Using custom lots, mods, ect on Mac with Parallels?

[ixora 3]

Hi all, I am trying to use custom lots and mods downloaded from this site on my Mac steam version of SC4. I know they won't work without some sort of Windows emulator so I downloaded Parallels and am not sure where to go from here. I also have a Windows computer but after downloading all the mods and lots I wanted it wouldn't barely run the game. So I put all my lots and mods on a USB drive and want to transfer them to Mac and use the Windows emulator to run the files. Does anyone know how i would go about doing this? Thanks

[gwada971 1,891]

Hi, I have Parallels installed with Windows XP, under Mavericks (10.9.5). After installing Parallels, you must have a Windows install with a product key and do the installation. The Parallels user guide is easy to follow, feel free to download it on the Support page of the site.

[ixora 3]

6 hours ago, gwada971 said:

Hi, I have Parallels installed with Windows XP, under Mavericks (10.9.5). After installing Parallels, you must have a Windows install with a product key and do the installation. The Parallels user guide is easy to follow, feel free to download it on the Support page of the site.

Yeah, I got Parallels actually running. The problem is I don't know what to do with my windows-only compatible mods/lots to make them work with my Mac.

[rsc204 21,806]

The first thing you need to understand is that there is no such thing as a Windows or Mac mod for SC4. All mods come in variety of formats, .DAT, SC4Lot and SC4Model files for example. For the game to load them, they simply need to be present in your Plugins folder when starting the game.

The only issue is when files are in .zip formats or inside installers. In these cases, you can just extract/run them under Windows and the SC4 files will be installed in the location you selected. The best thing would be to keep them under Users\Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins, which will likely be the default anyway. Once these files are extracted, just copy them from the Windows machine to the Plugins folder on the Mac.

There are a few caveats, firstly .DLL files, Mac’s can’t run them, they are basically a function of Windows in terms if how they work. If you are running Catalina or later, the OS simply won’t allow any ‘code injection’ such as these files utilise, it simply can not work. There was a special tool to make them work on a Mac but you’d need an older version of MacOS, the 32-Bit version of SC4 (which if you don’t have, you can’t get anymore), plus it probably requires other hoops to jump through.

Lastly, a bug in the Mac game means that after a certain number of files/folders are present in Plugins, the game becomes incredibly unstable. Not the size of the mods, simply the number of files and folders. To avoid this, you should also DAT-Pack your Plugins, to reduce them to a small number of files. This can be done in Windows or using jDATPacker it can be done on your Mac.