johnnyx10

Straight off the install CD onto VirtualBox XP virtual machine. No updates, no patches, no mods.

A MAC? No way. Although I confess I have OSX installed on the VM (call me bi-curious) along with XP (for games) Win8 and Ubuntu for work. i5 2.66 Gigabyte P55-USB3 Nvidia GTS 250 8GB RAM VirtualBox has been the solution to all the older games I know and love. Hope it helps someone here. And would definitely help the guy above who needs an 'untainted' OS. Oh, no mods or tricks up my sleeve. Straight up vanilla install.

A MAC? Uh, no. Just a desktop I built. Gigabyte P55-USB3 i5 2.67 8GB RAM GTS-250 Win7 64-bit Installed the VM last year after I got bitter with SimCity3K crashing into infinity. No crashes since. And if it ever does: big whoop. It's a virtual machine. Just reboot it and fix the problem or restore to a backed up image This would also help runjonah1 maintain an 'untainted' OS. Hope it helps someone out. Oh, I don't use any mods or plugins.

VirtualBox. It's the only thing that worked for me. Thought the suggestions on this page were the most helpful (esp. the CPUCount switch - nice) so I came back to post what worked for me. The game worked great for a few weeks, then started to inexplicably crash, mostly only when I worked a certain area on specific map. None of this helped. I was jacked up... Banged my head against this problem for a few days before I remembered the XP virtual machine I had made to play SimCity3K. Fired it up and installed SimCity4. It's been almost a month now: flawless victory. So, make sure you have a decent amount of RAM. Get VirtualBox or some other VM software. (Virtual Box is free) Install XP on your new virtual machine. Install all the old games you love. Rejoice.