The Sims 2

What works

Installer worked just fine without any issue at all.

Sims 2 Body Shop is Entirely Functional and Works fine (But models Do not render correctly)

Sims 2 Launcher Works. Takes a very long while to Load and Show up Though seems slightly Glitchy (Graphically) : Image

What does not

Family Thumbnails Appear broken. Sim Models Do not Render Properly. 

(Even with the workaround on The game) Sims 2 Body Shop still has Improper Rendering of Models. 

The in-game TV does not work correctly. Shows a black screen on top of it instead of video files. But i do not know if this might work or not on other systems.

According to Sims 2 On Lutris's GitHub it also says:

Changing resolution on public lots may result in a black screen. Avoid doing that and simply change it in the town mode. Icons above sim’s head (like the one you get for a new friend) cause temporary polygon explosion

I cannot Confirm the 1st One as i did not test that but it is easily avoidable.

But i also Cannot confirm the 2nd one as i did not test that either. but other icons like the positive/negative relationship impact icons did not cause a polygon explosion that i know of.

Workarounds

To fix these problems. you need to add a startup.cheat file in My Documents/EA Games/Sims 2/Config that turns on shaders for the game: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tannisroot/installer-fixes/master/userstartup.cheat or Manually create the file and insert 

boolprop useshaders true

What was not tested

i did not Test Going Downtown or other locations.

Or did not test some of the in-game cut scenes. 

Sims 2 Package installer was not Tested. 

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Overall. after those fixes the game did run pretty well. i was even able to install another expansion pack on top of it and it worked aswell. but these issues can be very annoying for a new user. not to mention some of these bugs i am not sure how to solve or if there is a workaround for them yet.

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.