The Sims 2

What works

Installer

What does not

Launch of game gives an error: "Direct3D returned an error: D3DERR_INVALIDCALL! The application will now terminate"

Workarounds

What was not tested

Playing game because of not able to launch

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Hopefully someone will eventually find away to fix this and able to run it under wine.

Simply install DXVK (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk) into your prefix using winetricks 

winetricks dxvk

and any version of Sims 2 will be fully playable without any glitches whatsoever!

Note that DXVK requires Vulkan-compatible graphics and fresh graphics drivers (at the time of writing this note, it was version 440.64 of Nvidia's proprietary driver and Mesa 20.0).

While still far from perfect and prone to unexpected crashes (dependent on hardware), it is possible to run The Sims 2 under Wine.

The infamous D3DERR_INVALIDCALL error is due to the fact Wine is hardcoded to supply 256 vertex shaders instead of 1024 that The Sims 2 demands. By patching this constraint, as well as providing "dummy" code for unimplemented shader interfaces, enables the game to play to surprising results.

Acknowledgements

A thank you goes to swswine for initially discovering the game's major unimplemented undocumented shader interface and for writing the patch to demonstrate this in bug report 8051. Further contributors include Robert Walker, Alexandr Oleynikov and Paul Gofman.

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_b...

Option A: Obtain a patched version of Wine

The following GitHub repository maintains the latest Wine source release with the patches to enable The Sims 2 to start. Compiled binaries can be downloaded for use with a 32-bit wine prefix (which could be used with front-ends like PlayOnLinux). Known graphical issues and build instructions for building from source are also documented:

https://github.com/lah7/sims-2...

Option B: Lutris

Lutris is a platform for installing games in a unified interface on Linux, an installer is available for this game: https://lutris.net/games/the-s...

Graphical Glitches Inevitable!

While the patch enables the game to play fairly well (dependant on hardware), there may be issues including:

• Family thumbnails rendering red "t-pose" Sims.
• Some skin tones look lighter on the character’s head skin tone than the rest of their body.
• Icons above sim head (like when a Sim gains a new friend) can cause a temporary polygon explosion.
• Changing resolution mid game in household mode can sometimes result in a black screen.

Do not submit test reports!

Please do not submit test results here as this is a hack to get the game running. Continue to submit tests for vanilla Wine or wine-staging (as long as this is explicitly stated), but it seems unlikely we'll see improvements from "Garbage" until the hardcoded limit is raised and there is a solution to adding the missing undocumented shader interface.