[Hamish]

Mac OSX Lion and Sim City 4



As the wait gets ever shorter for the launch of Apples new operating system I thought it was best that we address a few compatibility issues that most are going to face when trying to play SC4 on Lion.
Two years ago OSX switched from being compatible with PowerPC based Macs over to intel only. This was a big step forward for apple as it meant it could tweak the system to run its best on only intel chips, rather than both. However, It meant that every ones PowerPC based apps would become extinct. They added Rosetta, a 'behind the scenes' piece of software that will only run when you are wanting to launch a PowerPC based app.

However, It seems as if Rosetta support has been dropped for Lion, and so all old PowerPC based applications just won't work anymore.
What does this mean for SimCity4?

SC4 is a PowerPC application, it will have been running with Rosetta whether you have realised it or not. If you have not patched SC4 then it will not work in Lion.
Don't threat however, there is still something you can do about this.
Back in 2007 aspyr released a beta universal binary patch for SC4. What this does to the game is it drops the rosetta support and moves its framework to Intel. At this point in time this will be the only way to keep SC4 running while on Lion.

Download the patch here.


Lion is expected to come out any day now and will be out before the end of July. It will be avaliable via the Mac App Store and cost US$29.
I am not ruling out a total loss of rosetta, as no one has got the retail version of Lion there is still some hope that they will include it, but it makes sense if they don't as well. At the moment the patch is the only way it will run, however I will update this thread with more detailed instructions on whether or not the patch makes SimCity 4 work on Lion, or whether there are easier options.
Its not my preferred way of running SimCity, but its good enough for now.
I advise you to update SC4 before upgrading to Lion to be sure that it should work.

[bwong]

I am currently running Mac OSX Lion (GM version), and will be patching my simcity today. I will give a diagnostic of game performance later today, or tmrw.

[mauriciodiniz]

It didn't work for me.
I'm using Lion and I installed the patch, it opened the game but when i try to open a city it crashes.
What should I do?
:/

[bwong]

I replied to your pm. Hope that helps.

[Hamish]

Would you be able to post your fix in here by any chance?
Because I believe that there are other mac users with the same problems that could use the same info.
Thanks

[Nicholson]

Hi,

'Vanilla' (No Mods) Sim City 4 Deluxe working here for me on Lion with the UB patch. When I install the Network Addon Mod the game freezes when leaving god mode or when loading an existing city. I have to force quit SC4.

Anyone experienced this?

Ta

[DAB_City]

Nicholson, on 24 July 2011 - 03:27 AM, said:

Hi,

'Vanilla' (No Mods) Sim City 4 Deluxe working here for me on Lion with the UB patch. When I install the Network Addon Mod the game freezes when leaving god mode or when loading an existing city. I have to force quit SC4.

Anyone experienced this?

Ta

I wouldn't know, but the NAM and most mods do not run on vanilla SC4... Why haven't EA/Aspyr done anything about this??? As soon as my Power Mac G5 becomes too outdated, I'll either buy a second-hand PowerBook G4 (1.67GHZ, pre-Intel) for running PPC games and non-Intel stuff, or I'll buy a new PC.

[Nicholson]

DAB_City, on 24 July 2011 - 03:23 PM, said:

I wouldn't know, but the NAM and most mods do not run on vanilla SC4... Why haven't EA/Aspyr done anything about this??? As soon as my Power Mac G5 becomes too outdated, I'll either buy a second-hand PowerBook G4 (1.67GHZ, pre-Intel) for running PPC games and non-Intel stuff, or I'll buy a new PC.

Sorry I probably didn't make it clear I am running SC4 Deluxe, which is SC4 plus Rush Hour.

After trying a failing with the NAM I have tired a number of other mods, simple BATs, which all work fine.

Cheers

[bwong]

Hamish, on 23 July 2011 - 04:35 AM, said:

Would you be able to post your fix in here by any chance?
Because I believe that there are other mac users with the same problems that could use the same info.
Thanks

Quote

Hey,
I tried using the mac version of the game with the update. But it's terrible. The graphics are all wrong and yeah. It's terrible. So personally I would not recommend using the mac version. I tried using VMware Fusion 3 but the graphics were really glitchy and slow. So I now use Bootcamp, running a completely separate version of Windows on my computer. This works a lot better than I would imagined. The graphics are very sharp and everything is good.

So, no, it did not work for me, and as a result, I used Bootcamp to install windows XP SP3.

Nicholson, on 24 July 2011 - 04:55 PM, said:

Sorry I probably didn't make it clear I am running SC4 Deluxe, which is SC4 plus Rush Hour.

