Updated 7/14/03 I'm a big fan of Simulation games. Sim City has by far been my favorite. I was glad to hear that there was going to be a mac version of Sim City 4. The features are much improved over previous versions. Maxis did a good job of adding things without over doing it. I like the ability to have major streets and minor neighborhood streets. When creating residential zones it will auto draw streets within neighborhoods so all your houses have streets within the right distances of them.

After playing the game I started to notice some strange thing happing. The graphics wouldn't display right with weird screen redraw issues and scrolling that got out of control. In fact it became intolerable that I couldn't play the game at all.

I tried to register the game at the EA website so I could report the problem, but there was some issue with my serial number and it wouldnt let me register (yes, I legally bought the game). So instead I'm waiting for a response on that issue before I can report my real issues.

I decidedto check the MacNN message board to see what they had. Turns out someone messed with some of the setting and found that the ATI Radeon 9000 configuration was not set correctly in one of the graphic files. This person was using a TiBook with a Radeon just as I am. In the Video Cards.sgr file located in the Sim City 4 directory the line for the Radeon 9000 Pro reads: card 0x4966 "Radeon 9000 Pro" and needs to be changed to: card 0x4c66 "Radeon 9000 Pro".

Yup, that fixed it. Works like a charm now. No graphic drawing issues at. Now if I can just keep my budget balanced. After playing it for a few days now it can become pretty sluggish after my city population reaches 5000 sims. But it is still playable. I also found a great site called Simtropolis that has many great add-ons. Although geared for the PC they work fine on the Mac.