my true calling
given that most of my job is software qa at this point, i guess it shouldn't surprise me that i refused to leave broke enough alone, and continued fiddling with SimCity 4 on my TiBook. And, as it happens, i managed to get it to work.
So, to anyone else with a PowerBook or a Radeon 9000 and having trouble, try the following. Go into the SC4 loadpoint, and look in 'SimCity 4 Data', and edit the file 'Video Cards.sgr'. Scroll down to the following line:
card 0x4966 "Radeon 9000 Pro"
...and change it to:
card 0x4c66 "Radeon 9000 Pro"
after that, it should work fine. i shit you not.
so maybe i was destined to do QA for a living. aw, fuck that...
just out of curiosity, what made you try that value?
The game starts up and leaves a log text file reporting how it configured the graphics settings. In there, it mentions what kind of graphics card it thinks you're using, in this case reporting "Device 4c66" among other things. Of course, i'd tried all kinds of other stuff before getting to that point; based on what i'd found, i think it was running in software graphics before.
I remember having to do something equally stupid to get Homeworld to run on one of the RPI thinkpads, at a Technopalace LAN-party. Instead of a config file, it was a bit of registry-hacking.
The moral of this story is that computers are stupid, computers shall forever remain stupid, and we should look for better career paths.