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batista230's avatar
batista230
New Novice
1 month ago

Sim City 4: "Hardware drive error, could not initialize DirectDraw" ?

Hello!
Have just bough this Sim City 4 CD and installed it on to my machine. I try to open it and get the error message as in the title. Then I click ok, then it loads a black blank page and then quits the program.

Also did the same with Sim City 3000, no error message this time when loading the program but it just hangs.

Anyone know what it is please and how to fix it?
Thanks

3 Replies

  • EA_Cath's avatar
    EA_Cath
    Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
    1 month ago

    Hey batista230​ , it looks like a few other people are having the same issue. I think this happens when your computer is too powerful to run the game. What Windows version are you on?

    Since it's a very old game I don't think there will ever be a fix, but there is a list of useful mods to install to bypass this problem. The DgVoodoo 2 mod is the one mod you might want to install first.

    Let us know how that goes!

  • Hello Cath and thanks for your help!

    Running windows xp. In the system requirments for bough games it says that this OS is OK

    Also running a motherboard with a pentium 4 and 2.25GB of RAM (DDR400 type). Graphics card I cant tell you right now but when i looked it up it appeared to be upto the job!