After trying a failing with the NAM I have tired a number of other mods, simple BATs, which all work fine.

Cheers

Although other BATs are important, the NAM provides a pretty fundamental expansion to the game. Without NAM, the game, in my opinion, is not as fun and realistic. As a result, if you want to continue to play SC4 on mac, do not upgrade to lion.

Another solution, or way you can upgrade to lion is by making an extra partition on your mac, and install Lion on that. After that you could transfer all files (except for your SC4 files) and make your snow leopard or previous OS simply for the purposes of running SC4.

[Nicholson]

bwong, on 24 July 2011 - 11:00 PM, said:

Although other BATs are important, the NAM provides a pretty fundamental expansion to the game. Without NAM, the game, in my opinion, is not as fun and realistic. As a result, if you want to continue to play SC4 on mac, do not upgrade to lion.

Another solution, or way you can upgrade to lion is by making an extra partition on your mac, and install Lion on that. After that you could transfer all files (except for your SC4 files) and make your snow leopard or previous OS simply for the purposes of running SC4.

I agree completely, NAM is essential for enjoyable gameplay.

Dual boot is an inelegant solution and virtualising has performance issues, I am not ready to give up on SC4 + NAM on Lion as yet.

I will keep you posted.

Thanks

[DAB_City]

Nicholson, on 25 July 2011 - 03:42 AM, said:

I agree completely, NAM is essential for enjoyable gameplay.

Dual boot is an inelegant solution and virtualising has performance issues, I am not ready to give up on SC4 + NAM on Lion as yet.

I will keep you posted.

Thanks

You could use Boot Camp to run Windows (XP or newer), and buy the PC version of SC4. I picked up a £10 copy of SC4 Deluxe at GAME (UK gaming stores) to use the plugin tools, but I am thinking of getting a 4-16GB flash drive, so that I can switch between using Mac or PC SC4.

[Hamish]

I think creating a Snow Leopard Partition is a bit much, I am able to get SC4 to run in Lion. And am just working my way around the crashes. Seem to keep them at bay if I keep my plugins folder organized.

Nicholson, on 24 July 2011 - 04:55 PM, said:

After trying a failing with the NAM I have tired a number of other mods, simple BATs, which all work fine.

Cheers

I am able to get the NAM to run fine, and since you are able to get other BATs working too, I think you may have a NAM specific problem.
Were you able to get the NAM working before upgrading to Lion? And are you using the same files as the ones before you upgraded?

If you were able to get it running before Lion, then you may need to redownload it just incase some of the contents were altered in the update.
If this is your first time installing the NAM then you need to very carefully read the Read-Me file. There are some files that must go into your plugins and multiple files that you can only put in one of, it will crash otherwise.
So just recheck that the NAM has been installed properly, or redownload and reinstall the NAM.

[Nicholson]

DAB_City, on 25 July 2011 - 04:04 AM, said:

You could use Boot Camp to run Windows (XP or newer), and buy the PC version of SC4. I picked up a £10 copy of SC4 Deluxe at GAME (UK gaming stores) to use the plugin tools, but I am thinking of getting a 4-16GB flash drive, so that I can switch between using Mac or PC SC4.

I did that when I first got my Mac. I hated rebooting and closing all my other programs. I then tired using Fusion which ran terribly. Parallels was OK until a city got to 200,000 plus then it became so slow it was unplayable.

I will keep trying with SC4 and NAM on Lion.

[Nicholson]

OK quick update, the majority of the NAM does work with OS X Lion. The following items from the plugins folders within the Network add on mod folder had to be removed to prevent the game from freezing NetworkAddonMod_High_ElRail_Plugin.dat
NetworkAddonMod_High_Monorail_Plugin.dat.

Cheers

[DAB_City]

Nicholson, on 25 July 2011 - 06:55 AM, said:

OK quick update, the majority of the NAM does work with OS X Lion. The following items from the plugins folders within the Network add on mod folder had to be removed to prevent the game from freezing NetworkAddonMod_High_ElRail_Plugin.dat
NetworkAddonMod_High_Monorail_Plugin.dat.

Cheers

That means that you won't be able to use double-height elevated rail or monorail, but that shouldn't affect gameplay too badly. I believe Lion has a resume feature, so that when Lion is booted, everything is as it was before. I guess this also applies to Boot Camp?

[Nicholson]

DAB_City, on 25 July 2011 - 08:34 AM, said:

That means that you won't be able to use double-height elevated rail or monorail, but that shouldn't affect gameplay too badly. I believe Lion has a resume feature, so that when Lion is booted, everything is as it was before. I guess this also applies to Boot Camp?

