Wanting to transition

[Rex Tyrannus]

Hi guys. I'm hoping someone (or some many) can give me some advice. I recently fried my HP laptop by playing too much Civ. HP is fixing it, but I realize I should buy a new desktop, if I want to tax a computer so much.

Ever since OSX, I've wanted to turn to the Mac side and I'm looking to buy a 20" iMac to take on my current work and play tasks.

I think I'm fine with the "oddities" of performance I've read here. I think they'll patch those soon enough. But the prospect of waiting a year for the XP makes me nervous about transitioning. I play a lot of SGs and Realms Beyond events. These will start to move to Warlords very soon I think, but if I can't buy Warlords for Mac, I'll not be able to participate in these very enjoyable community events.

I will (probably) still buy my Mac for work (web app development), but I'm really not seeing enough (yet) to make me comfortable civving on a Mac. If someone here can convince me that Warlords should be a timely release (and that it will work) I'll make my transition immediately.

Otherwise, as Jeff Goldblum put it, I'm stuck in thinking jail, gaming on a stupid Windows computer.

Thanks in advance.

 

[bio_hazard]

I wouldn't hold your breath- Aspyr doesn't even list Warlords as a pending project, so I'm guessing it will be some months before it comes out (ie next year?). They will be busy enough patching Civ 4.

Of course, you can always run the PC version under boot camp or a windows emulator. Maybe someone can chime in about this new Parallels program that is shipping with some of the new macs?

That said- if your new computer would also be a work machine, enjoy your Mac! We are expecting there to be some desktop towers coming out in a few months if you aren't set on an iMac. I'm not sure there are specifics available on these yet, but based upon the experiences of some of the people here on the forum, they've gotten many years out of their g4/g5 towers as they are the most upgradable of the mac lines... Might be worth waiting a few months if this is important to you...

 

[Rex Tyrannus]

Yeah, I had thought about boot-strapping windows. Hell, if I can have a beige G3 running linux I ought to be able to get an Intel Mac to run windows (and civ).

Is boot-camp a true dual boot or does it run as a process of OSX? Recent Apple commercials elude to being able to run Windows from a Mac. Is this boot camp or some other system?

I'm assuming this is really just a matter of fdisking a vfat partition and using boot loader to point to whichever boot partition I want. Has anyone here done this to run Civ?

 

[bio_hazard]

I'm still on a G4 so probably the wrong person to answer this. As I understand it, "Boot Camp" allows real Windows, and requires a reboot (does not run under OSX). However, some of the new computers on MacMall ship with something called Parallels which I haven't seen much info on, but seems to indicate Windows would run either under or next to OSX, allowing you to move between the two w/out a reboot. Of course, mac has had Virtual PC for a while, which runs Windows under OSX.

I think several people posted positive experiences running Civ4 under boot camp. It actually seems to run better than the native OSX version, although to be fair its had almost a year of public trouble-shooting compared to only a week or so for the mac version...

 

[Rex Tyrannus]

Thanks, Bio. You've given me enough info want to try this. I love these sorts of do-it-or-die-trying challenges. I think I'd prefer the boot camp method to any sort of emulator for gaming. Hard drive space is cheaper than RAM.

If anyone's done this and knows of a particular Mac set-up that works best for this sort of thing, I'd really like to know. (Particularly with the video card.)

 

[Welnic]

Boot Camp allows you to dual boot and run XP off the other hard drive partition. It can make the other partition on the fly, and it includes window drivers for the mac hardware. I have a Macbook Pro that runs Civ4 for the mac very well, and I was also running the windows demo in XP on it in anticipation of the mac version. It seems to run as well to me in either OS except for sound issues on the mac side. We have a 20" iMac at work and it seems to be a nice rig. It has the same basic hardware as the Macbook Pros.

Parallels is program that allows you to run XP (and other windows versions and linux) in a virtual machine while you are booted in OSX. The speed hit for most things is not noticeable compared to booting in XP. The exception to that is the graphics performance, as it uses a virtual graphics card and doesn't take advantage of what the card can really do. I tried a couple of games in it, including the Civ4 demo, and they wouldn't run because of video issues.

 

[bio_hazard]

Welnic- thanks for the info on Parallels- sounded too good to be true!

 

[Cougarcat]

Crossover is something to look out for. It uses WINE as a compatibility layer. Unlike parallels it does not require windows, and they said they are planning to support a limited number of games, including Half-Life 2. Should be interesting.

 

[Rex Tyrannus]

I've used WINE from Linux builds before, but I've always had directX issues with games, though. Granted that was probably two years ago. Personally, I own a legal copy of WinXP pro. I don't think I see any drawback to dual booting. Especially with all the bugs reported in the Aspry civ.

Still, more homework is needed...

 

[AlanH]

If earlier are reliable, a dual booted Mac running the PC version under XP is more likely to work.

WINE is bad at games, but I believe Cedega will run Civ4 in Linux. If thats the case, then the rumours of an Apple compatibility layer for Windows apps, including games, could maybe come true.

