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I'm hoping someone can help direct me to where I might get a copy of SimCity 2000 for DOS to install. Not the pre-installed version here. An actual /install/ copy that will let the user input name and company to show in the beginning of the game? I know I found a clean install copy a few years ago online, but can't figure out where in the world it is now. All the copies I can find now are already installed and set up, and there's no way to change the name and company name that shows at the beginning. As to why I want to be able to do that, it's for a personal copy for someone who has fond nostalgia of the original game, and I want their name and title on it when it starts up as a gift.
Is there anyone who can help me?

[captain38]

Sorry can't help. Craigslist? eBay?

[The Fifth Horseman]

I can get you floppy images. Give me half an hour.

EDIT: Here.

That's just what I needed, super. Thank you very much!

Originally Posted by The Fifth Horseman

I can get you floppy images. Give me half an hour.

EDIT: Here.

[salisbury]

I first played SimCity on my Mac desktop soon after its release and like some people I couldn't see the point of it. Now I'm a teacher and believe it or not this game is a great teaching aid. My students use this game to actually see how the infrastructure of a city comes together and it's a lot of fun as well. Cheers.

[tristanzz]

Hard Mode (No Disasters)

I wanted to share my experience giving this game a go on Hard mode. People are saying NEVER to issue a bond in Simcity 2000. They never pay off, and you'll go deep into debt. Well, screw that. We're going to try and issue a ton of bonds and build a resplendent (though highly leveraged) city!

Starting out, we check out our budget menu and click on the bonds to see what is going on:



Loan rating is your eligibility for another loan. You start out with 1 good 3% bond for 10 grand. The Fed Rate is the rate at which the SimFederal Reserve is lending monkey to banks; these banks could inflict us with a much higher interest rate depending on our credit rating. With a Credit Score of "F," we don't even qualify for another bond. But having a high city value increases your credit rating. On the surface, it would seem that our credit score dictates that we have to start on 10k and nothing else. More on that in a moment. It's worth bearing in mind that this game I played is just sort of Hard. The land is flat and ready to serve the will of the Sims, and the heavens hold their peace with the earth (disasters are turned off). On the other hand, the year is 1900, so only the barest basics are available for our use. In the year 2050, I will either be out on my ass or— hopefully— literally lightyears ahead of a city founded in 2050.

First off: the City Value ($0, pictured above). The bank officers love power plants, for some reason. Coal plants and Hydro Dams, in particular, drastically boost the City Value and can vault us into a AAA credit rating. They add 1000x their cost: each Dam adds $4 million to the City Value; each coal plant adds $40 million. Placing these will enable us to get more loans at competitive rates, immediately. If you are building in harsh terrain, feel free to drop water squares on the slopes and dam them up, or on the plains create patterns like this one, pictured below.



Alternating water pumps and Hydro Dams like so, the water tiles you place on slopes do double-duty. In the picture, the 12 little Hydro Dams have added $48 million to the city's net worth. The 17 water pumps have also added $1.7 million. The credit score is now AAA, and we can get some bonds at the rate of 4%.

For this map, though, it's probably better to just use our first 10k to build 2 Coal Plants. In fact, we're going to issue lots of 4% bonds, merrily building Coal Plants as we go. And then before the interest rate hits 5, we stop and sneak in... a vast city!



Surely we wouldn't want to see those Coal Plants go to waste...

There is one goal in a hard mode city: INCOME. Fast income. Education takes many, many years to return income. It's the lowest priority. Health is nearly as slow coming on. Other things that boost demand and land values though— police, fire, Road & Rail connections, and a few cheap Parks— are instantaneous effects and can help so long as we don't go overboard on them. Raw RCI development is the fastest income and the thing on which everything rides, so almost all of the money not spent on Power and Water has gone into laying down as many zones as possible. It doesn't matter at the start if the Sims are unhappy, unhealthy, uneducated, and beset on all sides by criminals. They come to this horrid city... to live, labor, and die under the shadow of the 10k Bond, and our job as Hard Mode Mayor is to squeeze them like fruit rinds. Zone dense, to save on transportation and amenities.

Next up: another thing about Hard is that SimNation will probably go into some deep depressions. What this means is that your Industry, the products you export to the rest of SimNation, will get absolutely hammered and accordingly turn your entire city into a ghost town. Prepare for this. Zero the industry tax as soon as you see it suddenly start dropping off. The good news here is for your bonds, though! The Fed will cut interest rates to try to get easy money flowing again. Get in on the action. Roll over the bonds. Issue low interest bonds and pay your higher-interest bonds off, completely.

Here we are grabbing up *2%* bonds in 1904, right when the depression hits. (Also note how industry demand, the yellow bar, went into the toilet.) God's own interest rate, these things only cost $200 a year to hold. $10,000 worth of zoning beats that by miles.



Wrapping up: once we weather the depression, we'll see our RCI demand stabilize. I would recommend holding onto loans rather than paying them off, as long as there are still flat tiles on the map to develop. Keep the bonds working hard! Remember, INCOME is the word, and we can probably get more income by developing every square on the map than by repaying the bonds, at least if they are cheap. Expensive loans, say 6% and up, are a different matter and need to be eliminated as fast as possible.

[DarthHelmet86]

All I can imagine is this is a mayor who likes taking loans from loan sharks. In fear of getting knee capped he works his sims to death desperate to pay off his loans, but sadly like an idiot he takes out more and more loans to pay them off. Until one day he gets some new cement shoes.

Keep this up I am much liking the idea...and the way I am reading Loan Shark into it.

[Japo]

Well you've got to admit that it's a true simulation of political reality. :P I guess he may be onto something, though.

[tristanzz]

Originally Posted by DarthHelmet86

All I can imagine is this is a mayor who likes taking loans from loan sharks. In fear of getting knee capped he works his sims to death desperate to pay off his loans, but sadly like an idiot he takes out more and more loans to pay them off. Until one day he gets some new cement shoes.

Keep this up I am much liking the idea...and the way I am reading Loan Shark into it.

Yeah, that's the basic idea for Hard Mode. Build a pile of SimMisery and yank as much out of the wretches as possible. Fortunately, if we vault our credit rating, we will avoid getting sharked and end up serving our own coffers rather than CitiGroup's.

In 1911 the north side of the river was fully conquered. I built a bridge across it and started getting slaves in place on the south side.

By 1937, the entire map was covered with glorious, ugly urban sprawl and making money hand-over-fist. (pictured below...) The 150k worth of bonds was able to be paid off 6 years after this point.



The neighboring towns remain in the stone age. Health spending on this map is still trivial. I put on the junior sports ordinance and made a couple hospitals so that kids would be healthy. But the old people must all die. They don't work, so they don't give much of a kick to the Res/Com demand structure. Look at how high the residential & commercial property taxes can be without them!

Looking now at the little zone map, note that the city is very densely zoned and uses only roads— no mass transit. There are 16 longitudinal roads on each side that serve as the commuting arteries across the zones. No one bothers using the stupid bridge I built. Sims automatically realize that the other side of the city is just as disgusting as theirs.

</Hard Mode>

[another_guest]

Very interesting take on SimCity
And like Japo said, it's quite realistic too, I bet some people are getting their inspiration from such as sim...