SMAC for Mac

[pauldavis@turno]

The fact that that rhymes is the only happy thing about this post...

I Have been playing Civ III for about a month now, but played SCAM for years, but have not played in a while. I loved the strategy ionvolved and how easily the game was modded.

Well this forum got me feeling like I wanted to play again, but as I have a Mac now, I needed a different version.

Just one problem. Mac versions of SMAC are running about $150 on ebay and $85 on amazon!!! Can anyone tell me why I could get the PC version for $7 but the Mac version is so damned expensive???

This post is more in anger I guess, but if someone knows where I could get a hold of SMAC for Mac, that would be great, as I am beginning to realize that it is a superior game to Civ III.

p.s. Does anyone know if the Mac version is as easily as modded as the PC version?

 

[vyeh]

Mac is expensive because:

(1) There are fewer Mac games produced than PC games. I suspect that PC gamers tend to turn over their games more than Mac gamers.

(2) SMAC is an OS 9 application. OS X came out shortly after SMAC. Consequently, the demand for an OS 9 game was small after OS X came out. While SMAC for the PC has been reissued as The Planetary Pack and The Laptop Collection, SMAC for MAC has never shown up bundled with another game, not even its expansion.

Any mod that works on the PC works on the Mac. The PC version has a faction editor that the Mac does not, but anything that can be done on the faction editor can also be done with a text editor (and I think there are some modifications that can be done in a text editor that cannot be done in the faction editor).

Some think SMAC is superior to Civ IV in some respects ...

If you look at the Civ IV Mac forum, you'll see that Mac users are disadvantaged compared to PC users. Most mods use the SDK, which only works with Windows.

Now that Macs are being built with Intel chips, Mac gamers will be able to play PC games by having a Windows operating system in addition to their Mac OS X system. Unfortunately, they will not be able to play OS 9 games on their Intel systems ...

 

[Chairman Meow]

What I did was I got a Windows copy of Alpha Centauri, and used QEMU and Windows 98 to run Alpha Centauri. You'll need a copy of Windows, though, but Alpha Centauri runs flawlessly in emulation.

edit - if you have a PowerPC Mac, then Qemu won't work, but you can probably use VirtualPC instead.