Abandonware – a Wikipedia definition:

Abandonware refers to computer software that is no longer sold or supported, or whose copyright ownership may be unclear for various reasons. …

Well – SimCity2000 (SC2000) is told to be abandonware. So I’ve downloaded simcity2000.zip [2.3MB] from the year 1993, and tried to run the INSTALL.EXE with wine. Hehe, good joke. That doesn’t work of course, and I’ve got this:

#wine INSTALL.EXE
err:midi:MIDI_AlsaToWindowsDeviceType Cannot determine the type (alsa type is 1) of this midi device. Assuming FM Synth
wine: Cannot start DOS application "Z:\home\acme\abandon\INSTALL.EXE"
because vm86 mode is not supported on this platform.

SimCity2000 is an old DOS program, and therefor it needs an appropriate environment: a DOS box. You have to install the program dosbox in order to play it. I’ve done this on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) like this:

apt-get install dosbox

and unpacked and started the game

mkdir sc2000
mv simcity2000.zip sc2000
cd sc2000
unzip simcity2000.zip
dosbox SC2000.EXE

And all worked like a charm. Sound, mouse support, the graphic was fluent and ALT+Enter gave me a proper full-screen mode. With Ctrl+F10 I was able to leave the dosbox-window again.
The only bug I saw, was a buggy full-screen in TwinView mode with the latest nvidia beta driver 180.06 (but that’s OK I think). The screen just opened on the wrong monitor, and the dosbox remained black and unfunctional in the other window.

Oh boy, I’ve loved to play this game! Unfortunately “Midtown Madness” doesn’t work with wine at all. I loved this game, because I was playing it with NVIDIA’s stereo driver and the ELSA 3D-Revelator shutter glasses. Since the 8xxx series the shutter glasses aren’t supported for the Windows driver anymore. But there was never any support for Linux anyway regarding the 3D driver. Beside this, I’d need a CRT for this job. *sigh* the good old times ;-(