What is SimCity 3000?

SimCity 3000 is the follow up to SimCity 2000 which is a classic city builder in isometric view. Originally planned to be in 3D like what SimCity(2013) and Cities Skylines are but following the Maxis purchase by Electronic Arts (EA) the game was reworked to be isometric like SimCity 2000 and SC4 and Lincity/ng. You probably already know more about SC3K anyway so why bother reading this? 

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Five years after the release of SimCity 2000 for the Mac, Maxis has taken its award-winning city simulation game to a new level. Added detail and complexity bring you closer still to the sights, sounds and chaos of running your very own teeming metropolis, but if you want a city simulation game that offers more playability and less gee-whiz flash, SimCity 3000 is a big disappointment.

For the first time, you can zoom in on your city so closely that you actually see your subjects (called Sims). Having through the throes of daily life. They carry briefcases to work, wield protest signs during demonstrations and even run around in panic during an earthquake or alien invasion.

Vastly improved audio conveys the excitement — and the peril — of city life. The brouhaha of riots and the sweet sounds of road rage have replaced the flat music of SimCity 2000. The game offers new and deeper advice from your city advisers and is generally far more interactive than any of its predecessors.

Now for SimCity 3000’s fatal flaw: it doesn’t actually run well on a Mac. It has weighty system requirements. The game dumps 260MB onto your hard drive, while heavy use of virtual memory pushes space requirements even higher. Count on saying goodbye to at least 390MB of your hard drive, even with the CD inserted during gameplay. (Maxis recommends you start up with only a basic set of system extensions to play the game.) SimCity 3000 is slower than molasses in winter, even when you play it on a G3. And despite serious emphasis on graphics and animation, the game does not use hardware acceleration, so a Voodoo or ATI card in your Mac won’t help.

SimCity 3000 creates unique graphics for each side of a building — unlike SimCity 2000, which showed different angles of the same view — but at a cost. Dragging between city sections in any close-up mode shows you blue squares (dubbed “ice cubes”) until the program catches up and fills in the details. Depending on your machine’s speed, you may face a frustrating wait.

If SimCity 3000 feels like a PC game, that’s because it is. Maxis did not originally plan to make a Mac version. MacKiev, a company in Ukraine, conducted the port but unfortunately did a very poor job of constructing a Mac environment. A surprising number of Windows elements show up in SimCity 3000. Try to open a city file and you’ll see what we mean. See that button for moving up one level in the folder hierarchy? That’s right out of Windows.

While SimCity 3000 can theoretically import files created with SimCity 2000, this feature is almost useless. First off, there is no Import button or menu item within SimCity 3000. Selecting Open does not allow recognition of the SimCity 2000 file unless you give it the DOS extension of .sc3 or drag the file onto the SimCity 3000 icon manually to open it. When it finally does open, you quickly see that it’s not worth the effort. Too many items simply vanish — highways, roads, prisons, power plants, you name it. You end up with half a city and a whole lot of mysterious blank spots.

If you can ignore its many flaws and you have a superfast G3 or G4, you just might find SimCity 3000 enjoyable, but not if you own anything less than the latest and greatest Mac. As for us, we’re going to stick with SimCity 2000 for another few years.

Shuchat-Marx, Mark D. (January 2000). SimCity 3000. MacAddict. (pg. 58).

Download SimCity 3000 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.5 up to Mac OS 10.4

Compatibility notes

Architecture: PPC

At least 32MB of RAM (recommended 64MB) with at least 128MB of virtual memory (So you CANNOT use SheepShaver because of this)

Mac OS 7.5.3 - Mac OS 9.2.2 - Mac OS X 10.4

QuickTime 3.0 or later

At least 360MB of free hard disk space (including virtual memory occupied space)

 

(Notes from User: CaelThunderwing)

to Run without it complaining about the CD, do not use toast, instead use the "Virtual CD/DVD Utility" found at https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1616-virtual-dvd-rom-cd-utility

on Real Hardware: a G4 Quicksilver will run but you may encounter some hickups along the way if you have more than 512MB Ram installed, as OS9 automaticly past the 960 mark disabled Virtual Memory and SC3k will complain about this! (either reduce installed Ram, Setup a Ram Disk so you can assign and change Virtual Mem or ignore the warning, (i personally went w/ ramdisk+ virtualmemory solution i did not test past loadingscreen with ignoring the virtual memory error.)

 

Bearly tested in OSX Tiger Classic but i can imagine it'd work just not as well natively in OS9.

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: QEMU