New Mac for Sim City

[TiggerEyes 0]

Hello,

I'm on the verge of buying a new lap top and using it to replace my slowly dying Dell Dimension. I've decided to go back to using a Mac. My first two computers were Macs and the only reason I switched was because my school only supported PCs.

I still haven't decided exactly what I'm going to buy yet. Money is certainly a factor, but only one of many. As far as Sim City 4 is concerned what should I be looking for in a Mac i.e. memory, speed, storage. I apologize if I'm not making myself very clear. I'm not a "techie" person. Computers are like cars for me: I can make it run, but don't ask me to fiddle with it.

I'm not looking to transfer my cities or plugins or anything like that. I'm perfectly okay with starting from scratch. I guess another question would be loading the NAM or plugins. I managed to figure it out on the PC, but is it more or less the same with the MacBooks?

Any advice would be very, very helpful.

Thank you!

[bwatterud 7]

A regular macbook should be fine for you. You should definitely get more memory, probably get the faster processor (it isn't necessary, but it would help), and depending on what you plan on using the laptop for, maybe a larger hard drive.

The plugin setup is the same on a mac, so if you wanted to, it would be pretty easy to transfer your plugins.

[TiggerEyes 0]

Originally posted by: bwatterud A regular macbook should be fine for you. You should definitely get more memory, probably get the faster processor (it isn't necessary, but it would help), and depending on what you plan on using the laptop for, maybe a larger hard drive.

The plugin setup is the same on a mac, so if you wanted to, it would be pretty easy to transfer your plugins.quote>

Thanks! That was my main concern, buying the macbook only to discover that I could only use my "practical" software (i.e. quicken and the like) and all the fun stuff would be too much.

TE

[lucashp 1]

The mac mini 1.66 GHz version is only 600$, I suggest that, And if you need more speed just ask for better parts. And macmall.com Has mac mini's with Windows pre-installed, for about 100 more dollars..

[winana 0]

I use Mac Mini Intel Core Duo with 512Mb Ram.. Sim City 4 running well on my mac.

[Crissa 1]

The Mac mini and MacBook don't have an additional graphics card, and use memory from the main as graphics memory. It's good enough, but does leave a performance gap between it and other machines...

...However, as software performance increases, thise gap has lowered, especially for games and apps which aren't able to load everything into a video card's memory.

^-^

-Crissa

[GoaSkin 2]

To run Simcity you shoud not use Mac OS. The Mac version has too many bugs and is 10 times slower than the windows version.

[Crissa 1]

I've been told it's slower, but I'm not entirely sure why.

I'm happy enough with the speed, but if you must, there is Boot Camp.

-Crissa

[Sabretooth78 808]

I'm currently running SC4 + RH + NAM on a Dell PC (2.0 GHz, 1 GB RAM), but I'm considering going back to being a Mac user (what I used to be, just like the thread's author).

I'm considering the Core Duo 2.0 Mac mini with 1 GB RAM (similar specs on paper at least to what I already have) and then running it though Windows using Parallels. I'm not making ease of running SC4 to be the prime determinant for my choice, but it would probably be far and away the most graphics intensive thing I would throw at it (my other favorite games include stuff like Civilization, NHL 06, etc.)

Is that way out of whack? Should I expect SC4 to fully run (NAM and all) with comparable performance? My understanding is that I can run Windows apps seamlessly using Parallels, so I'd assume I'd have no problem running with my current game configuration on the PC.

I've just been reading things about the integrated video card being slower at 3D tasks so I want to thoroughly research this. If I do jump ship, it probably won't be until Leopard is released; they're saying October, so that gives me time to make an educated decision.

[Crissa 1]

I wouldn't count on games working through emulators. If they could run in an emulator, then they'd run in Linux, and that'd be... I'm not sure, but the big corps don't want their stuff on unix.

Civ has a Mac version, it runs about the same. Most Windows games will run slightly faster under Windows via Boot Camp than their Mac versions run... but it's usually a matter of within 2-5%.

Program reliability is just much high in the MacOS, though. So you can do things like get away with running more than one game at a time...

-Crissa