Or is that a dream not worth dreaming?

If you are referring to the source of the actual Civ4 software then there's no chance. It includes a lot of proprietary code from Gamebryo and Firaxis, plus a whole lot of their own magic for converting from Windows to Mac OS APIs.

If you are referring to the SDK source, then there's no point. The Mac versions of Civ4 software integrate the SDK code into the main body of the application, and they have no interface to talk to a separate CvGameCoreDLL.dll file. So even if you modify and recompile the SDK source, the Civ4 software on your Mac is incapable of using it.

If you are referring to the source of the actual Civ4 software then there's no chance. It includes a lot of proprietary code from Gamebryo and Firaxis, plus a whole lot of their own magic for converting from Windows to Mac OS APIs.

If you are referring to the SDK source, then there's no point. The Mac versions of Civ4 software integrate the SDK code into the main body of the application, and they have no interface to talk to a separate CvGameCoreDLL.dll file. So even if you modify and recompile the SDK source, the Civ4 software on your Mac is incapable of using it.

I refer to the latter. Yes what you describe is true, but they can chose to restructure the code to use a DLL. While not a piece of cake, it is not out of the question..

Except that it probably is, since it would serve no major purpose in terms of furthering the franchise. It appears the Mac version is more of an afterthought, relatively speaking. That's cool, hopefully the next version of Civ 5, will use OpenGL and be written in ANSI portable C++ :)

One can dream right? :)

Dream on! There is absolutely no business case for Aspyr to re-engineer the Civ4 structure to support a separate SDK-able library.

They've sold pretty well all of the copies of Civ4 they are going to sell. How many more would they sell to the handful of modders that would want the SDK but don't already have Civ4?

Not only that, but if you have ever contacted Aspyr tech support and even hinted that you *might* would like to be able to mod Civ4, you will know that they are deeply allergic to modders.