Well with all the simcity 5 debacle going on i went back to an old classic only to rediscover the reason i stopped playing it in the first place, this problem! Googling it brought up this thread again
However a guy from here has created a patch to fix it:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...s-me-out/6a1d65ba-41fe-4249-9af3-e93d3173d6cf
You can follow the instructions he gives there or follow the step by step guide below.
Props to CrazyCasta for making this patch
1. Right click this link and hit save target as:
http://www.crazycasta.net/classic_games/SIMCITY.patch
2. Go here and download bsdiff:
http://sites.inka.de/tesla/others.html#bsdiff
3. Put both the SIMCITY.patch file and the files from bsdiff in your simcity 2000 directory
4. Whilst still in the simcity 2000 directory go to file and open a command prompt
5. Copy/paste this into the command prompt without quotes:
"bspatch SIMCITY.exe SIMCITY_PATCHED.exe SIMCITY.patch"
6. Play simcity 2000 with the new SIMCITY_PATCHED exe that appears.
7. Enjoy!
This is 100% working in windows 8 64 bit. Brings back full functionality to the windows version of simcity 2k, no need for the DOS version to play