How to play Micropolis on Mac

Game summary

If you’re unfamiliar with the original SimCity, don’t panic – it’s not that complicated. You need to build roads, power infrastructure and zone lots. Do well and people will move into your city, do poorly and they’ll abandon it, leaving you with no revenue and a lot of useless roads to maintain (similar to some actual cities, actually). It’s a game about balance above all else. The fun of the game comes from keeping everything running – revenue, crime, transportation, entertainment. Help prod the city to growth, and remember, you need more police stations than you think. You can also help growth by adjusting the budget. There’s not a lot of control – at least, not compared to modern incarnations – but it’s interesting to see what effect tweaking things can have. Raise taxes and people will leave, lower taxes and you won’t be able to fund anything. As mentioned earlier, you can also play various scenarios. I enjoyed the layout of Hamburg – it roughly corresponds to the real city – until it was bombed to oblivion.

Play Micropolis on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Micropolis on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Micropolis installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Micropolis like you would on any PC.
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