Cities XL on a Mac?

[Simgiov 0]

I know, MC hasn't released Cities XL for Mac but has someone tried to play it with CrossOver or VMWare Fusion?

I ask because i don't play Cities XL a lot only cause i don't want to waste time to reboot on Windows (i have Cities XL on bootcamp) which is slow and full of useless programs that start when i boot.

I tried CrossOver but it fails since .NET framework fails to install.

[Simgiov 0]

VMWare fails too, the game load but when you go to the city view (where you build the city and do everything) the world turns to a black screen with only the GUI.

[natedoggg 0]

i hope they will release it on mac !!!

[Red Lightning 7]

please do not double post guys, and by the way, you can get cities xl for mac, read this

Cities XL on a Mac: Here's How

I've long been a fan of the Sim Cities series of games, so when I saw that a French company was bringing out its own take on the genre called Cities XL naturally I took a look.

Cities XL could have been Sim City 5 if it had come from Maxis, because like the Sim Cities before it is a natural progression in the genre, complete with graphics fitting 2009.

Sadly though they haven't developed a Mac version of the game, and at the time of writing don't intend on creating one. You could set up a bootcamp partition and run Cities XL via Windows, but well...I'd rather not have to boot out of OS X to play the game.

Several hours later I have Cities XL running on my 13? Macbook Pro without using bootcamp or running something like Parallels. Here's how.

Downloads

I should note that I purchased the download via Steam because the Cities XL site's purchasing section wasn't working at the time. These instructions should work fine with a standard install.

You'll also need to download the latest version of Darwine here.

Installation

Install Darwine as would any normal program.

From the dropdown menu in Darwine (top right hand side of the screen) select Winetricks. In Winetricks install Direct X 9, MS .NET 2.0 and MS Visual C++ 2008 libraries. If Direct X 9 doesn't install, don't worry too much because the game will attempt to install it when it is setting itself up. If you have ongoing problems though, grab Direct X 9 from Microsoft direct and try running it.

Install Cities XL.

I had a problem with graphics, although being on a low end Macbook Pro might have had more to do with it. If you get a popup about failure to deal with screen resolution (or similar) the way around it is to change the settings in Wine to "emulate a virtual desktop" (Wine Configuration/ Graphics.) You will need to restart Wine + X11 for the change to take place.

And that's all there is to it, and so far I haven't seen any bugs or issues with the game play.

The game itself: not bad, although the online component is over priced and underwhelming so far.

[lazyboy007 0]

Hello,

please redlightning, can you tell me which links you used?

Thanks

[tjh876 31]

For someone who is confused by what red said (very well said too) is that you will need a program called Darwine (Google is your friend) to run CXL since it is only designed for Windows. Now if you follow the steps, you should have it running fine on your mac. That also is a good question to ask Focus if it already hasn't been asked, will CXL 2011 run on Mac based OS'? What OS' does it support? Good luck.

[a_muses 39]

The instructions posted are out of date, as Darwine has been ported to Wine, and the instructions simply don't make sense. If anyone's got Cities XL running on a Mac now, it would be nice if they could post what they did.

[LivingInThePast 364]

For some reason, I've just never found optimal performance with games in Mac ported from Windows. More often than not, even when played "native" (without Wine) they're compiled from some CIDER library, which, while allowing them to run natively, takes a noticable hit in performance (causing sound to break and freeze for a few seconds in most cases). This isn't nearly the problems that PowerPC ports got: I'd love to see SimCity 4 ported to Mac with CIDER, instead of a crap port to begin with and a crappier Universal patch. But it still it wouldn't have gmax, which, at last checking, doesn't work with WINE.

[BoilerNC 0]

I know this is an old post, but if anyone is looking to run Cities XL 2011/2012 on a Mac - I am doing it with VMware Fusion 4. I have a 27" iMac with a 2.66GHz Core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and Radeon 4850 GPU with 512 MB RAM. Cities XL 2012 runs perfectly at 2560x1440 when VMware is full screen with all the graphics options turned up.

[flyepeter 0]

I

I know this is an old post, but if anyone is looking to run Cities XL 2011/2012 on a Mac - I am doing it with VMware Fusion 4. I have a 27" iMac with a 2.66GHz Core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and Radeon 4850 GPU with 512 MB RAM. Cities XL 2012 runs perfectly at 2560x1440 when VMware is full screen with all the graphics options turned up.

I'm running the game on my mac with a wineskin. Can you add mods to this and if so how?Whenever I click the mod button on the game it redirects me to windows and shuts down.