Hello!

[Dummy 0]

Hello. I've had Sim City for my mac for about two years in its original box, along with Rush Hour and have only begun to start to play (about two weeks ago). I bought it because I loved the original simcity2000 game on windows and thought it would be nice to play again. Well, never did I think there would this entire community devoted to all things Sim City - uuhh... as I type that i can imagine that comment sounding a bit naive or silly but I have not been playing video games much.... Anyway, I've been lurking for a bit and its great to know that such a resource is here to help. So on to my two questions. 1. A general FAQ. Everything here is a bit overwhelming. Is there a general FAQ for mac Newbies or newbies in general that someone can point me to? I think I have read that one can do most things on the mac that you can do on windows but its hard to tell. I have installed the "essential" updates and some of the landmarks but find that the other things are going over my head. 2. Park mods. Whilst browsing I have found virtually no mods/addons/not sure what they are called for parks, playgrounds, etc. Is this right or am I looking in the wrong place? Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read.

[bwatterud 7]

Welcome to Simtropolis. Hope you enjoy your stay.

For your first question, the pinned threads in this board are a good place to start for Mac specific FAQ. The Omnibus is where you'll find general game FAQ. The in game tutorials are pretty helpful for beginners too.

As for your second question, the BSC park set is pretty good, and allows for large parks with trails. I think those are only available at SC4Devotion, but its worth registering there, because they have all the updated dependencies, as well as the consolidated works of Simgoober, and other high quality stuff.

Edit: also, if you have an Intel mac, don't bother with Aspyr's universal patch.  The game runs much better through Rosetta. 

[Hamish 1,369]

Huh, what's Rosetta? Never heard of it.

[bwatterud 7]

its the program built into Tiger/Leopard that lets you use old PowerPC applications (like SC4) on intel macs. Basically, I was saying that the games runs better without the universal patch than it does with it (which completely defeats the purpose of having the patch in the first place).

[Dummy 0]

Thanks for the reply... what does Omnibus stand for?

[Ramona Brie 121]

An omnibus is much like an encyclopedia. And yes, Rosetta is THE PowerPC emulator, no questions asked.

[Hamish 1,369]

Where do you find Rosetta? I've searched my mac and can't find it. Is it on an install disk? and not a download? and yes I have an intel mac.

EDIT: I found out how to do it with safari, but not with sc4. So how do I do it.

[rodent1989 9]

I'm not sure you understand.  Rosetta comes on all new intel macs.  It works automatically and requires you to do absolutely nothing to make it work.

Its a pretty independent little bugger.

As far as parks you can browse the STEX here or over at SC4devotion.com there is another impressive file exchange there too.

[Hamish 1,369]

So it will run whenever I run SC4.

I was looking at the apple site and it said to click something in the get info window to force it to run. I can do that with safari but not SC4. So is that normal?

[TEG24601 32]

That is normal. Safari is a Universal Binary, whereas SC4 is not. SC4 is a program written for the G4 and G5 processors. It will run fine on your Intel Mac, however, because Rosetta has to convert the older code to run on Intel systems (which aside from speaking a different language, they also write number in different orders), it will require more memory to run SC4, and more processor power than it would if you were using the Universal Binary patch (which I am using on a PowerBook G4 and it actually made the game faster for me).

TEG