As part of my effort to learn more about this stuff I slaved the Zecutime Social dining chair from the base game to Jonesi's bed blanket (for which I have a ton of recolors). I also did another office-y chair with is part of the "loft" set (not sure of the in-game name right now). The Zecutime chair is fairly ideal for this because the fabric texture is basically a square block with minimal shading, so that blankets with a nice texture to them actually are something of an improvement. (The other one is less ideal because of the mapping but it still looks really good with some of the recolors.)

And...I FINALLY got it to work. YAY! As far as I can tell, there are no problems.

But...I am having a hard time figuring out what my cloned slave objects are compatible with. They are both based on base game objects, so in theory there is no reason for them to require any expansion packs. But I have Double Deluxe and half of my expansion packs came as parts of sets, so SimPE has a hard time recognizing them properly and I cannot simply uncheck them under the "File Table" (when I try unchecking everything but the base game under advanced options...I can no longer load any objects at all).

So...what configurations do these work for? And how do I tell? (I'm afraid to try the AnyGameStarter to test after reading the part of the description that says that if you have collections later than Double Deluxe it may cause problems.) I wasn't sure which was the right place to ask about this so I picked this forum because it seemed like more of a technical sort of thing. (And also, thank you for bearing with my excessively wordy explanation...)

They will require whatever the latest EP is ticked in SimPE. From what I can tell DD contains Base+NL+Celebration stuff. Celebration stuff runs on the OFB game engine. Looking at your objects though, they also reference Pets.

Not having the collections I'm not sure of the install directory, but you should be able to select in the file table in SimPE the location that your game is installed.

Thank you so much for looking into this for me! And also for confirming my suspicion that the files were not doing what I wanted.

Finally, after much slow and boring clicking of check boxes (it wouldn't be so bad if you could just click-click-click, but instead it's more like click-PAUSE-click-PAUSE-click-PAUSE), I have managed to get SimPE to load just the base game files. This involved figuring out that SimPE will only load the base game object location if you only have the base game...OR if you tell it to open it for, say Apartment Life. Aha! That almost even makes sense now.

I cloned another object, did absolutely nothing to it (except change the GUID in case that is necessary), and attached it to this post. Other than being completely pointless, does THIS ONE work?

Yep that one works (tested in my base AGS).

The whole click-PAUSE thing is why I use three different versions of SimPE. One for just base (.68), one for changing up EPs(.72 - this one doesn't need to pause), and the newest for all EPs(.74).

AWESOME! Thank you so much! (Now to make cloned versions of base game objects that actually do something...)

Are there any special precautions you need to take to run multiple versions of SimPE or do you just install multiple versions?