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Top Secret Researcher
Original Poster
#1 Old 31st Mar 2020 at 4:28 AM
Default The Sims 2 on VirtualBox
When I first set out to do this, I thought I was the first. Well, after some more careful Google-ing, I was wrong, although it would seem that this was mentioned more than attempted.

A couple of days ago I installed a 64-bit version of Windows 7 into a VirtualBox virtual machine hoping to see if I could get it to run any old games. The Sims 2 was high on my list: I was hoping to find a way to install the game in a stable environment, free of Windows 10's update shenanigans breaking things and forcing me into disarray twice a year thanks to Microsoft's illogical update cadence (firing their entire Windows QA Team at the dawn of Windows 10 certainly helped things). Windows 7 is out of support, but that's okay - I can just keep the virtual machine disconnected from the Internet, and I'd never have to worry about updates. And if things turned out well, it meant that, in theory, macOS and Linux users could enjoy the game too! Aside from wasted time and a worn-out hard drive, there's no risk to playing around inside a virtual machine. If things blow up, your main system is unaffected.

I had high hopes... oh...



Oh... oh...



boolProp UseShaders false solved the flashing purple eyesore, but the game is still locked at the worst graphics settings, and the textures looked like a dog's dinner.



F

Turns out the game was not recognizing VirtualBox's own graphics adapter, which was supposed to allow for (experimental) Direct3D support that would allow 3D acceleration to be done on the host GPU (and not virtualized in software, which would be slow... yeah, a lot of technical jargon). I had a lot of head-scratching and anguish with trying to figure out solutions. Graphics Rules Maker did not help, and neither did trying to add VirtualBox's own special graphics adapter to the game's Video Cards.sgr file. Manual changes to Graphics Rules.sgr to try to force the game to not use software rendering were completely ignored, as if the game wasn't reading its own files. And the performance was terrible - I wasn't expecting stellar performance (it's a virtual machine, after all) but the sluggishness was definitely a consequence of software rendering, not the virtual machine.

I won't go into the gory details of what I did here. I did actually keep a journal of hypotheses, what I did to the game to try to get it to work, and the outcome of what happened. You can find it in this Google Doc. And this isn't a help thread (I just wanted to share with the community about my little adventure); I do have an active help thread on Leefish which you can comment on if you have any suggestions on how to get the game to work on VirtualBox. In any case, I hope that I have left at least some resources for anyone in the future who might be trying to do what I am trying to do.

Have any of you had experiences with trying to get the game to run on VirtualBox, or any other virtual machine software? Please do share them! With The Sims 2 seemingly becoming harder and harder to run on modern systems (quite frustrating, given how it's such a wonderful, timeless game), virtualization may someday be the only way of enjoying the game on a modern system for generations to come. Digital archivists, we're counting on you!
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#2 Old 31st Mar 2020 at 5:28 AM Last edited by HobbesED : 31st Mar 2020 at 6:00 AM.
I find this interesting. Many moons ago in a job nearly forgotten, I was in charge of making some of my company's applications run on MS App-V and we were also running VMware virtual machines.

At that time, I gave serious consideration to trying to run Sims2 on a (home) virtual machine. We're talking more than 10 years ago now. Back then the server/desktop cost for something robust enough was a bit prohibitive for me so I never did attempt it.

We also did run into issues at work where the software emulation of hardware devices just couldn't deliver the performance we needed. Memory we could allocate but for the heavier graphical applications, trying to get the display adaptors & graphics cards to cooperate enough in a VM to meet expectations was a great challenge. Some applications we just couldn't convert to run in a VM because of their hardware dependency.

I'll have to check over at Leefish and see what you've tried.

EDIT: Would trying to run the game in windowed mode (adding [blank]-w to the shortcut) possibly get you around the screen resolution issue? I seem to recall an issue where running fullscreen locked resolution at 800x600 but running windowed opened up more selectable resolution options.

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Scholar
#3 Old 31st Mar 2020 at 7:04 AM
Ooh, red flashing? That's a new one!
Mad Poster
#4 Old 31st Mar 2020 at 12:36 PM
It's technically possible to run TS2 on regular Windows 10, so perhaps try that first (if you're running Nvidia, a line in the GraphicRules seems to have fixed some of my biggest issues with pink-flashing, at least for now). It seems the biggest problems comes relate to how the game handles graphics card issues (if you have one of the newer graphic cards, you really do need to fix a bunch of things to make the game not flash in the colors of the rainbow... or is pink in the rainbow? Hmm... ).

