We can certainly help one another out by asking questions and answering them, but we can’t intuit exactly what the problem might be from limited information, which appears to be the second major communication failing you’re upset about here. Rightly so, because these people proffering advice (myself included) can only guess at what you’ve already done, and can only guess at what might work. They aren’t labeling it as guesses though.

Speaking of which, from my reading of that WineHQ thread (that’s right, I skimmed it before pasting it in here, without a thorough reading), I can see the part that bothered you — the “I’ll let you find that on your own” bit. It’s in reference to a No-CD crack, which may or may not be illegal in your area (and since you’re in the States, we can safely say is in violation of the DMCA). WINE doesn’t work well with some ridiculous CD DRM (Digital Rights Restrictions Management) software (I’m looking at you SecuROM), which often does nasty tricks like writing intentionally bad sectors on CD that the DRM driver can read and retrieve a key from, but without those DRM drivers the CD hardware would merely fail hard trying to read. Since it’s a copyright protection scheme, one that WINE can’t handle well, it’s probably what’s crashing the system. The “I’ll leave that to you” is saying, “this is probably illegal, and I’m not going to put a link to where to find a No-CD crack because we’ll call down the Copyright Gods to smite WineHQ, and that’s just not cool.”

I can understand his reasoning. I don’t get why he couldn’t just say what I said instead.

And again, this thread comes down to “copyright laws make things ludicrously difficult for Linux users for no apparent reason”.

If I have time tomorrow, I’m going to drag out those disks and try to get it working. Of course, I’ll probably have to get the No-CD crack, despite owning it legally, meaning I might run afoul of some stupidly designed laws. If they can reach into Canada, anyway.

Another thing you should NEVER EVER put into writing in a forum like that is “Oh, to make that happen, do X, Y and Z.” followed by “I’ve not tried that but it should work.”

Try it, test it, verify it, then talk about it. Or keep mouth shut. No one benefits from that kind of advice.

(There is a way to suggest a solution that you haven’t tried, but not by describing it in detail as though you did it then later revealing that you never did it.)

Think of it like the little wires. Do you cut the red one, or the blue one? Don’t tell someone which to cut, then later mention that you have no clue.

Greg, was this one of the places you said you found Geeksnarkese? It’s the official WineHQ thread for the game. That’s the first place I’d look for useable advice. (For instance: don’t try to run the game, via the command line switches available to the .EXE proper, under software rendering or OpenGL, as DirectX seems to run smoother.)

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=10515

What I men by Geeksnarkese is a linguistic and cultural phenomenon that at one time prevailed in Linux circles on the Internet (and elsewhere, in Windows fora and in Meatland as well) but is now, thankfully, less common. I’ll write about that some other time but there is a good chance you know what I mean. Anyway, it was impossible to figure out from them what was needed to get SimCity4 Deluxe to install, run, or run properly (though they claimed it could be done) because in Geeksnarkese one ends potentially helpful paragraphs with things like “… and I’ll let you figure that part out on your own” and substitutes key instructions with phrases like “… just set up your media drive to emulate a file in the correct path and adjust the permissions accordingly…”

This is still extremely common, outside the specific context of computers. In fact, a vast majority of advice or instructions about “acceptable” social behavior or conversation consists of nothing but.

“Virtual box would require me to install Windows, which would require me owning a copy of Windows.”

D’oh! I’d forgotten about that little snag. The copy I put on the Mac was actually provided by the IT folks here, so licensing wasn’t an issue.

I can’t even remember why we put it on in the first place. That’s how often I’ve booted it. I know it had something to do with being able to run OSX simultaneously, so Boot Camp was out of the question – probably it was due to the way people keep sending me MS Publisher files and asking me to turn them into decent documents via InDesign or Illustrator. (There’s no Publisher for Mac, and there probably won’t ever be.)

On the plus side, VB runs Linux extremely well.

Many years ago in the first flush of system emulators, I was talking with a friend about how fun (bizarre) it would be to stack emulators, just for giggles. That is, install VB on a Mac, run Windows on it; install VB on the emulated Windows and put Lin on that, then install VB on the Lin and put OSX on there. Of course, we didn’t have VB then. Or, for that matter, OSX.

Someday, if I have lots and lots and lots of free time on my hands, I might try it just to see if it causes a local disruption of the continuum and actually creates the Infinite Improbability Drive.

Also, there are equivalents to OEM issues on Linux. Playing DVDs is of questionable legality, depending on where you are and/or where the distributor is. Considering you’re US based, it’s pretty much in the illegal bit, except for distributions that have paid for the license.

So last year about this time I bought a copy of Windows. It did not come with a key. Therefore it could not be installed.

Feeling fairly bad about shelling out dollars to Microsoft for absolutely nothing again, I decided not to do that for a while.

The last time before that I installed Windows, soon after, I upgraded the video card and the hard drive and the license was abrogated on the assumption that I was installing it on another machine. I had to call Microsoft to get them to reinstate it.

With that kind of track record I’m not too interested in messing around with installing Windows. I have an old out of date Windows install on an old out of date Computer, and that runs the occasional piece of software that I need to run.

But in truth I will probably have to go the Virtual box route eventually. I do have it … I run Freedos on it.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

I’ve found it overall to be easier to set up and get running than WINE, though I haven’t done any game playing on it at all.

It is also a commercial version of Wine, but is specifically geared towards games. I didn’t look in their list of supported games for SC4, but I remember quite a few SIM games being on the list last time I checked.