Can't even startup on Mac

[blahedo]

I have a Mac Powerbook G4 (Titanium), 500MHz with (for now) 128MB of memory. I just installed civIII, but when I start it up, it bounces in the Dock for about five seconds, then the OS tells me: "The application Civilzation III has unexpectedly quit." I don't even get to the config screen.

This doesn't quite match any of the bugs listed on infogrames' site, although I did change my screen resolution to 1024x768 in case that was related. Didn't change anything.

I haven't installed any patches yet. I d/l'ed 1.21g, but when I started it up, it popped up the "Preparing to Install" message, and then it's been grinding the hard drive for the last twenty minutes or so. *sigh* In any case, it doesn't look like this was a problem that was supposed to solve.

Any ideas?

[blahedo]

Well, the patch installer just finished running (is it normal that it takes that long?), but the behaviour of the main app is unchanged (still fails immediately upon startup).

[blahedo]

Just thought to reboot, even though the installer didn't say to....

It didn't help.

sigh

[Sheik]

I know nothing about macs but can a mac have safedisk problems? If so it may be related to that.

[blahedo]

"safedisk" problems? What are those? It seems to be some sort of encryption system; what does that have to do with, well, anything?

[zulu9812]

safedisk is the CD Copy Protection system civ3 uses; it's also the Cd-check

[blahedo]

Update, in case anyone finds this thread: I called tech support, and they said that this really was the powerbook g4 bug---even though the system is able to handle standard resolutions, the mere existence of the others confuse civ3. The good news is, they (claim that they) are working on fixing it to go in the next patch.

[Jaybe]

Sounds to me that you don't have enough memory. In Mac OS 9 the Civ app itself wants more than 128MB. App requirements went up with 1.21. See the Read Me file.

[blahedo]

Ah. No, that's not it; the reason I said "(for now)" in my original post was that I actually had a 512MB DIMM sitting next to my computer waiting to be installed. I have since installed it---I'm now at 640MB of RAM (everybody knows that 640 megabytes is... oh nevermind)---and it affects the problem not at all.