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
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:
Additional Comments
Tested using the official winehq-staging packages, not Ubuntu's packages. Intel HD Graphics 6000.
Operating system | Test date | Wine version | Installs? | Runs? | Used Workaround? | Rating | Submitter | ||
Current | Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar" (+ variants like Kubuntu) | Jul 06 2023 | 8.11-staging | Yes | Yes | Yes | Garbage | MA | |
Show | Pop!_OS 22.04 | Apr 23 2023 | 8.6 | Yes | No | No | Garbage | Aliaksandr Makash | |
Show | Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan" (+ variants like Kubuntu) | Feb 09 2020 | 5.1-staging | Yes | Yes | Yes | Silver | Emyn | |
Show | Manjaro Linux | Dec 27 2019 | 4.21-staging | Yes | Yes | Yes | Silver | Alec153 | |
Show | Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial" amd64 (+ variants like Kubuntu) | Nov 28 2017 | 2.21-staging | Yes | No | Yes | Garbage | Alexandr Oleynikov |
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:
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:
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.
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. WineHQ is not responsible for what they say.
by Shy Zedaka on Monday December 18th 2023, 4:47
For the game to work it depends on EA app to work properly.
since Origin was replaced with EA App.
by Shy Zedaka on Monday December 18th 2023, 4:49
it's still The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection.
by Luke Horwell on Monday December 18th 2023, 8:24
by Shy Zedaka on Monday December 18th 2023, 9:32
by Nicky on Wednesday March 25th 2020, 6:30
by Alexandr Oleynikov on Wednesday March 25th 2020, 16:50
Note that you need Vulkan support for it.
by Katherine Williams on Monday October 24th 2016, 9:18
by Luke Horwell on Monday October 24th 2016, 12:55
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.