CivIII and iMac

[satchel]

Hi folks - PC civ player here, barging in to the Mac forum with a question. I'm thinking about picking up a copy of CivIII for my brother, who uses an iMac. I don't know what the specs of his system are but it's relatively old, one of the first iMac models from a few years back.

Is it hopeless to imagine the game running reasonably well on his system?

 

[PRIMEMOVER]

I think he'll be okay assuming he has some decent RAM and a decent processor (G3? maybe).

I'm running on an iMac with 512K and a G4. I started a thread a while back asking what other Mac users were running on and how it performed for them. Seems to me there were some fairly older machines that ran okay. I've never had any problems. You may want to look back about a month or so and check out that thread.

 

[PRIMEMOVER]

I just looked...back on page two...it's called Mac Ops survey!

 

[Sid]

Hey-ah satchel. I have an older (Grey) G3 iMac: 500mhtz with 512 meg of RAM. The extra RAM makes a fair bit of difference. The only concessions that I make to my lack of grunt are: I don't play the music; map size restricted to Large (anything bigger and I make too much coffee between turns in the modern era). I usually leave Quartz rendering off, although I sometimes run with it for minimal deterioration in speed.

 

[dojoboy]

satchel, I'm playing Civ3 on an old (4 yrs.) tray-loading iMac (Rev.B) w/ a G3/333MHz and 512MB RAM. It runs really well.

 

[n8mac]

satchel, the original imac was a 233mhz, civ III requires 300mhz. In order to find out what its running (no, put that screw driver away) is to start the machine up and see what system its running.

As it starts up it will say "welcome to mac os #". If the number says 8.x then he would need a system upgrade. If it says 9.x then after its done click on the apple in the upper left corner and go to apple system profiler and look for the processor and ram info there. If it says 10.x then double click the hard drive (upper right icon) and go to applications-utilities-apple system profiler. As long as the mhz is 300 or more than make sure the ram is at least 192 (256+ recommended) and your set!

n8mac

 

[Trabpukcip]

I don't think you expect any problem, exept may be little slow...

 

[tao]

Originally posted by n8mac
satchel, the original imac was a 233mhz, civ III requires 300mhz. ...... As long as the mhz is 300 or more than make sure the ram is at least 192 (256+ recommended) and your set!

Don't confuse recommended with required. Before I got my G4 MDD, I ran Civ III on a PM 7500 upgraded with a 250 MHz G3 card with 208MB ram and it was playable. After the 1.21(?) upgrade however, ram requirements increased and vm needed to be enabled: slow. 256 mb highly recommended!

 

[Daelda]

I once ran Civ III on a 233 iMac with 256MB RAM. It was slow, but worked fine. As long as he has enough RAM, it should work, albit slowly.

 

[satchel]

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I don't have access to my brother's computer (he lives 200 miles away ... ) so I'm not sure how much memory he has or what his processor speed is.

I'm thinking of buying him the game and a memory expansion, or just buying him the game with the promise to return it and get him something else if it's too annoying to play.

 

[dojoboy]

Be sure to give him this web address!

 

[Grey Randall]

Originally posted by n8mac
satchel, the original imac was a 233mhz, civ III requires 300mhz.

Ummm... running Civ III on a G3 Gossamer (Beige G3/233)

No problems whatsoever with Civ III at lower processor speed.

I do think the only requirement is that the screen be capable of displaying at greater than 800 x 600. I know my iBook won't do this, I have no idea if the iMacs will.

 

[nmcul]

The extra RAM is dire to Civ 3's performance. Civ 3 was at first agonizingly slow on my computer, even though I was well above the system requirements. As soon as I increased the amount of RAM to allot to Civ 3 (we were running OS 9 at the time), the game became much faster. I'd say that at least 1.5x the recommended memory alottment is needed.

Isn't it odd, though, that a game that lacks 3D graphics, constant operations, and virtually any multimedia can be such a resource hog?

 

[satchel]

I'm getting more pessimistic. My brother's girlfriend did some snooping for me, and reported that his iMac is running OS 8.6 and has only 98MB RAM. She didn't get me the processor speed. I might be able to get him a 256MB DIMM as part of the gift, but I don't know if I can get more than that because I don't know how many slots there are.

And can CivIII even run under OS 8.6?

 

[tao]

Just look at the Mac support site: http://www.ina-support.com/faq/civ3_mac.asp

 

[Grey Randall]

I believe it will run under 8.6, provided he has carbon lib.

 

[nmcul]

One unconventional way to estimate your brother's processer speed is to see what color his iMac is.

 

[n8mac]

WARNING!
I have a 400mhz iMac w/dvd drive. It was the first dvd drive for the mac 3 years ago. It came with 8.6 and my carbon lib was out of date, so I went to apple to load it. I found out that it wouldn't work with the dvd drive under 8.6 and so I had to buy 9.+ because 9 resolved this issue. Only a problem if it has a dvd player. To be safe I would buy 9.x, ebay should have a cheap one fer ya. And yes, I would buy a 256 dimm, got any extras?

n8mac