any help?

[oceanpony]

I don't think that anyone's asked this yet, I've looked all through the FAQs...

I have the original Civilization III and it refused to run. I've tried reinstalling it and I've downloaded the latest update from civ3.com, but it doesn't work. If I insert the disk, the screen comes up that says play game/exit, etc. And I click play game, and this screen that says "Sid Meier's Civilization III" with a nice picture in the background comes up, sits there for a while, then disappears and I'm right back at my desktop where I started, the game doesn't start running. I know my copy of the game works, since it runs on my boyfriend's computer.

If it helps, I'm running Windows 98SE, 192MB Ram, AMD Athlon XP 2400+ processor, SiS 740 graphic card thingy, and I have over 100GB of free hard drive space, so that has nothing to do with it. And I have DirectX 9.0 installed. Does OpenGL, and my possible lack of it, have something to do with it? Or is it something else?? Any help would be appriciated.

[Dr. A. Cula]

It seems that the copy protection scheme is preventing you to play the game. Since it works on the other computer, the only thing that comes to mind is that you are trying to run the game from a cd-writer drive. The copy protection scheme is trying to access some data in a part of the disc that normal cd-writers don't have access to, even older cd-rom drives could become damaged if they try to access that area. Since it can't read it's bits, it assumes (quite wrongly) it is a pirated game. Your only solution is to try playing from a cd-rom drive.