Understood, don't think I have ever used those anyways. I will now go on and rebuild my plugins directory. If I run into anything that does not work I will post it in this thread.

Auto resume is a feature of the OS, not the EFI of the Mac and there for not available on bootcamp partitions, or other OS partitions which do not contain an install of Lion.

I have been playing with Lion since the developer previews. If anyone needs any info let me know.

Cheers

[DAB_City]

Nicholson, on 25 July 2011 - 08:44 AM, said:

Understood, don't think I have ever used those anyways. I will now go on and rebuild my plugins directory. If I run into anything that does not work I will post it in this thread.

Auto resume is a feature of the OS, not the EFI of the Mac and there for not available on bootcamp partitions, or other OS partitions which do not contain an install of Lion.

I have been playing with Lion since the developer previews. If anyone needs any info let me know.

Cheers

I meant that when you reboot from Windows back into Lion, the Mac OS would restore open windows, documents etc. It wouldn't appear in Windows unless Microsoft switch on their photocopiers again! I'll eventually build a dedicated PC rig to run Windows games and applications... Thanks for the advice everyone, this will be useful to other people...

[gweed123]

Just upgraded to Lion. Using a Black MacBook from 2006 I believe. I have NAM installed, and I took out the files that were suggested above. The game crashed as soon as I opened the city.

I have a new 13" MBA on order, and I'm going to try running the game on that machine (although I doubt it will make a difference). If that doesn't work, my plan is to run SC4 on a Parallels version of Windows 7. It'll mean I'll have to download the windows version of the NAM, but small price to pay for having a version of SC4 that actually works.

[Nicholson]

Maybe it is not consistent in the files it does not like. I removed the .dat files in groups of 4 from the NAM plugins folder until i found the group of 4 which did not work. I then tried each .dat individually which is where i got the 2 plugins mentioned above.

In general SC4 is now working well on Lion, I have encountered a weird problem where some transport stations have a really low capacity, usually between 1-10 when the should be 10000+. has anyone else encounter this issue before?

Cheers

[Hamish]

I don't know why it is crashing, but there will be some files that either just won't work, or have been corrupted during the SC4 patch upgrade.
One thing I have noticed though is that it will only crash when the simulator is running, if you have saved a city on pause with no plugins you are able to load it fine with out it crashing, however once you click play, with plugins, it will crash.
I'll look into this further...

Gweed123, and others, with SC4 crashing, you need to search through your plugins folder to find the files that are stopping it from working. This may take some time, but it will mean that you can run SC4 again.

Nicholson, on 28 July 2011 - 01:35 AM, said:

In general SC4 is now working well on Lion, I have encountered a weird problem where some transport stations have a really low capacity, usually between 1-10 when the should be 10000+. has anyone else encounter this issue before?

This is a well known mac bug. The lots have been created differently, and one entry has the wrong number, which causes our game to think that it has between 1 - 10, where as it should have 10,000. You can either fix it by loading the lot in windows, or just download a different station.

[DAB_City]

Hamish, on 28 July 2011 - 01:51 AM, said:

I don't know why it is crashing, but there will be some files that either just won't work, or have been corrupted during the SC4 patch upgrade.
One thing I have noticed though is that it will only crash when the simulator is running, if you have saved a city on pause with no plugins you are able to load it fine with out it crashing, however once you click play, with plugins, it will crash.
I'll look into this further...

Gweed123, and others, with SC4 crashing, you need to search through your plugins folder to find the files that are stopping it from working. This may take some time, but it will mean that you can run SC4 again.

Nicholson, on 28 July 2011 - 01:35 AM, said:

In general SC4 is now working well on Lion, I have encountered a weird problem where some transport stations have a really low capacity, usually between 1-10 when the should be 10000+. has anyone else encounter this issue before?

This is a well known mac bug. The lots have been created differently, and one entry has the wrong number, which causes our game to think that it has between 1 - 10, where as it should have 10,000. You can either fix it by loading the lot in windows, or just download a different station.

Actually, if you do have a Windows copy, but you still want to use a specific, affected station with the Mac, I have found this tutorial involving iLive Reader (for Windows). This should sort out the capacity issues, and it doesn't seem too difficult either. I wonder why developers can't do this every time...

[Hamish]

I know, I have done this for a few stations. I don't understand why the creators don't do this themselves either.
Whats more difficult to fix is nightlight for macs, but its worth it when it works

[gweed123]

So I removed the entire NAM from my plug-ins folder, and the game worked very well. I re-installed just the essentials, and it did the same thing as before. Does anyone have any idea which file is causing this? I'm going to re-install the whole NAM from scratch to see if that works. I'm using Traffic Plugin Z Hight if that helps.

