Sid Meier’s SimGolf (2002, Firaxis and Maxis) lets you design a golf resort hole by hole, staff it, price it — and then grab a club and play your own course with a golfer whose moods and skills you shape along the way. It is also one of the games DxWnd’s developer has personally spent the most time fixing: in the project’s SourceForge forum, ghotik has published his own step-by-step setup for SimGolf, a corrected profile file, and a running list of what still does not work. This guide follows that thread, nothing more and nothing less.
Why SimGolf struggles on modern Windows
SimGolf is a Windows 98/XP-era DirectDraw game that expects to own the whole screen at low resolutions. Two separate problems follow. First, getting the original CD release installed and started at all can be the hard part: like many games of its period, SimGolf’s disc protection relies on a legacy driver that modern 64-bit Windows refuses to load, so the disc check fails before the game ever opens. DxWnd does not touch copy protection — it only enters the picture once the game itself can start. Second, once running, the game insists on fullscreen, draws its course overlay through old GDI blitting calls, and puts its mouse behaviour (edge scrolling to move around your course) at odds with a windowed desktop. That second set of problems is exactly what DxWnd addresses.
Before DxWnd: get the game starting on its own
One discipline from the thread is worth copying: separate the two fights. First, get SimGolf to launch at all on your machine — installed, past its disc check, opening to the main screen however ugly. Only then add DxWnd. If the game cannot start standalone, no profile will fix it, because DxWnd hooks a running program; it does not repair installations or disc checks. Players in the thread who followed ghotik’s recipe successfully were all working from an install that already started. Conversely, if your install does start and your only complaints are fullscreen behaviour, the overlay and the mouse, you are exactly the audience for his profile.
What DxWnd fixes for SimGolf
With ghotik’s profile, SimGolf runs in a window — the profile defaults to 1200×900 — or in a borderless “Desktop” mode that looks fullscreen while behaving like a window. In his forum write-up, ghotik explains that the game’s overlay graphics are drawn by the CPU through GDI StretchBlt/BitBlt calls, which is why hooking works best with administrator rights: in his testing, the GDI hooking needed for this game depends on them, so run DxWnd as administrator as covered in how to use DxWnd. Edge scrolling has its own fix: a dedicated mouse option, Center on exit on the Mouse tab, added after ghotik reproduced the “camera scrolls away when the pointer leaves the window” complaint in the thread, with an alternative mouse-clipper option if you prefer to confine the pointer instead.
Setup, following ghotik’s own instructions
- Install the current DxWnd release (v2.06.16 at the time of writing). Ghotik’s instructions were written against v2.06.13, and he has continued fixing this game in the builds since.
- Open the “Sim Golf Help” thread on the SourceForge forum and download the corrected Sid Meier’s SimGolf.dxw profile attached to ghotik’s configuration post. He is explicit about this: use the file from the thread, not an older copy of the profile from anywhere else.
- In DxWnd, use File → Import and select that .dxw file. If profiles and importing are new to you, how DxWnd profiles work explains the mechanism.
- Double-click the imported profile and correct the game path: a .dxw file stores the absolute path from the author’s own PC, so point it at your SimGolf folder before launching.
- Start the game from the DxWnd window. One thread tip for the intro movie: wait until the Maxis logo appears, then press the spacebar — skipping earlier can hang the playback.
- Prefer fake fullscreen? Right-click the profile, choose Modify, and set the window position to Desktop; ghotik notes this gives you the fullscreen look while DxWnd still controls the game.
Under the hood: why this game is hard to hook
Ghotik’s thread doubles as a development diary, and two of his findings explain why SimGolf resists the generic treatment other games accept. The first is the drawing model: SimGolf renders its course view through a memory buffer at twice the window size and blits quarters of it to the screen with GDI calls, rather than presenting finished frames the way DirectDraw games do — which is why the admin-rights point above matters, and why fixes for this game have arrived as dedicated code rather than settings. The second is the mouse: the game implements edge scrolling by watching the cursor leave defined screen zones, so a window border changes the geometry it assumes. The Center on exit option exists because ghotik reproduced the scrolling fault and built the compensation into DxWnd itself. None of this requires action from you — but it is why “just try the default profile” was never going to be the answer for this particular game, and why the thread’s own profile, with its logging options stripped out for everyday use, is the right starting point.
Known issues — what is still broken
Ghotik is unusually candid in the thread, and this guide repeats his status rather than smoothing it over. He states plainly that SimGolf is not fully supported yet: his list of remaining problems includes sporadic crashes and hangs during play, and fixes for them have been landing one by one in recent builds — mouse scrolling at the window edge being the latest example. If you hit a crash, you are seeing a known work-in-progress, not a mistake in your setup. When that happens, the fastest route is the thread itself: it is active, the developer answers in it, and a profile update there will be newer than anything repeated elsewhere. If the pointer behaves oddly in other ways, DxWnd mouse problems covers the general mouse options beyond this game’s specific fix.
Where to get SimGolf legally
SimGolf is not currently sold as a digital download — there is no GOG or Steam release (it exists on GOG only as a community wishlist entry). The legitimate way to play it is an original CD copy, which still turns up second-hand. That also means the disc-protection hurdle described above is part of the package, and why so many players reach DxWnd only after a fight just to start the game.
More game-specific setups live on the DxWnd games hub. Sources for this guide: the “Sim Golf Help” thread in the official DxWnd discussion forum, including ghotik’s configuration post and fix notes (linked above).