reciv

Sid Meier's Civilization (1991, DOS 474.05) running natively on modern Windows and Linux. The aim is the original game, bugs included, in a window.

You need your own copy of the original game data; reciv does not include it.

The game logic in src/game comes from civd, a reverse-engineered reconstruction of the DOS source, not MicroProse's original code. reciv's changes to it are marked reciv:. src/platform replaces DOS, the BIOS and the game's drivers with SDL3.

Download for Windows

Download reciv-windows-x86_64.zip from the latest release, unzip it anywhere, and point it at your game:

reciv.exe -d C:\Games\Civilization -s C:\Games\reciv-saves

On Linux, build from source as below.

Building on Linux

You need CMake, Ninja, GCC 14+ (for _BitInt) and SDL3.

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja
ninja -C build
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure
./build/reciv -d /path/to/CIVILIZATION -s /path/to/saves

tools/build-windows.sh cross-builds a Windows package with MinGW-w64 GCC 14+.

Building on Windows (Visual Studio)

Install Visual Studio 2026 with Desktop development with C++, and CMake 4.2+ on PATH. Then, from PowerShell:

.\tools\build-msvc.ps1
.\build-msvc\package\reciv.exe -d C:\Games\Civilization -s C:\Games\reciv-saves

The script downloads and verifies SDL3, and produces build-msvc/package/ and build-msvc/reciv-windows-msvc-x86_64.zip. For VS 2022, add -VisualStudio 2022 -BuildDir build-msvc-2022.

Four of the eight tests need GNU ld --wrap and are skipped under MSVC.

Options

Option	Effect
-d DIR	Original game files (default: current directory).
-s DIR	Saved games (default: the game directory).
--skip-quiz	Skip the copy-protection quiz.
--filter NAME	Artwork scaling: hq4x (default), sharp, nearest, bilinear. --no-filter means nearest.
--text-filter NAME	Lettering scaling: sharp (default), nearest, bilinear, or same to use the artwork filter.

Filters change only what you see in the window. The game, its saves and its screenshots are unaffected, and the picture is always shown at 4:3.

Licences

Portable packages include the notices for the bundled SDL3 (zlib), HQx (LGPL-2.1+) and Nuked-OPL3 (LGPL-2.1+) in licenses/, with the HQx source in sources/.