[Hamish]

To test and see if it is the NAM set up, or a file inside the NAM, load a city with out any plugins, preferably a new city. Pause the city and then save it.
Place your NAM files back in. Load the game and then the city. If it crashes right away, then its the set up that is the problem, and you need to redo the NAM files and make sure that it has everything that is needed inside it. If you are able to load the city, press the play button. If it then freezes, then this means that there is a file inside the NAM folder that is your problem, rather than the NAM set up or conflicting NAM files.

Also, what do you mean by essentials? Because there was a NAM essentials file which I don't believe is essential anymore, as long as you have downloaded the most recent NAM.

[bwong]

I have about 5 days doing nothing, so I can run an automated program that will just run Simcity 4 on Lion with an assortment of different plug-ins. I will hope to put up the results in about 10 days from now.

[Hamish]

Is someone able to check this out for me.
Does the SC4 Deluxe Edition Disk have an installer that works on Lion? Because on the my RushHour disk it will no longer work. Which means I am not able to reinstall it if I need to. Although I don't plan on reinstalling it anytime soon.

Also going to work on a fix for the Route Query tool bug. Hope to have that sorted out early next week.

[gweed123]

Hamish, on 28 July 2011 - 04:28 PM, said:

To test and see if it is the NAM set up, or a file inside the NAM, load a city with out any plugins, preferably a new city. Pause the city and then save it.
Place your NAM files back in. Load the game and then the city. If it crashes right away, then its the set up that is the problem, and you need to redo the NAM files and make sure that it has everything that is needed inside it. If you are able to load the city, press the play button. If it then freezes, then this means that there is a file inside the NAM folder that is your problem, rather than the NAM set up or conflicting NAM files.

Also, what do you mean by essentials? Because there was a NAM essentials file which I don't believe is essential anymore, as long as you have downloaded the most recent NAM.

Sorry, I meant core files. The NAM is divided into "core" files and "optional" files. So I went through and installed the core files one by one, and the only one that caused it to hang was NetworkAddonMod_Bridges_Plugin_Controller.dat. I know this is a core file, but will the NAM be significantly impaired if this file is not included? I have all the rest of the files included in the NAM, including most of the optional ones, and all my other plugins working fine with the game. It's apparently literally just that one file that is causing all the problems.

Can I run the NAM effectively without it? Or is the NAM completely useless without it? Thanks in advance.

[Nicholson]

Hamish, on 28 July 2011 - 08:47 PM, said:

Is someone able to check this out for me.
Does the SC4 Deluxe Edition Disk have an installer that works on Lion? Because on the my RushHour disk it will no longer work. Which means I am not able to reinstall it if I need to. Although I don't plan on reinstalling it anytime soon.

Also going to work on a fix for the Route Query tool bug. Hope to have that sorted out early next week.

The deluxe disc is a Drag to Applications folder install. Once the UB patch is installed the game runs fine.

So I have now downloaded and installed 200+ mods from the STEX and the LEX. Apart from the hiccups with the NAM I can report that SC4 is working really well, and from what I can remember better than it did on Snow Leopard.

One thing to note about my install is this was not an upgrade from Snow Leopard. It is a fresh Lion install and a fresh SC4 install.

Cheers

[Hamish]

gweed123, on 28 July 2011 - 09:17 PM, said:

Can I run the NAM effectively without it? Or is the NAM completely useless without it? Thanks in advance.

Try it out. I think it should work as long as there are no additional bridges that you want to use. I will look for a solution on this though.

Nicholson, on 29 July 2011 - 03:08 AM, said:

The deluxe disc is a Drag to Applications folder install. Once the UB patch is installed the game runs fine.

Oh great! The Rush Hour upgrade is an installer, and I was hoping that it was different for Deluxe.
Glad to hear its working well on your machine too.

[gweed123]

So far it's actually been working better than what I had under SL. Overall the program is snappier than it previously was. I have had a few more frequent freezes than I had before, but I just have to get in the habit of saving more often, nothing too crippling. The other thing is for some strange reason the colour of the water in the region view has changed to a lighter shade of blue. Again, nothing major, just a difference that may be worth noting.

Thanks for checking in on the NAM file Hamish. I'll let the forum know if I encounter any new issues with it. I should be receiving my new 13" MBA soon, so I'm hoping that it'll bump the performance of the software up even more. Either that, or it may bring in some new issues that I'll have to report.