SimCity 4 - lag, pink and green boxes

[Raymie Humbert]

Hey, I just upgraded my host MacBook to a new computer (16" MBP with a Radeon 5500M GPU) and also updated to Virt. I have noticed when running SimCity 4 in my Windows 10 VM, mouse and keyboard input is very slow to be recognized, and I'm getting these flashing pink and green boxes on the left side of the screen. The input lag in particular makes SC4 quite hard to play.

The VM also lags to the point that MacOS will flag it as not responding. However, there are no issues when in Windows outside of SimCity 4.

Any suggestions? I'm attaching a screenshot to show the boxes, as well as zipped logs. Please let me know if there are any indications as to what might be causing the issue. There are also some kernel panics on startup but those seem to be an unrelated VB issue.

[mpack]

You have an 8 core host, I'm quite sure that the Win64 guest could benefit from having more than 1. I'd give it 2-4 (not more).

You have plenty of RAM too. I'd double the guest allocation to 4GB.

And make sure that the graphics controller is VBoxSVGA.

[Raymie Humbert]

The memory bump is reasonable (I just upgraded from an 8GB RAM system and SC4 can be patched to interact with up to 4GB RAM). SimCity 4, however, was released in 2003, a time when multicore systems were not common, and the incidence of crashes is notably increased on multicore systems or without the -CPUCount flag set to 1.

Yes, with the 6.1 upgrade I changed to VBoxSVGA.

This forum is quite stingy with attachments. I have a screencap with the pink and green boxes that appear on the side during SC4 here.

[mpack]

SimCity 4, however, was released in 2003, a time when multicore systems were not common

If you wanted the ideal environment for a 2003 Windows app then I would not have chosen Win10-64 as a base. I'd have chosen XP, which would have been the target at the time.

You need more than one core to run Win10-64bit with acceptable performance. Failure to do this will impact SimCity as it will every other app you run.

[Raymie Humbert]

I appreciate that, but it ran just fine on the previous machine. There seems to be something with graphics causing the additional trouble.

[mpack]

Your guess is as good as mine on the green and pink boxes. Obviously some kind of graphics glitch, either with VirtualBox or the host drivers. If you can describe a reproduceable fault with affects not restricted to SimCity then you could raise a BugTracker ticket to inform the devs.

Your original post raised two issues: graphics glitches and lag, I've concentrated on the latter. One final tip: if you have an app that crashes when it sees multiple cores then perhaps investigate setting the "processor affinity" for that app only to a single core. I thought this was done using the properties of a desktop shortcut, but I can't find it there. So, I'll let you do your own research.

[Raymie Humbert]

Your guess is as good as mine on the green and pink boxes. Obviously some kind of graphics glitch

Thanks! Turns out I have had two separate issues: I must have had the SC4 resolution too large, thus the boxes, but even with the boxes gone the mouse lag is still there in SC4 only (not while in the general environment).

perhaps investigate setting the "processor affinity" for that app only to a single core.

Yep, in SimCity 4 there is a -CPUCount:1 flag that I have set.