iMac 24" Sim City RH fix 11-25-07

[unity]

So I am have been pretty darn ticked about buying a new iMac that has TONS more horsepower than my laptop only to have SC4 RH run like pure crap.

Prior I have a Titanium 1GHz G4 PowerBook with 768MB RAM with Radeon 9000.

Now I have a 24" iMac 2.4GHz Core 2 duo with 2GB RAM and a Radeon HD 2600.

As some may recall the Radeon 9000 had a issue on the PC and Mac where it was not addressed correctly with a certain attribute. This result is REALLY crappy scrolling.

I HOPED the new iMac had the same issue, but besides scrolling there were other artifacts in the game. Mainly pixels "holes" in cars and waves were not rendering right all the time. See pictures.

So I poked around and played with the same files that fixed the 9000.

I have the April Universal Binary BETA update from Aspyr Installed.

For iMacs with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 you need to go into the main application folder, then "SimCity 4 Data" folder :

1. Open "Video Cards.sgr" with TextEdit
2. Locate the end of the list of "vendor "ATI" 0x1002"
3. Add this line to the end, but before the word "end" :

card 0x9583 "Radeon HD2600"

4. Save and close.
5. Open "Graphic Rules.sgr"
6. Locate the ATI rules, near the bottom like so:

stringMatch cardIdentity "*7?00*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*8?00*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9000*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9100*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9200*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9300*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9400*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon VE"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon Mobility"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon FireGL"

7. You will add just one line:

stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon HD2600"

8. It should look like this:

stringMatch cardIdentity "*7?00*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*8?00*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9000*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9100*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9200*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9300*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "*9400*"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon HD2600"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon VE"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon Mobility"
stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI, Radeon FireGL"

9. Save and close.


That should do it. It worked well for me. Scrolling is NOT smooth as butter, but perfectly acceptable game play at NATIVE resolutions! Also the pixelated cars and weird waves are pretty much gone. If present, a slight scroll one way clears that up. Basically its much more playable, but still has a couple of quirks.

Now if only the Universal Patch can get sound working right!

PLEASE let me know if this works! This is ONLY for the 2600 card for now.

 

[subwire]

I have th same prb with my 20" imac,2600 card.
But how do you open the .sgr file(what program)?

 

[unity]

I have th same prb with my 20" imac,2600 card.
But how do you open the .sgr file(what program)?

Right click and select "open with" then "other..." and locate TextEdit. If TextEdit is already open, you can just drag the file onto the icon in the dock.

 

[tomthepto]

Hey man thanks!!!!

I've been trying to fix this issue for a while and thankfully I stumbled on this forum. I was having serious graphics chunking issues. Your fix seems to have worked perfectly!!!

Thanks again!!

 

[Princess Cake]

Aspyr's port of Sim City 4 runs like shyte no matter what your specs are, you really gotta wonder what sort of NASA supercomputers they were developing it on.

It was PLAYABLE for me on my 2.66Ghz iMac up until you get to about 50,000 in population then it starts to crawl.

Aspyr released a patch that made the scrolling less laggy and sped up the game somewhat but I just couldn't use it as it is incompatible with the "NAM" mod which makes all the sims in the game have smarter path-finding instead of all taking a single alleyway to work when there's a massive superhighway a block over.

 

[RCGMac]

So SC 4 still runs like crap on Intel Macs? I recently got a new iMac and have been itching to play again. Is it still a better choice to get the Windows version and run it via Boot Camp?

 

[MagicBoy]

So SC 4 still runs like crap on Intel Macs? I recently got a new iMac and have been itching to play again. Is it still a better choice to get the Windows version and run it via Boot Camp?

Last time I tried the Mac version was on my original revision MBP and it wasn't good even with the UB patch. I find the Windows version runs better virtualised via Parallels in XP on my current MacBook.

On a physical machine SC4 for Windows doesn't seem to get along too well with multi-core machines with modern graphics cards. My PC (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, HD4850, Windows XP or 7) runs it like a dog and there's a number of graphical glitches even after tweaking the graphics rules files (see OP). The old spare Pentium 4 (2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, GeForce 4) I've got kicking about that I built in 2001 runs it absolutely perfectly.

 

[RCGMac]

Last time I tried the Mac version was on my original revision MBP and it wasn't good even with the UB patch. I find the Windows version runs better virtualised via Parallels in XP on my current MacBook.

On a physical machine SC4 for Windows doesn't seem to get along too well with multi-core machines with modern graphics cards. My PC (Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, HD4850, Windows XP or 7) runs it like a dog and there's a number of graphical glitches even after tweaking the graphics rules files (see OP). The old spare Pentium 4 (2.4GHz, 1GB RAM, GeForce 4) I've got kicking about that I built in 2001 runs it absolutely perfectly.

Hmmm, that is disappointing. I have a Windows version that I may try on my iMac. SimCity Societies is a pathetic excuse for a SimCity game.