Civ4 Colonization in Parallels

[AlanH]

I've just installed Civ4 Colonization in Parallels/Windows XP on my 1st generation Mac Pro. Early impressions are that it performs pretty much the same as Civ4 and its expansions. There are some graphics glitches, including some missing layers in the leaderheads; but it's playable, at least in the early game.

 

[jasonc1]

Thanks for the report, I've been trying to get a colonization install to work in parallels but hit an error reading from an external CD/Rom. It thinks it isn't an original disk in the drive, when it is. The rest of the error message just says to ensure the device is using DMA if available, which it is.

Did you hit anything like this and solve it, or just have no issues with your install?

 

[jasonc1]

By the way, the install went fine, no hitches. It is only at the play stage that the game doesn't recognize the CD as an original. (It has never been used before on any other machine, just bought, legit shrink wrapped game & disk, etc etc).

I've got a young civ fan with a Mac who can't run one of his Christmas presents...

 

[AlanH]

Hi, welcome

I haven't tried it again since I upgraded Parallels to version 4, but when I tried just now, it failed in the same way as yours did.

I tried a second time, double clicking the desktop icon for Colonization. When the error message came up again it said it had timed out waiting for the CD, and had a "Retry" option, which I clicked. While it was searching for the CD again, I right clicked the CD icon at bottom right of the VM window and selected "Configure ...". In the VM config screen that came up I just clicked OK. I think that caused the CD to remount, and then the game started up. I've repeated the error several times, and have found no tricks to ensure that it starts up reliably, Patience and persistence seem to be required

Disk-based copy protection systems seem to be a bit flakey. I've had similar problems with the Mac versions of Civ4, and repeated eject/reload/relaunch cycles have been my only way to solve them. I think there are some very tight timings involved in the checking software, and Parallels version 4 may have changed something and pushed it close to the edge for Colonization.

For reference, I am running Parallels build 4.0.3540 (November 22, 2008) in OS X 10.5.6. I normally start and run the VM in a window, though I can switch to Coherence mode to have just the game window displayed within OS X.