I think the red flashing is due to direct shader issues, but I'm not sure. Pink seems to be more of a texture memory issue (made worse by shaders). The bad graphics and stuck at 800x600 are due to the game not recognizing your graphic card, so some VideoCards/GraphicRules editing seems to be in order.
Top Secret Researcher
Original Poster
#5 Old 31st Mar 2020 at 2:03 PM
Quote: Originally posted by HobbesED
Would trying to run the game in windowed mode (adding [blank]-w to the shortcut) possibly get you around the screen resolution issue? I seem to recall an issue where running fullscreen locked resolution at 800x600 but running windowed opened up more selectable resolution options.


The game was running in windowed mode in the VM using the -w shortcut trick. No go, alas.

Quote: Originally posted by simmer22
It's technically possible to run TS2 on regular Windows 10, so perhaps try that first (if you're running Nvidia, a line in the GraphicRules seems to have fixed some of my biggest issues with pink-flashing, at least for now). It seems the biggest problems comes relate to how the game handles graphics card issues (if you have one of the newer graphic cards, you really do need to fix a bunch of things to make the game not flash in the colors of the rainbow... or is pink in the rainbow? Hmm... ).

I think the red flashing is due to direct shader issues, but I'm not sure. Pink seems to be more of a texture memory issue (made worse by shaders). The bad graphics and stuck at 800x600 are due to the game not recognizing your graphic card, so some VideoCards/GraphicRules editing seems to be in order.


To clarify, the game does work fine on my host system, which runs Windows 10 and uses an Intel Graphics Card. I can get the game to run there no problem. Running the game in a virtual machine here was more of an experiment than a necessity (although, since Windows 10 is so volatile to older programs, having a virtual machine that won't be affected by Windows 10's update shenanigans would be nice, which was the point of this endeavour). The hardware is thus perfectly capable of running the game. The trick is running the game in VirtualBox. As a general rule, an operating system running in a virtual machine does not get direct access to all of the hardware on the computer the same way the main, host system does; instead, it needs to proxy through the virtual machine software that is running it. VirtualBox provides an optional extension for the guest OS called "Guest Additions" that, among other things, allows for 3D and 2D acceleration that uses the host system's resources and GPU rather than being processed in software (which would be slow). The guest OS will see this as a special, VirtualBox-made graphics adapter that the guest OS can use to perform hardware accelerated graphics rendering (it works for Windows Aero, which requires a GPU). The problem is that the game does not recognize VirtualBox's graphics adapter and thus continues to fall back on software rendering for 3D graphics (I've gotten 2D games to work perfectly fine in this kind of setup). Editing the Graphics Rules and the Video Cards sgr files, both manually and through the Graphics Rules Maker, did not work, as mentioned. That's the real puzzle.
Mad Poster
#6 Old 1st Apr 2020 at 4:48 PM
I'm intrigued by that "GrumpyLo..." icon on the desktop.

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Top Secret Researcher
Original Poster
#7 Old 1st Apr 2020 at 6:43 PM
Scholar
#8 Old 4th Apr 2020 at 9:16 AM
What I did was buy an entire machine just to play TS2...installed all the best graphics cards etc. I would have another monitor on the side with my regular computer and one for ts2.
Scholar
#9 Old 12th Apr 2020 at 4:26 PM
VM ware should give (theoretically) a better performance, though they have worse license. However for you private use it's not that big of the deal and you are using W10 seemingly, so...

Hows your overall performance (and native machine specs for comparisation)?


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Test Subject
#10 Old 3rd May 2020 at 6:03 AM Last edited by darth_kor : 3rd May 2020 at 8:51 PM.
The red flashing is a symptom of incompatible graphics card, it came with Pets. It does have to do with shaders.
There was a way to solve this issue but it's been years since I saw the tutorial and the website where I found it no longer exists.
I remember you had to change a file in the Res folder or something like that. It's been a long time since I've seen this.
The ugly blue water is due to lack of transform and lighting capabilities.
I run the game with an outdated Intel chip and at most I have lag and some graphic glitches like the blue water and flickering snow (GraphicsRules.sgr helps with this a bit).
Never seen the pink flashing before as far as I remember.

It will be difficult to have playable FPS, and your game will always look bad. I don't think there is a fix. Run 2D stuff instead. I believe The Sims 1 might work.

