SimCity 4 on Intel Mac Pro

[kkachurak]

So I picked up SimCity 4 from the Apple Store (one of my all time favorites) and it's running slower than my pet turtle, Bob.

Seriously. The hardware I'm running shouldn't be an issue right (see my sig below)? I realize its a PowerPC app and the emulation will cause issues, but damn it's slow.

And every time I try to lay out zones, the whole app locks up and the only way to get out is to force quit.

Any ideas?

 

[kkachurak]

Seriously, no one has any ideas on how to make this better?

I toyed around with it last night and learned that if I scroll in and out using the scroll wheel, after about 20 seconds of that, the game will catch up, lay out the zone and proceed.

Nothing I can do to get this working better on my beastly Intel Mac Pro?

 

[Schtumple]

"Beastly Mac Pro"

It runs ok-ish on my iMac 2GHz C2D, 3GB RAM...

Did you find and install the "universal" patch for it? It doesn't make it 100% universal, but it does make it quite a bit faster.

 

[kkachurak]

"Beastly Mac Pro"

It runs ok-ish on my iMac 2GHz C2D, 3GB RAM...

Did you find and install the "universal" patch for it? It doesn't make it 100% universal, but it does make it quite a bit faster.

I saw a little of that but realized it is only intended for the Rush Hour expansion pack... or am I wrong?

Anywho - I disconnected my Wacom Bamboo tablet and that fixed up some of the bizarre timeout issues with laying zones and I degraded a bunch of the graphics options and that helped make it snappier.

Damn shame though, considering what I have under the hood.

I'll investigate more into the patch.

 

[Beric]

If this is true, how would it run on my 2.0 Ghz C2D Macbook? I've been considering getting it for a while.

 

[voyagerd]

I got the expansion pack so the application would be universal and run better on Intel hardware. The expansion also runs a lot faster on PPC hardware as well.

 

[togermano]

I got it with my new imac 2.4ghz computer at the time and even installed universal patch and it still ran like **** and it has a ******** of graphic bugs..... Aspyr really needs to fix there **** before they release something

 

[abrooks]

I run this on my 2.16GHz MBP and frankly it is sluggish. It is obviously a port and a bad one at that.

Still playable but when you see it running on a 4 year old PC it is heart wrenching.

 

[Fogtripper]

Seriously, no one has any ideas on how to make this better?

Honestly?

Do what I did: buy the PC version and run it in bootcamp.

Since getting my octo-core, I have bought and run Crysis Sim City 4 and NWN2 under boot camp and really see no reason so far to purchase a mac port game ever again. (unless it is a Blizzard game)

 

[eXan]

Sim City 4 is the most crappy Mac port I've ever seen. It runs extremely smoothly on my friend's P4 2.5 GHz with GeForce 4 video, but slow, s l o w like death on my iMac G5 2 ghz with Radeon 9600 (not emulation, obviously). And its incredibly buggy.

Seriously, before buying a game, do some research on how it runs. In your situation my suggestion is get a PC version.

 

[bbbensen]

It works perfectly fine on my MacBook Pro....

I just tried it this morning.

 

[Digital Skunk]

I would never run a 3D "ish" game built for PPC on an Intel under emulation. That means there will be processor and graphics issues. You are bound for issues across the board.

And when running the game on a PPC based computer I'd look for the fastest I can get with the best GFX card I can find. And at that time the PPC cards weren't that great save for the high end on the G5 tower side.