is can i play all of my games on mac?

I just answerred this question on another forum and it bears repeating here.

I have just finished testing the Mac version pretty thoroughly trying to resolves issues for Pets EP & other EPs/Stuff Packs. What I discovered is this: many meshes that have been made "bump-map enabled" may cause a crash of the Mac version, this is not a uniformly occuring bug and may deal more with video card drivers/extensions than anything else.

Another thing is the 12800 file limit, the Mac version can barely exceed that number of files in the downloads folder without a crash. The familiar problems of special characters and unicode characters in file names and long file names are still there, and with the Sims community being a world community, the chance of a Korean or Chinese character in the name is pretty high.

Display of some meshes is also problematic, many Mac users have reported a problem where the texture will not apply to the surface of the mesh or the fat/pregnancy morph of the mesh displays with an ugly grey texture even when not in use (I experienced this too in my testing).

Some hair truly unremarkable meshes will cause the Mac version to crash, and I am still figuring out why this occurs.

Then there are colour-binned hair recolours. Some of these work fine - others will cause a crash.

Whereas on a PC a duplicate mesh is more a nuisance than a fatal problem, it seems to always be a fatal error in the Mac version, and with Pets EP's version of Body Shop including meshes in the Sims2Packs, it is a hazardous thing to install any Sim made with that version of Body Shop.

Another consideration is that the game seems to not be affected by modifying the values in the max.proc, so one will additionally run out of resources and have rather crappy game performance no matter how you tweak the system.

As for hacks and mods. A good case example is InTEENimater. The InTEENimater depends on the various pieces loading into the game in a particular sequence. Much like extensions might run into problems if not in a particular order on the old MacOS (version 9 and earlier)

In Windows 98 systems using the FAT32 hard drive format, the issue seems to work based on the "write time" of the files to the hard drive. For a Windows 98, ME, or XP user with a FAT32 drive extracting the files one at a time in the order of their names generally works the trick to make it work.

In MacOS X it doesn't always work that way, and other techniques may be necessary - like renaming the files as one formerly did with extensions. There is no rhyme or reason to the way the game decided to load things in the Aspyr version that I have been able to determine. The people who have gotten the InTEENimater to work on Mac have generally tried many things and can't inform me which of the things they did made it work.

But my guess is extract the files one at a time in the order of their name, then delete the groups.cache and load the game - forcing the game to re-index the downloads. As I say, that is my best guess.

After all seeing many of these problems first hand, I am not really sure I would have bought the Mac version for anything other than compatability testing, it seems plagued by far more bugs than the PC version. I appreciate all the hard work that went into porting the game to Mac, but I do not think I can recommend it or any Mac version of a PC game.

If you are wanting to play games - it still looks like a PC is the way to go because of the minute differences that are all the difference between an Intel-based Mac and a PC. Opinions vary, but I won't lie to you or allow a religion based on Steve Jobs sway my opinion: I have cordially hated my Mac since MacOS X came out.

There was a time not so long ago that I could run all Windows software on my Macs without a glitch, but that was under MacOS 9 and earlier.