I never could run games using VMs, not even old Win95 stuff. For some reason, they wouldn't install properly or give out errors. There were few exceptions. I guess it was because I was too lazy to configure everything. I've had better luck using compatibility mode on Windows XP and 7, as well as DOSBox. Funny how things go.

I don't know nowadays, but back when I used to mess around with VMs, the graphics options were lacking to say the least so you couldn't run anything better than say, Oregon Trail II which had simple graphics.
Changing GraphicsRules.sgr will do nothing. It's like you have no graphics card, the game doesn't recognise the emulation.
You probably have a glitch where you get red hexagons when the household is loading. I had this in 2009 when I tried to run TS2 using my old computer with a 32 MB SIS (?) chipset.
Top Secret Researcher
Original Poster
#11 Old 5th May 2020 at 9:28 PM
Quote: Originally posted by ElaineNualla
VM ware should give (theoretically) a better performance, though they have worse license. However for you private use it's not that big of the deal and you are using W10 seemingly, so...

Hows your overall performance (and native machine specs for comparisation)?


I actually did try running the game in VMware; I didn't update this thread, but I did update the Leefish thread with the results. The game recognized the emulated hardware and was able to run outside of software rendering mode, so I could get acceptable performance. However, the terrain disappeared and didn't reappear until after I installed Seasons. Even with Seasons installed, the sky and the terrain outside of the lot doesn't load. Also, VMware itself was another story... I was not impressed with all the additional drivers and services it installed on my host machine. Compared to VirtualBox, it's quite loaded... and yet they still have the nerve to ask me to pay just to have features like snapshots--something VirtualBox offers for free.

My host machine has an Intel Core i5-6200U 2.3GHz, 12 GB of DDR3 RAM, 6205 MB of dynamic video memory on an Intel HD Graphics 520 card, and a 1 TB HDD. It runs the game with no issues aside from flashing green on curved pool edges. At the very least I know that my hardware is more than capable of running the game.
Field Researcher
#12 Old 7th Jun 2020 at 10:28 PM Last edited by Liza : 8th Jun 2020 at 10:20 PM.
Hello everyone.

The fact that you are trying to run the game in a virtual machine is wonderful. We are also working on this in the Russian Betahunters forum thread "The Sims 2 Development History" (https://thesims.cc/threads/istorija...i-sims-2.31582/) I want to show you our experiments related to running Sims 2 on a virtual machine. I advise you to start experimenting with the base game.


https://l-1-z-a.tumblr.com/post/186...rks-pretty-well

Proof that The Sims 2 base game works pretty well. You must use VMWARE in software mode, install Windows 2000.
Game running on VmWare Player 10 - a free software for end-user. Release year - 2012.
Game running on low-end PC - a 10 year old. A PC without hardware virtualization support, everything working on the ancient VmWare accelerator which have the same age as a TS2.
FPS:
On screenshot - 64 FPS.
In the house of Don, with one Don - 44 FPS.
In the house of Caliente with 4 Sims (sisters + Mortimer Goth with his son) - 37 FPS.
In a mall with 8 or 10 sims - 27-29 FPS.
On a modern machine, all this will work more faster.
Resolution can put whatever you want. Screen refresh rates you can choose between 60 Hz and 85 Hz. It was simply manually limited in a virtual machine for convenience.

More screenshots:
https://l-1-z-a.tumblr.com/post/186...-quality-source

https://l-1-z-a.tumblr.com/post/186...eenshots-source
These screenshots are proof that the base game is capable of displaying the hood decor on the lots, without EP and SP.
This was discovered when starting the game in VMware, in software mode using the guest video driver in the virtual machine.

https://l-1-z-a.tumblr.com/post/615...machine-without
Running the base game in a virtual machine without the support of virtualization hardware on a real computer. The performance of the game is at the level that would be on computers in 2005 or better. The reference point was taken on the platform based on the 4th Celeron on the Northwood core, 1 gig DDR266 with a GF 6200 graphics card. By the way, it was “overtaken” even without hardware virtualization support.
Source (RU): https://thesims.cc/posts/5719353

And like bonus:
Running The Sims: Life Stories on software and hardware mode using VMWARE and Windows 2000:
https://l-1-z-a.tumblr.com/post/187...on-software-and

The Sims 2 Beta Library
Russian Betahunters forum thread "The Sims 2 Development History" - without them, many secrets of the Sims 2 would not have been discovered and investigated.
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