haap303

This is my first post here. Let me just say that I love Simtropolis. It's an an amazing community for an amazing game and I admire the hard work of all the batters and modders. I'd like to help out all the hardcore fans who have switched to the Mac to have best Simcity 4 experience. After the huge disappointment with the Aspyr release I've been experimenting with VMware Fusion. With VMware you can run any version of Windows in a virtual machine right on your Mac Desktop. Simcity 4 works great and the speed is unbelievable. On my i5 quad core iMac I can watch movies while the game is running in an another window, not a sweat from the machine, even with larger (300.000+) cities. Runs great on Core 2 Duo Intel Macbook Pros too. I seriously recommend everyone to ditch the sluggish Mac version and use the Win version instead. Important! In order to make the game work properly you must Make sure VMware is configured to use 1 processor in the virtual machine (Settings / Processors & RAM) Run the game as an administrator in compatibility mode (XP or Vista if you have Win7), right click on Simcity 4.exe and click Properties / Compatibiltity Make sure you force software rendering by running the game like this: Simcity 4.exe -d:software (you can create a desktop shortcut for your convenience) Disable Color Cursor in the Graphic options menu (screen icon) of Simcity 4 (this is optional based on your Windows version, I had some flickering issues) Extra tip You can disable the intro if you also add the -intro:off parameter when running the game Desktop shortcut Target: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C START "Simcity 4" /high /affinity 1 "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -intro:off -d:software Start in: "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps" So if you have the Win version of Simcity 4 and a Windows license lying around, get VMware and try it out! I think they have free trials so there's nothing to lose. Have fun!

Updated the original post with some clarification.

It's very picky about the settings so you might want to double check everything. I remember having to play around with it a LOT till I got it right... You can also run into problems if you simply run Simcity 4.exe, so it's better to use a shortcut like this: Target: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C START "Simcity 4" /high /affinity 1 "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -intro:off -d:software Start in: "C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps"

Whoops, I'm a bit late with this reply... Anyway, there's no lag at all and I haven't noticed too many crashes. You get the same experience that you'd get on Windows. Parallels is great too, actually I got to run some games in Parallels that always crashed for me in VMWare Fusion.