Sim City 3000 for Mac not working on any mac?

[mathwhiz90601]

I've had SC3k for a few years. It used to work on the old iMac G3 (os9) but then it for some reason wouldn't let me save. Thought it might have been because of an OS update I installed. But I can't get it to run on SheepShaver, which runs the same os 9 I started with on the old iMac. Any ideas?

 

[torchwood04]

Sheepshaver is very slow on Intel computers/Macs. I believe it runs 1/4th (if that) natively. It is fine for some apps and early games, but for SC3K? Your best bet would be to buy SC4 (with beta universal binary update) or a PowerPC mac with Classic support/OS9. This is just my opinion though..

 

[mathwhiz90601]

One fourth is what I heard. That would make it run at about 600Mhz, which is nearly twice what my OS 9 computer ran (350Mhz). So it's faster.

 

[torchwood04]

I Googled this and found that Sheepshaver emulates a 100mhz G4. Just an FYI..

 

[mathwhiz90601]

It just says that no matter what speed it actually runs at. I ran Norton System info in it and it ran faster than any other system (went up to 450 mhz G3 and 400 mhz G4) in CPU, graphics, and disk. FPU was slow, though.

 

[torchwood04]

Um, when I tried Sheepshaver, it was very slow, I mean even opening the Finder. I highly doubt that Sheepshaver fares better than say a G3 running at 350mhz. Okay, try playing Unreal Tournament in Sheepshaver vs. the G3? Is there a difference? I would think so.

 

[mathwhiz90601]

Unreal tournament? Whazzat?

SC3K is the only high-demand game I'll be running in SS.

And it is faster than the G3. Startup is about 3x faster. Norton test is faster.

 

[torchwood04]

I was simply using that as an example. Sheepshaver does NOT run higher than 100mhz now, the OS could think it's more, but it's not. Emulating will probably never be as good as an actual machine.. Can you provid benchmarks that your 350mhz G3 runs slower than Sheepshaver?

 

[plinden]

Um, when I tried Sheepshaver, it was very slow, I mean even opening the Finder. I highly doubt that Sheepshaver fares better than say a G3 running at 350mhz. Okay, try playing Unreal Tournament in Sheepshaver vs. the G3? Is there a difference? I would think so.

It depends highly on how much RAM you assign to SheepShaver. It's very slow with the default (I can't remember what that is) but I found it much snappier when I increased the RAM ... but I don't remember what I set it to. I didn't have any OS 9 apps to run on it (it was just a geeky experiment) so I ended up deleting it.

 

[mathwhiz90601]

I can't give exact numbers on the G3 since I've already packed it up and put in the basement, but it tested at the expected rate for an iMac G3 at 350 Mhz. The G3 had 576MB RAM. Now, for SS, with 512MB RAM assigned...