I’ve always been a bit disappointed with SimCity 4 for the Mac. The PC version was a huge system hog but the Mac version was unplayable on my 1Ghz iBook G4. Also, Aspyr crippled the game by not allowing access to the SimCity site with a Mac product key, hence killing the online component and the ability to download the bonus landmarks.
Luckily I’ve managed to cure part of that. It appears the Wacom tablet drivers were the cause of the severe performance hit. Updating them to the latest version and (this is the important bit) using ‘tablet mode’ rather than ‘mouse mode’ made the game play 100 times better.
I polished this off by adding the ID of my video card into the ‘Video Cards.sgr’ file (for some reason it was missing and hence the card wasn’t being recognised as a Radeon 9200) and turning on the ‘no backing store’ scrolling feature in the ‘Graphics Rules.sgr’ file (I don’t know why this was turned off for the Mac version as it makes scrolling on the lower-end Radeons many, many times better).
Result: I’ve got SimCity 4 eating up my time again. Damn.
