A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Macs | Hacker News Reader

A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Macs

github.com

171 pointssplatzone55 comments

After finding this guide I was able to play the game for the first time since my childhood. The nostalgia!

I know one of the key programmers behind The Sims 1, Don Hopkins, is a regular on HN. I hope he knows how much joy his work brought kids like me.

Here’s a video where Don demos an early build of the game: https://youtu.be/zC52jE60KjY

ZombieSims is a mind-blowing, brain-eating, tour de force Sims 1 fan expansion pack by two of the greatest Sims user created content artists and programmers: Heather "SimFreaks" (who created SimFreaks.com and much of the beautiful content for Sims 1 at http://www.simfreaks.com/index.php including themed play sets like http://www.simfreaks.com/themes/storytime/pirate/index.shtml ) and Steve "SimSlice" (who created SliceCity: SimCity within The Sims at http://simslice.com/Slicecity.htm by programming many interlocking objects in SimAntics, and also many other amazing Sims 1 objects like the weather machine at other cool stuff at http://www.simslice.com/Objects-Electronic.html ).

Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!

https://zombiesims.com/

Twitch streaming videos:

https://www.twitch.tv/simfreaks_heather/videos

Highlight: Zombie Sims - Beta - Everybody Dies

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1049524221

Check out some of the crazy menus that pop up -- this demo barely scratches the surface!

One thing that always fascinated me is how Maxis liked to push tools to create custom content for the game, and how content creation tools were even released before the game was released, to allow users to create content that they could use for the game when it was officially released.

When I was younger I spent a lot of time using your The Sims Transmogrifier tool, at the time I didn't know that the tool was created by one of The Sims 1's developers.

Will Wright even talked about the The Sims 1 modding community, and how it shaped the future of The Sims and its expansion packs: https://youtu.be/hLHnmRtqNno

This kind of custom content has always fascinated me.

Do you remember if there was a reason the Edith[0] tool didn’t ship with the original game? It seems like that would have encouraged some interesting mods and variations, by letting players change the interactions between objects in the game

[0]: http://simantics.wikidot.com/wiki:edith

Whoa, this just brought back memories I didn’t know existed. I definitely recognize simfreaks, and it brings to mind another content house called Seven Deadly Sims, which I cannot find anymore. Unfortunate because I remember them having a particularly cool landing page (for the early 00s that is).

Perhaps http://7deadlysims.com/

Damn I remember being 10 and downloading random items for my The Sims house! Thanks so much for the travel down memory lane Don, much love.

(In Professor Farnsworth's voice:) Good news everyone!

I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.

I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)

If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!

Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!

https://donhopkins.com/home/DonsSims1Downloads.zip

    cd ~/Downloads
    curl https://donhopkins.com/home/DonsSims1Downloads.zip > DonsSims1Downloads.zip
    cd ~/Applications/Wineskin/The\ Sims\ Complete\ Collection.app/Contents/SharedSupport/prefix/drive_c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Maxis/The\ Sims/
    unzip ~/Downloads/DonsSims1Downloads.zip
    A

Simprov Wedding Play Set: Demo of the Simprov Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks. Programming by Don Hopkins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwt5LJlrMe8

Speed Dating With Cupid: A demo of Speed Dating with Cupid, part of the SimProv Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Programming by Don Hopkins. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUP9OXmHTM

Transmogrify Self: A quick demo of The Sims Transmogrifier personified in The Sims 1. Graphics by SimBabes, programming by SimSlice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsTbs7IL5EI

To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!

Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.

The crowd sitter and the Dumbold voting machine are included in the collection. (Just kind of hard to find since there are so darn many objects!)

The Sims 1 Crowd Sitter

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-sims-1-crowd-sitter-1f478b...

Dumbold Voting Machine for The Sims 1

https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

These are amazing Don, thank you for sharing

Don, thank you! And please pass our thanks on to Heather as well!

Omg. My childhood is back. The Sims was one of my favorite games of all time. I would spend so many nights playing this game until 4 or 5am, using the free money cheat to trick out my houses and to set my Sims up in horrific situations. I would then have to be up to leave for school at 7:30am and try to explain to my mom why I was so tired, not dare telling her the real reason, lest she remove my PC from my bedroom.

I even used to use my miniDV camera and the FireWire card on my computer to capture game footage to edit it with funny voice overs and edits, similar to the style later known as Machinima. But it was the year 2000 and I didn’t know anyone else doing anything like that.

The subsequent games have been varying degrees of great or meh — Sims 2 was a disappointment to me and while it took me a while to embrace it, Sims 4 is pretty dope (I had very few complaints about Sims 3). But the first game, I remember reading a preview of it in Next Generation magazine in August of 1999 and getting a preorder at my local video game store that week. Six months later, I left school early to get it early.

I can’t wait to play this when I get back home tomorrow.

I found Sims 2 on PS2 very cool as a child because instead of a queue you had live control over the sim.

All the same nostalgia but for Sims 2.

It was really my daughter who played it with her friends and I got sucked in because I had to install the expansions and made sure it ran.

I mostly remember the godawful load times.

And woo-hooing the mail carrier with cheats.

Why was Sims 2 disappointing to you? I remember it being received well, and I loved that the Sims could finally age and die. I don't see many people who were disappointed in Sims 2 unlike 3 and 4.

They felt less and less sandboxed to me after a while. Like I don't remember Sims 2, but in The Sims 1 you could find a Genie lamp and become a millionaire instantly, and hire a robot butler to take care of the house tasks, simple stuff. Otherwise The Sims feels like a game that takes way more effort than life itself as you balance umpteenth things about your sims life. A lot of the fun was in making ridiculous homes.

Of course, other people play The Sims to live out saddistic gags like my cousins did, they would make "kill homes" as I call them, they would remove doors, windows, and food sources, and make them as miserable as inhumanely possible.

I used to do the murder houses! So much fun, especially in Sims 1, where a lot of that stuff was based on the hacks people found on the internet. My favorite was to invite a ton of people over to party and see how many of them I could kill in the pool (after removing the ladder) or by forcing them to use a cheap oven.

I would leave them in a room usually and remove all amenities. One crazy one was a friend who said his sim had a baby he didn't want to deal with, so he put walls around the baby, then when child services came to take the neglected baby, they kept walking around the walled structure.

Honestly, I might have confused Sims 2 and Sims 3 in my mind. One of them wouldn’t play well on my laptop at the time, and I thought it was Sims 2, but looking back, I think it was Sims 3. I will admit that some of the magic just wasn’t in the sequels for me, tho I did like that Sims could finally fuck in Sims 2 (it was Sims 2, right?) and I’ve definitely spent a lot of time with Sims 4 over the last six years.

Sims 3 ran terribly, that was one of the things that the community hated about it, so yeah, probably Sims 3. Also Sims 3 sims looked like potatoes and while Sims and Sims 2 still had some Maxis personality in them, Sims 3 was pretty stripped of that.

Sims could fuck in the Sims 1 (the heart bed debuted in the Sims 1 after all), but they didn't get pregnant or age.

Edit. I confused Sims 3 and Sims 2 in my brain. I had few complaints about Sims 2. Sims 3 was trash.

Something that I recommend to use if you plan to play The Sims 1 is to use this widescreen patcher: https://github.com/FaithBeam/Sims-1-Complete-Collection-Wide...

By default The Sims 1 supports only 800x600 or 1024x768, which is annoying since most monitors nowadays aren't 4:3.

There are ways to manually patch the Sims.exe by changing the file with a hex editor, however that causes video artifacts in the game (example: when opening the buy/build menu, the items in the list go outside of the UI) because the original UI images aren't resized to match your resolution. The widescreen patcher automatically patches and resizes those UI images for you.

It also installs DDrawCompat (or DGVoodoo2) for you, which is useful because vanilla The Sims 1 on Windows 10+ is choppy for some reason, using DDrawCompat or DGVoodoo2 fixes the choppiness issue.

So, am I the only one who spent 99% of his time playing in Buy/Build mode rather than actually 'playing' the game? I'm not sure the 'game' part of the game ever really appealed to me, but as a house designer, I kind of liked it.

Fun fact: The Sims was first designed as an architectural simulator with little human figures that could walk around the designed interior. They realised that people quite enjoyed playing with those, and turned the game into what it became. [0]

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/20...

I recently tried to run it but failed! I even considered making an old PC just to play that. Thanks for sharing this tutorial.

I never stopped listening to the build mode songs from this game, they are the best tracks to get me full nostalgia mode.

Oh my goodness, the soundtrack was insanely cool! It's still my go-to OST for programming! You just cannot have bad mood when listening to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=399YneFTwh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs5QGN-zhwM

Jerry Martin, Marc Ruso, and Kirk Casey!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Martin_(composer)

https://www.last.fm/music/Marc+Russo

https://soundcloud.com/kirk-casey

http://www.jerrymartinmusic.com/the_sims_g1.php

>The Sims: The music in The Sims is in a huge variety of styles. Most of it is kind of "tounge-in-cheek" and adds a lot of humor to the game.

How The Sims Made New-Age Jazz Piano the Soundtrack of Our Lives

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LpVUi9TQ8U

The Sims soundtrack is an iconic piece of video game music, and the build mode's minimalist new age jazz piano songs are undoubtedly among it's most famous tracks. We spoke to Jerry Martin, the composer of the soundtrack, to find out how and why new age jazz piano became the sound of The Sims.

Check out Jerry Martin's website to download mp3s of the build tracks, piano sheet music, and even original songs at:

https://boombamboom.com

The Untold Story of 'The Sims,' Your First Favorite Jazz Record

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qveqew/the-untold-story-of-t...

Music in The Sims

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Music_in_The_Sims

For as much as I love their work, I can’t believe it has never crossed my mind to look and see if these musicians have an online presence.

I’m so glad you’ve shared this and all the other links in this thread. You’ve definitely caused some fanmail to be generated today.

I’m not the only one! In addition to the base game I also have the tracks for the expansions as well. My programming playlist also has Sim City 4 and Streets of Sim City on it too.

I also like to listen to SimCopter’s soundtrack on YouTube from time to time. While I like listening to high fidelity audio in my main playlist, hearing the intense compression artifacts and the in-game advertisements makes me feel so nostalgic.

One of the motives that I tried to play piano was the Sims building music (:

I haven’t seem the words NoCD crack/patch in a loooong time

I hate online games that are unpatchable!

I felt so cool as a teenager knowing how to use DaemonTools and CloneCD

SAME! I was cleaning out an old laptop I found at my parent's house last month so it could be recycled (truly too old for anyone to do anything with and not unique enough to keep around as something for nostalgia) and after waiting an eternity for the slow as fuck HDD to spin to life, I was greeted by Windows XP and a bunch of memories, including DaemonTools and other ISO/cloning stuff. Truly took me back in time to high school.

I do not know why I needed this stuff on my mom's laptop, but I assume I was either installing pirated software on her machine (honestly, that is the most likely reason) or I was trying to troubleshoot stuff and her CD/ DVD drive wasn’t working for some reason. One thing is for certain, she did not put it there! I made her move to a Mac in 2009 or 2010 before I would do any more computer repair for her, so it was truly a blast from the past.

(Unrelated aside, my father refuses to use a Mac and if I gave him a Linux laptop, he’d literally just go buy something overpriced and covered in adware at Best Buy and get scammed into some antivirus subscription, so I begrudgingly had to start agreeing to service his laptop again after he fell for a ransomware scam the second time, not to mention the fact that I got a job at Microsoft sort of made my “no Windows tech support” rule feel wrong (even tho I worked on Linux at Microsoft and had a corporate-issued Mac.) Thankfully, Windows is much easier for me to deal with these days and I’ve set up his machine so I can ssh into it remotely if I have to. )

This is great. I very recently looked into getting the Sims 2 and found this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UT0HX3cO4xLft2KozGypU_N7...

Still working on getting it (or a similar release) working in a Wineskin for macOS. But it works great on Windows 10.

Thanks for the link!

Been nostalgic for this game recently and will report success or failures getting this working here. Thank you for sharing this!

Was able to get this working, and I needed to apply the widescreen patch as well. Lower resolutions work best.

Sims 1 has the best soundtrack of all time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=399YneFTwh0&list=PL28035C530...

thank you, I have forgotten this tune!

I think its fantastic that people go to such lengths to keep old titles like this playable on newer hardware.

I was never a big fan of The Sims, but I loved SimCity, and I was very into with SimCopter for a year or two.

Myself on windows I simply run a windows xp virtual machine using VMware workstation. Simpler and flawless, at least compared to using wine or running it natively on windows 10.

Why would that work on M1/M2 macs? Rosetta isn't mentioned, only Wine, which isn't an emulator... What am I missing?

Rosetta is transparent right? So macOS would start Rosetta to translate amd64 Wine into ARM, and then Wine would be translating the Windows ABI into something macOS can handle.

Oh, that transparency would be new. But a behaviour like that would be ideal. I do not have a copy of the Sims to try it thou...

I do, but my M2 Max machine is still in the mail, I'll report back when I get it.

Working fine on M2 Max :)

Yep this is how it works, Rosetta has supported it since day 1 (for both 32- and 64-bit Intel code, important since The Sims is a 32-but app)

So the guide consists of using Wine, just like you would for any other game. What is the interesting bit here? I was quite disappointed with this article, was hoping for some insight in game internals.

The news for me was that it's possible to run the game in WINE in the first place, it's been possible since 2019 I believe. Previously I thought I'd have to get an old Windows XP machine running to play this again!

Too bad EA cease and desisted the open source reimplementation, Simitone.

According to [1] "EA only demanded us not to port the game on mobile devices"; that's the only thing I could find anyway.

It's still on GitHub: https://github.com/riperiperi/Simitone

Looks like the main dev mostly moved on to https://github.com/riperiperi/FreeSO

[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/Simitone/status/12027483512272691...

While yes, EA did let them continue the project, after EA's request the project has slowed down considerably.

And about FreeSO: FreeSO is a The Sims Online reimplementation. The Sims Online is an improved version of The Sims 1's engine. Due to the similarities, riperiperi decided to make a The Sims 1 reimplementation based off FreeSO's engine, with support for mobile devices.

And besides, in theory EA couldn't even request that: The engine is a clean room implementation, the implementation doesn't use any of the original game assets.

A guide on how to use wine? Okay.

More to it than that but good job only reading the first few lines

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