The Sims 2

What works

Nothing due to installation failure

What does not

did not make it past initial origin install, failed completely.

Workarounds

What was not tested

everything past clicking "download" in origin

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Nvidia GTX 660 Videocard running the official 346 binary driver Latest Xubuntu 15.04 "Devel" release Latest origin installed from website (game installation was tried with and without the network "patch" needed to download files)

With this new and updated workaround, The Sims 2 can work fairly well (depends on hardware configuration) without any crashes and bugs that make the game unplayable.

The patch used in this tutorial is pretty much the same as in previous notes except for some changes made in order to accommodate to differences in wine code.

The games still has some issues:

• Family thumbnails from household selection menu/during loading screens are corrupted in Origin 2009 version (they are mostly fine in 2008 release).
• Character’s head skin tone looks a bit lighter than on the rest of their body.
• Changing resolution mid game in household mode can sometimes result in a black screen.

The game was tested with a 3.7 GHz CPU with NVIDIA GTX 570 graphics card using Ubuntu 18.04 with proprietary nvidia-390 drivers from https://launchpad.net/~graphic.... Except for the issues described above, none were discovered during many hours of playing.

Here's a video showing the game in action (under patched 2.21 wine):

• Origin EP9 2009 Version: https://youtu.be/LKzsKu76yok

Before you start: These steps are provided as-is. Patches may stop working with newer versions of Wine, and please do not submit any test results as this is not a true reflection of vanilla Wine or wine-staging.

Instructions

1) Grab the latest source (confirmed to work with 3.7, not tested with 3.8 and newer) for Wine from:

http://dl.winehq.org/wine/sour...

It is also recommended to install either wine-staging or wine-devel from repository to have all necessary dependencies. The instructions are available here:

https://www.winehq.org/downloa...

2) Download comment 161's patch (from bug report #8051) from https://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=61321&action=diff and save as a .diff file. Or download from comment 159 for 2.21.

3) If you wish to use Origin version, you need to use wine with applied staging patches from https://github.com/wine-stagin... in order to successfully install Origin client. It won’t work with vanilla version.

4) After staging patches were applied (optional), open the directory where source (wine-xxxx/) is located, then open the terminal and patch:

$ mv wine-xxxx/ a/

$ patch -p0 < the_patch.diff

5) Enter the directory (./a) to configure and make Wine. I used a 32-bit distro in a virtual machine to save the hassle with 64-bit setups:

$ ./configure

$ make -j4  (change 4 to your number of cores to speed up compiling)

6) To install the game from disk/to launch Origin installer in terminal run:

$ env WINEPREFIX=/path_to_where_you_want_your_sims2_wine_prefix_to_be/ /path_to_folder_with_wine_you_have_compiled_earlier/wine explorer

and navigate to launch the installer.

7) After the game has been installed (to activate Play button in Origin, run repair in the game’s menu), run it for the first time to create game files, then exit.

• If you install the game from disk, you may need to get NoCD executable and replace the original one with it.

8) To fix “kraken” issue (https://i.redd.it/9mjz5zi42d20...), open your Documents directory, locate “EA Games” folder, open “The Sims 2” folder and then inside it in “Config” folder create a userstartup.cheat file and open it with a text editing program. Type in:

boolprop useshaders true

and then save. Or you can just replace all mentions of useshaders false in Graphics Rules file to *useshaders true", that works too.

9) Have fun playing the game!

Want it precompiled instead?

If you're impatient, pre-compiled builds with the staging patches and sims2 patches applied are available at

https://yadi.sk/d/h_2-ia-o3VLz... (wine 3.7 compiled under 32-bit Ubuntu 18.04)

https://yadi.sk/d/MpPQN3eE3QSA... (wine 2.21 compiled under 32-bit Ubuntu 16.04 but)

Adjust your settings accordingly

To prevent the resolution messing up the desktop, a virtual desktop (configured in winecfg) or a -w in game’s launch arguments may be essential, but it may work fine without one.

Acknowledgements

A thank you goes to swswine for discovering the game's major unimplemented undocumented shader interface and for writing the patch to demonstrate, and to Peter Beutner for finding a fix to make the patch work again with newer versions of wine and describing a workaround for “kraken” issue.

And again, 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.

The notes for applying a patch to get the game to play only works for Wine 1.9.6 or older.

The game is broken and will not start in Wine 1.9.7 or newer builds - with or without a patch.

While still far from perfect and prone to unexpected crashes (dependent on hardware), The Sims 2 can work fairly well if you possess later expansion/stuff packs that can update the base game as close to © 2008 as possible.

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

There are still some glitches, such as:

• Sims' portraits turning red to their T pose (in the neighbourhood screen) after saving. 
• Changing appearance can result in a darker skin tone in the portraits.
• Glitched animations or rendering.

The game's rendering (lighting?) engine has also changed significantly from it's initial release in 2004, meaning that the latest base game version (EP9, © 2008) plays a lot better then the original base game and earlier expansion packs.

Here's some videos showing the game in action:

• Base Only - 08/17/2004 Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-pFDlEtnC0
• EP9 - 10/11/2008 Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9rZPdNLd6I
• Another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzO4t-5TKhU

Before you start: These steps are provided as-is. Patches may stop working with newer versions of Wine, and please do not submit any test results as this is not a true reflection of vanilla Wine or wine-staging.

Instructions

1) Grab the latest source (confirmed to work with 1.8-rc2 to 1.9) for Wine from: http://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/ 

2) Download comment 124's patch (from bug report) from http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=52904 and save as a .diff file. For details on what this patch does, see bug report #8051.

Note: This patch hardcodes the shader model to version 2. If you wish to test with SM3 using the registry keys, unpatch directx.c.

3) Open the terminal, cd to the root of the source (wine-xxxx/) and patch: 

$ mv wine-xxxx/ a/

$ patch -p0 < the_patch.diff 

4) Enter the directory to configure and make Wine. I used a 32-bit distro to save the hassle with 64-bit setups: 

$ ./configure 

$ make -j4  (change 4 to your number of cores to speed up compiling)

5) Install/start the game from the source directory:

$ env WINEPREFIX=/path/to/sims2_wine_prefix/ ./wine explorer 

Have fun!

Want it precompiled instead?

If you're impatient, a pre-compiled binary and source is available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/mna97xftkwfved0/wine-1.9.0-patched-sims2.tar.xz (except directx.c was unpatched so shader model versions can be set from the registry)

Adjust your settings accordingly

To prevent the resolution messing up the desktop or causing a crash, a virtual desktop may be essential, but it may work fine without one. When they say Wine can play games better then Windows. This might be true, the shadow bug caused by high settings is not present! (NVIDIA driver bug on Windows).

I also found the game to crash much less on a faster 3.7 GHz processor than at 2.7 GHz. Both ran adequately at both 1024x768 and 1920x1080 (1080p) resolutions.

Acknowledgements

A thank you goes to swswine for discovering the game's major unimplemented undocumented shader interface and for writing the patch to demonstrate.

Once again, 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.