Mac or PC games under virtualisation - my dilemma.
Jamie Kahn Genet
to run the Mac version of XYZ app even if it did cost twice the price.
It used to seem worth it, but I've been shopping online for new or
new-ish Mac games the past few days, which is unusual for me. I've
either been sticking with my old classic Mac games (I have some old
hardware to run them), buying shareware Mac games, or buying GBA and DS
games (love my DS!).
But the urge to try out newer commercial computer gaming (newer by my
standards anyway) got the better of me this week. *sighs* The price
difference, lack of compatibility upgrades for Mac titles (to be fair
the change from MacOS to OSX, then to Intel from PPC wasn't any
developer's fault), missing expansions (Aspyr - where is the third Civ
IV expansion, dudes?) and special editions - well, it's getting me down
:-(
It's not like this is any real news to me, but I've never been so
willing to buy cheap PC games and run them under VMWARE Fusion.
So - how does the Mac version of Civ IV and the second and only
expansion ported by Aspyr run under Leopard on an Intel Mac? Anyone
tried the PC version with Fusion?
Also - I've read awful things about SimCity 4 on Intel Macs - is this
true? What's the PC version like under Fusion?
Generally any pointers to cool games that run great under Fusion would
be welcome :-) I don't want to save money at the expense of playability,
but from what I've read all but the very latest Mac games run more
poorly than their PC counterparts :-(
TIA,
Jamie Kahn Genet
--
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Richard Maine
> So - how does the Mac version of Civ IV and the second and only
> expansion ported by Aspyr run under Leopard on an Intel Mac? Anyone
> tried the PC version with Fusion?
I've got the Mac version on this Intel iMac (2.16 GHz). I'd say it
mostly runs reasonably, though it crashes more than I'd like (and
crashes hard, requiring a system power cycle). I'm suspicious some of
the crashes might have been from overheating. I've bumped my fan speeds
using smcFancontrol2, and I haven't played CiV 4 subsequently to see if
that helped.
I haven't tried it under Fusion, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting
for decent performance. Fusion does seem to be improving for games; the
answer is no longer just an automatic "no, forget it". But if you
really want to run Windows games on your Mac, I'd argue for bootCamp,
which should do them well.
> Also - I've read awful things about SimCity 4 on Intel Macs - is this
> true? What's the PC version like under Fusion?
Haven't tried it either way.
> Generally any pointers to cool games that run great under Fusion would
> be welcome :-)
See the very helpful page at
<http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1287>.
I note that it lists someone as reporting that Civ 4 "Plays in single
player mode, but a little slow." and categorizes it as "Mostly useable."
Another report, using VMWare Fusion 1.1 reported it as unuseable, saying
"App loader starts loading game - then entire VM crashes ungracefully:("
--
Richard Maine | Good judgement comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgement.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain