The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection Crashing When Selecting Neighborhood

Kiri - The noCD exe you linked to, does it have and/or need the 4gb fix from here?

Kiri and BO - Thank you so much for explaining where to get a good texture memory number from. I thought for my card it would be 22504 based on its specs but you helped me double check whether I was looking in the right place. Turns out I need *dedicated* video memory and mine is 6144 according to NVidia panel or maybe 6052 according to dxdiag.

I want to follow this thread since it seems similar to problems I've been experiencing but when I click Watch I get the error that it's a feature for people who are signed in. I am signed in so I'm puzzled by this. I should probably start a new thread to ask about my issues though.

Thank you both so much for all the help you give folks.

I’m sorry for how long my thread/post has become - I didn’t mean for it to carry on so long like this!

I wanted to ask if anyone has reported these issues while using the CDs? I ask because I retired my CDs when TS2UC was available on Origin and they’re in storage. However, they’re easily retrievable and as much as I’d rather have the Origin version fixed, I’d also like to not take up so much of everyone’s time here. It probably will turn up with the same issues but I wanted to ask if it was even worth trying?

@pixelchixel Don't worry about how long it takes. You do not have to apologize for that. You can't help it if it just refuses to work. I'm sorry that so far we've been unsuccessful in helping you fix it.

I have no Win10, no Origin, and no TS2UC. I'm still playing the CD/DVD version of TS2 on Win7, and I will continue to do so as long as it continues to work!
I don't know if the disc version will work as well on Win10, though. But if I were in your place, I would at least TRY!

@pixelchixel - I have Windows 10, Origin UC, and an NVidia card. I don't know if my issues are the same as yours, could be totally different, but I do have a thread here and more current one at MTS about the issues. The only thing I have found so far that has helped with crashes, by making them take longer to occur, not actually stopping them, is following the graphics driver clean reinstall instructions in the video Kiri linked to here. Sorry if I got confused and you don't have NVidia.

I suggest testing a very vanilla game with no CC whatsoever, no CEP even, although that doesn't break things, nothing. Take your old Sims folder from Documents, move it somewhere safe. That's your entire EA Games/The SimsTM 2 Ultimate Collection folder from Documents. The game will regenerate a new game data folder in Documents. Once you get things fixed up, you can put your play folder back in, get rid of the test folder. If your issues are due to CC, testing a vanilla game should get rid of them.

I test in 800x600 resolution. I can get higher resolution just fine using the great instructions at Leefish but I want to make sure the crashes are NOT due to higher resolution before I increase resolution. The only thing that's not vanilla about my game when testing is I use sgr files from here, with slight tweaks, and I added -w and -CPUCount:1 to my shortcut. I run in admin mode and XP sp2 compatibility mode. Others recommend Windows 8 compatiblity. Neither has prevented crashes for me but hopefully your issues are different from mine and will get resolved.

Alright everyone - slightly new problem!

So after using the 4gb fix that CatOfEvilGenius linked the crashing is persisting...but is now only when attempting to go to community lots. I'm also getting very horrible pink flashing if I add any CC (and just a bit when there's none at all), which isn't the end of the world but I thought I'd mention that also.

Thank you so much @BoilingOil for your response. I really do appreciate all your help here and thank you for telling me how you play because I was actually curious! If that works for you I may try that myself since the problem is persisting, albeit in a much less obnoxious way.

When I have the time I'll be sure to dig out those CDs and hopefully that'll be an upgrade from the way things are right now.

Edit: Thank you so much CatOfEvilGenius for linking that very helpful video and sharing that info! I completely forgot to address that.

Ahh, thank you so much everyone. Even if the problem isn’t completely solved yet I can finally see the sims again and that’s something I really did miss!

@BoilingOil - I wish I still had my old XP machine where Sims worked beautifully. Lost it years ago to a head crash. Lost my Win 7 machine to a head crash after that. Wishing your Sims rig long life! Wish I knew how to clone disks, might have been handy. I'm almost tempted to try running Sims on vmware XP but not frustrated enough yet to install from disks and then hunt for old patches.

@pixelchixel - You may be interested in gwynne's thread in this forum about UC and Windows 10 update versions and NVidia. Some combo of those is breaking things for several simmers, and breaking games in general for some people, from mid-January or so.

@CatOfEvilGeniu I've used Clonezilla live to copy the boot disk from my previous computer to the one I'm using now. And since both the old and new systems were running off an SSD drive, the entire copying process took not even 5 minutes. Of course, because the hardware in both machines was rather different, I had to update all the drivers at the first boot-up, but after some 20 minutes it was as if nothing had changed at all.

You simply download this tool (only 312 MB) and put it on a thumb drive (or USB stick, if you prefer that phrase). When you boot the PC from that thumb drive, it allows you to make an image of any harddrive partition, and write that image to another drive of equal or larger size. It can also skip the image-making and directly copy from the source disk to the target disk.

The linked page contains links to all the info you need to make it work.

There is no need to hunt for all the patches. There are web pages that contain ALL of them in a convenient list. Or I could send you an archive that contains all the patches that I saved on an external drive.

@BoilingOil - Thank you for the link to Clonezilla and now that you mention it, I do recall that the community did collect all the patches. I have a link to them now.

You're most welcome, @CatOfEvilGeniu. It was hardly an effort on my part

Hi everyone!

I thought I'd check in and give a bit of an update.

First off, I haven't gotten a chance to install the CDs just yet but I do have them all rounded up so that time will come soon.
Next, thank you @CatOfEvilGeniu so much for tagging me in that post about the recent findings from Epi7's thread. It seems to have helped quite a bit with the crashes but the pink flashing and some severe lag is still an issue it seems. I've also been lurking periodically to catch up on all the threads here with the similar issues + any progress being made. I myself haven't made much if any at all alone recently which is why I guess I've been quiet.

With that being said, I'll try the CDs soon and hopefully be back to let everyone know how that goes! I've been in touch with EA help (their "advanced" troubleshooting department, in quotes because I don't think that was the right word/term) for a few weeks now and we haven't really gotten anywhere noteworthy - though I now have a way to completely remove Origin + TS2UC from my computer which I think I'll do before installing the CDs so that Origin won't mess with that for now.

Anyway, thank you all for your help again and I hope this CD test turns out well!