I got a Mac for Christmas, and have a whole SC4 installation on another Windows PC. I know SC4 for Mac exists, but there's a little wrench called Rosetta. In 2003, Apple was two years away from its switch to Intel (they still used the PowerPC processor line). Aspyr wrote a PowerPC-exclusive version of SC4 then. Problem: I'm running on an Intel Mac, and don't want an emulator (Rosetta) and nightlighting problems in my way.
Do you think VMware Fusion would do the trick with a Windows virtual machine? It's got the better DirectX support, and I could even run other Windows applications on my Mac! I'd port my existing SimCity installation, of course. Parallels Desktop for Mac is another similar product, but it has DirectX 8 support, and that's it. Fusion can run DirectX 9 (not its a, b, or c flavors), which is a big plus. Plus, I can use BOTH cores of the Core 2 Duo processor in this MacBook. Parallels can't do that.
Do you think I should keep SC4 on the Windows PC, get the PowerPC-native SC4, or bring it to the Mac with Fusion? And if I do, what should I do to make it its best on Leopard?
Aspyr did an Intel patch for the game...but they failed to fix a lot of the things they got wrong. My recommendation is to use Bootcamp (integrated into Leopard) to create a Windows XP partition and run the game under Windows natively. Any emulator, be it Parallels or Fusion, will only give you a fraction of the processing power and very little in the way of high end graphics. The only catch is you need a bootable XP SP2 CD-ROM. This way you will have 2 computers, a Mac and a PC with the benefits of both.
I don't want to have to reboot just to play! And that's what Boot Camp will make me do!
And our XP discs are not SP2.
Quote from: callagrafx on March 02, 2008, 04:22:00 PM
Aspyr did an Intel patch for the game...but they failed to fix a lot of the things they got wrong.
It also, ironically, slows down gameplay and causes the game to crash when you have the audacity to *gasp* plop a lot!
The best way is to buy Crossover Games and the Windows version. Crossover allows you to run Windows games on OSX without needing a virtual machine. This solution is much faster than the Aspyr port, cheaper (EA Most Wanted collection) and all the Maxis updates incl. Nightlights work.
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/