 

[AlexandrNyetski]

working great on a 20" intel imac

 

[thegreatluke]

Parallels is program that allows you to run XP (and other windows versions and linux) in a virtual machine while you are booted in OSX. The speed hit for most things is not noticeable compared to booting in XP. The exception to that is the graphics performance, as it uses a virtual graphics card and doesn't take advantage of what the card can really do. I tried a couple of games in it, including the Civ4 demo, and they wouldn't run because of video issues.

That's not true. Virtual PC emulates a computer (is this the thing you're thinking of?) while Parallels virtualizes a computer. This means that the computer doesn't make a computer in software, but uses the actual hardware.

However, Parallels doesn't work very well running graphics-intensive programs due to driver issues.

 

[football751]

I've used WINE from Linux builds before, but I've always had directX issues with games, though. Granted that was probably two years ago. Personally, I own a legal copy of WinXP pro. I don't think I see any drawback to dual booting. Especially with all the bugs reported in the Aspry civ.

Still, more homework is needed...

I can say that Civ 4 runs great using Boot Camp on a MacBook 2GHz, 2GB RAM. I would suggest you splurge and get 2GB RAM, you can get it for less than $200 off NewEgg, and then you can sell that 512MB stick. As far as graphics goes, the game runs fine with my Intel GMA 950, so the 128MB x1600 should work fine. But for some more intense games, you may want to upgrade to the 256MB.

In all, Boot Camp makes your Mac a PC. You can't even see the Mac partition in Windows.

 

[Rex Tyrannus]

Thanks, football. Is there a filesystem both can read/write? In all my dual-booting experience on Linux/Windows systems I've always set up a small partition as vfat (fat32) for swapping files. Can Mac read/write fat32 or NTFS?

What is the filesystem default for MacOS anyway?

 

[AlanH]

OS X default file system is HFS extended with journalling.

A Mac can read or write a Fat32 partition. It can read NTFS but not write to it.

 

[Rex Tyrannus]

To post a follow up, I bought my spankin' new 20" iMac last night from the Apple Store here in Charlotte. A few hours later, I recovered from eye-candy overload.

This morning, I boot-camped the girl and now have a full-functioning dual boot. I'm now, officially, only half-evil.

I haven't used MacOS full-time since System 8, so the learning curve promises to be steep. First order of business, though is to put Firefox on it. I'm sorry, but Safari just seems mediocre at best. (I probably ought to read more, though, I might be missing a lot of features.)

Second order will be to Civ. Civ hard and not look back.

Thanks for the help, folks,

-RT

 

[ejday]

Welcome back, Rex. There is definitely a steep learning curve between OS 8 and OS X. On the flip side, if you've been using XP, the transition shouldn't be too painful. OS X is a little different... a bit more intuitive once you get in the groove but coming from XP will require reprogramming a little "muscle memory."

Firefox works remarkably well on OS X. On the downside, there are still some issues that slow it down/choke it up, often in the same places as Safari (which I still use as my primary browser... Gawd, I love the integrated RSS browser).

Safari is pretty capable, though certainly not be-all-end-all of browsers. You can, however, tweak it fairly deeply. Check out Pimp My Safari (a resource aggregate... apologies for the name) and see what functionality they can point you to.

 

[Gatekeeper]

I purchased David Pogue's "MacOS X: Tiger Edition, The Missing Manual" in order to get a clue as to what awaits me in the new OS (I'm currently using 8.6). Suffice to say, the 800-page book has just about everything on 10.4.x, to the point my eyes are glazing over. That said, it's going to be a great resource once my new iMac arrives via FedEx.

Gatekeeper

 

[AlanH]

I can't imagine reading a manual about OS X without having it in front of me or ever having seen it. Everything is soooo much easier to do than to describe.

 

[Gatekeeper]

To post a follow up, I bought my spankin' new 20" iMac last night from the Apple Store here in Charlotte. A few hours later, I recovered from eye-candy overload.

This morning, I boot-camped the girl and now have a full-functioning dual boot. I'm now, officially, only half-evil.

I haven't used MacOS full-time since System 8, so the learning curve promises to be steep. First order of business, though is to put Firefox on it. I'm sorry, but Safari just seems mediocre at best. (I probably ought to read more, though, I might be missing a lot of features.)

Second order will be to Civ. Civ hard and not look back.

Thanks for the help, folks,

-RT

*snort* You're lucky, RT.

I made the mistake of ordering via phone/Internet from the Apple Store on July 6. They said my top-of-the-line customized Intel iMac would ship 1-3 business days after the order. Well, here it's July 14 and I'm still waiting. To add insult to injury, the order status page now says the damn machine won't ship until July 18 at the earliest, with an estimated arrival on July 21.

Right now, I *despise* Apple. At the very least, they need to refine how they "estimate" their shipping times, because if I'd known then what I know now, I would have gone to an authorized reseller with more inventory on hand. Furthermore, you'd think they could treat a customer who paid for his computer up front a little bit better. Now I feel like they got my money so nothing else matters to them.

God, I so want to *throttle* Apple right now.

The only good thing I've gotten out of them is a free upgrade to 2-day shipping once they're finally done building the damn Intel iMac.

Well, maybe Brad, et al., at Aspyr will have the patch out for Civ IV by the time my computer arrives. Until then, I'm left to read a "quick start" guide when I really wanted a full manual and to browse the various fora. And maybe find time for a Civ II game or two.

A very disappointed,

Gatekeeper