeed overwrite the original files in your civ2 folder (i.e. drag the unzipped files into the folder and overwrite, or unzip the Zip file into the civ2 folder and overwrite).

You'd want the MGE 1.3 patch (also available at CFC I guess). That's got an installer.

You should put the vbrun300 thing in your Windows system folder. That would typically be C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM for Win95/98/ME and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 for WinNT/2000/XP, assuming C:\WINDOWS\ is where Windows is.


... And regarding the crashing. If it's got anything to do with viruses or spyware I would suggest you'd get a decent virus scanner and firewall (though you probably already got those) and start using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer... Occasionally burning your stuff on CD might also be a good idea.
Anything that isn't a monstrous file-devouring virus or fatal hardware failure really just shouldn't make you lose anything of value (i.e. Civ2).

[beingofone]

Exile,
Are going to continue on with AOB? I sure hope so, it looked real promising dude .
I wish I could have been more of a help with playtest feedback but I didn`t know where you wanted to take the game so I didn`t know what to look for.
Now I really am to busy to help but I look foward to seeing another masterpiece by you.

[curtsibling]

Everyone should get AVG anti-virus, AdAware SE and Zone-Alarm without delay.

All are free and very solid!

[N35t0r]

Originally posted by Mercator
Don't you have MGE? The 2.42 is for Civ2 classic, so you wouldn't need it...

He probably wants 2.42 for the more diplomatic AI...

[Exile]

First of all, thanks to everyone for being such a cool community. Help abounds. That's a good thing and far too often overlooked or taken for granted.

Gareth; thanks and you'll be hearing more from me. lol.

Curt; Yep, I've had a number of protection programs for quite awhile, including zonealarm and several anti-spyware progs. Didn't help. A hijacker got in and I couldn't pry it loose. Also, there were a number of "things" on my HD that I didn't put there and were taking up space and done without either my permission or knowledge. That had to end. The firewall caught all these perncious little bastards whenever they tried to communicate outward . . . but they were still there. Unacceptable.

Being; thanks. No idea when I'll get back around to AoB. It's not abandoned, but the progress will be slow for now.

Jorrit; Yep, I DO need the 2.42. My AI is remarkably unagressive now. The program also doesn't inform me when my units were killed. And there was a conflict with the labels.txt. I resolved it, but it was a quandry for awhile. 888 to 873 at the top of the labels column. I tried doing just what you described--unzipping the patch directly into a backup copy of the main Civ2 program. Still gave me error messages, but that was before I worked out the labels problem. Perhaps I'll try it again. And, despite your explanation, I'm still at a loss as to how to install the vbrun thing. Where is Carl Fritz when you need him? Helloooooooooo Carl ?

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Exile
Jorrit; Yep, I DO need the 2.42.

Okay... But you'd better not be applying it to anything other than civ2 classic. That just can't be good. It's certainly not what it's meant for.

And, despite your explanation, I'm still at a loss as to how to install the vbrun thing.

What I said is the only installation it needs. You only have to put the extracted file (vbrun300.dll, that is) in the system directory and you're done. CivTweak and CivCity should work after you've done that.

Alternatively, you could put the vbrun300.dll in the same directory as CivTweak and CivCity.

[Exile]

Here is the result of my attempt to install the 2.43 patch and the faq dealing with it;

Q2: I downloaded the Civilization II patch. When I try to run it,
though, it says "Cannot find SMEDSNET.DLL."

A: The file you have is not a demo or an update program. It is a
replacement executable file for Civilization II. What you need
to do is copy this file, along with the other files that came
with it, to the CIV2 directory that is on your hard drive. If
Civilization II isn't on the hard drive yet, you need to install
it before you can copy over the patch.

How do I do this?

On the same subject, how do I
"put the extracted file (vbrun300.dll, that is) in the system directory . . ." No idea how I did it the first time. As I recall, Carl walked me through it years ago.

[jim panse]

As far as I can recall - for those Civ2 system folders are definitely "not-do-anything-for-it-might-be-causing-havoc" folders - I copied that patch into the main Civ2 folder, extracted it (it was kinda executeable program) and when I was asked to overwrite the current files I hit "Yes, to all".

Maybe it works?

[Exile]

Yep. That's exactly what I did. And I got the smedsetc message.

But then, I extracted it into a copy of the main file, so as to prevent the repeated despoiling of my main civ2 file.

But this shouldn't make any difference--the civ2 program functioned whether or not I used the copy or the main program.

[jim panse]

Weird. Last time I installed Civ2 I took my vanilla first edition CD, inserted it, dled the patch & it worked fine. Weird.

Sorry, but I fear I have no other ideas how it could work. :dknow: