Cities XL on Mac: Free Download of Popular Sim Cities Game
Cities XL is from a French company who thought they would bring out their own take on Sim Cities.
Sadly though they haven’t developed a Mac version of the game, and at the time of writing don’t intend on creating one. You could set up a bootcamp partition and run Cities XL via Windows, but well…I’d rather not have to boot out of OS X to play the game.
Several hours later I have Cities XL running on my 13″ Macbook Pro without using bootcamp or running something like Parallels. Here’s how.
Downloads
I should note that I purchased the download via Steam because the Cities XL site’s purchasing section wasn’t working at the time. These instructions should work fine with a standard install.
You’ll also need to download the latest version of Darwine here.
Installation
Install Darwine as would any normal program.
From the dropdown menu in Darwine (top right hand side of the screen) select Winetricks. In Winetricks install Direct X 9, MS .NET 2.0 and MS Visual C++ 2008 libraries. If Direct X 9 doesn’t install, don’t worry too much because the game will attempt to install it when it is setting itself up. If you have ongoing problems though, grab Direct X 9 from Microsoft direct and try running it.
Install Cities XL.
I had a problem with graphics, although being on a low end Macbook Pro might have had more to do with it. If you get a popup about failure to deal with screen resolution (or similar) the way around it is to change the settings in Wine to “emulate a virtual desktop” (Wine Configuration/ Graphics.) You will need to restart Wine + X11 for the change to take place.
Thats is!
The game itself: not bad, although the online component is over priced and underwhelming so far
2 Comments
hey i am having some problems trying this method. I’ve gotten Darwine and I am able to get the install menu for the game and install it, but when the install is over it always says there was a major error and the doesn’t open. Any tips for what I might be doing wrong?
Hi, I managed to install the game following this method; the game works ok, besides a few glitches, and is very snappy in low-res version. Many crashes though.
Thanks,
tom