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Category: Main Games Simulation Games The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection

The Sims 2

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Digital version available via the EA App (formally Origin)

Application Details:

Version: Ultimate Collection
License: Retail
URL: https://www.ea.com/en-gb/games...
Votes: 1
Latest Rating: Garbage
Latest Wine Version Tested: 8.11-staging

Maintainers: About Maintainership

Link Archived EA Help article about this release

Test Results

Old test results
The test results you have selected are very old and may not represent the current state of Wine.
Selected Test Results

What works

The game launches... but that's about it.

What does not

The game is unplayable due to massive amounts of graphical glitches.

The game does not run in full screen (at least not in a GNOME Wayland session), only in an 800x600 undecorated window stuck in the top-left corner of the screen.

Workarounds

DXVK (which wraps DirectX to Vulkan) makes the game run flawlessly, however many older GPUs do not support DXVK. I also tried dgVoodoo2 (which wraps Direct3D 9 to Direct3D 11 rather than to Vulkan) but it seemed to have no effect.

What was not tested

I didn't test the Create A Sim mode.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

  • GPU: Intel
  • Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Tested using the official winehq-staging packages, not Ubuntu's packages. Intel HD Graphics 6000.

selected in Test Results table below
Operating systemTest dateWine versionInstalls?Runs?Used
Workaround?
RatingSubmitter
CurrentUbuntu 23.04 "Lunar" (+ variants like Kubuntu)Jul 06 20238.11-stagingYes Yes YesGarbageMA 
ShowPop!_OS 22.04Apr 23 20238.6Yes No NoGarbageAliaksandr Makash 
ShowUbuntu 19.10 "Eoan" (+ variants like Kubuntu)Feb 09 20205.1-stagingYes Yes YesSilverEmyn 
ShowManjaro LinuxDec 27 20194.21-stagingYes Yes YesSilverAlec153 
ShowUbuntu 16.04 "Xenial" amd64 (+ variants like Kubuntu)Nov 28 20172.21-stagingYes No YesGarbageAlexandr Oleynikov 

Known Bugs

Bug # Description Status Resolution Other apps affected
8051 The Sims 2 demo needs support for software vertex processing STAGED View

Show all bugs

HowTo / Notes

Other ways to run The Sims 2

This game does not run under regular Wine. The game crashes with D3DERR_INVALIDCALL because The Sims 2 requests 1024 vertex shader constants, but Wine has a hardcoded limit of 256. Direct3D 9 normally supports up to 8192, using hardware shaders first (where available), followed by software emulation. Software emulation is not currently supported in Wine.

Wine Staging helps improve the situation, but may result in an unstable gameplay as reflected in test reports.

Below documents some third party solutions, which cannot be submitted as test reports here.


1. DXVK

If you have a Vulkan-enabled graphic card, install dxvk through Winetricks and enjoy a fully playable experience without much (if any) glitches specific to Wine. DXVK is a Direct3D to Vulkan translation layer.

Note that Steam's Proton includes DXVK, which may work too.


2. Lutris

Lutris is a platform for installing games in a unified interface on Linux, an installer is available for this game.


3. Manually patching Wine

There is an old repository that documents patches and glitches for an older (now unsupported) version of Wine:

https://github.com/lah7/sims2-wine-patches

Technical analysis of The Sims 2 under Wine

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_bug.cgi?id=8051


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 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 for patched versions!

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" for regular Wine until the missing undocumented shader interfaces are implemented.

Comments

The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. WineHQ is not responsible for what they say.

Rename to "EA App Version"
by Shy Zedaka on Monday December 18th 2023, 4:47
This should likely be renamed to "EA App" Version i think. (and retested)
For the game to work it depends on EA app to work properly.
since Origin was replaced with EA App.
RE: Rename to
by Shy Zedaka on Monday December 18th 2023, 4:49
i meant to change the description!
it's still The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection.
RE: Rename to
by Luke Horwell on Monday December 18th 2023, 8:24
Thanks for the suggestion. Description updated.
RE: Rename to
by Shy Zedaka on Monday December 18th 2023, 9:32
Thanks a lot!
D3DERR_INVALIDCALL - How to fix this?
by Nicky on Wednesday March 25th 2020, 6:30
Hi need help with Sims 2 Ultimate Collections. Thanks for any help. Please do pm me at [email protected]
RE: D3DERR_INVALIDCALL - How to fix this?
by Alexandr Oleynikov on Wednesday March 25th 2020, 16:50
Use DXVK. You can install it with winetricks (it has a verb for it called `dxvk`).
Note that you need Vulkan support for it.
Game only moves when I scroll
by Katherine Williams on Monday October 24th 2016, 9:18
i have patched Wine and Sims2 starts. I can open my game and everything. However the game is frozen unless I scroll in game. even tooltips only show up when i hover over an area and then quickly move to the edge of the screen to scroll. Otherwise the game will appear frozen, then jump in time the moment i scroll. Does anyone know what causes this and what i can do to change it?
RE: Game only moves when I scroll
by Luke Horwell on Monday October 24th 2016, 12:55
I noticed this behaviour too, but it happened on rare occasions. I have an NVIDIA graphics card, in case certain graphic drivers may be causing that "ghostly" glitch.

For me, it "just worked" eventually by tweaking the graphic settings, changing the resolution, deleting the save data or just restarting the game. I don't know why it does this - newer patches of the base game (or by installing EPs) seem to have a different rendering engine from the original release, so it doesn't happen in later versions.
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