So the old Civilization 4 won’t run on Catalina because it’s 32 bit. But I’ve set up a Parallels VM on Catalina. Installed a fresh High Sierra there and then used MA to copy back from an old HS clone I had lying around. All of that worked beautifully, only problem is Civ4 simply won’t run. On boot it displays a cryptic error message about DirectX. I tried moving my old Civ prefs folder so the app was forced to start from defaults, but that didn’t fix it. I tried increasing the VM’s screen resolution to make sure Civ had enough space to work with, but no dice either. Anybody have an idea what might be going wrong here?
So apparently Parallels cannot do graphics accelerated apps for virtualized macOS. They’re blaming it on Apple’s lack of API support. Details here (as per their support).
I wonder if the situation would be any different with VMware. I’ll see if I they have a free trial.
I wanted to try out a free trial of VMWare’s Fusion, but unfortunately the default guest OS partition is 40 GB which isn’t enough to install HS and migrate back my user data from clone. I was able to give it 200 GB but when I used the guest Disk Utility I couldn’t resize the partition to exploit the full 200 GB. I’m giving up for now.