The Sims Deluxe Edition: Sound Problem

[Glaanieboy]

I have a sound problem with the Sims: Deluxe Edition. I installed the game as usual, tried starting it, and the game crashed as soon as it entered the neighbourhood. To make a long story short, I disabled the sound by using the -nosound switch and it worked. I updated my drivers (version 5.12.1.5017 is what I use now), reverted back from DirectX 9 to DirectX 8.1. Also I updated the Sims with the official patch.
I looked around the internet, and I found that more people were having my kind of problems, but I did not find a solution.
I did not install any thirdparty addons, only the game it self.

Specs:
Soundblaster 4.1 digital using drivers version 5.12.1.5017
DirectX 8.1

I already e-mailed EA support, see below:

E-mail from EA Technical Support
Discussion Thread
---------------------------------------------------------------
Response (Box Karl D.) - 01/31/2003 06:57 PM
Have you downloaded any items for your game off the Internet? If so, I'd first suggest going to our website, click on the ""Get Cool Stuff"" link, then go to ""Make Cool Stuff"". Download and install the Sim File Cop application. This will help resolve 60% of most download related issues. Otherwise, you will need to contact those websites for assistance with placing the items you have downloaded. This is because these items are not designed by Maxis, but by third party. There is no guarantee that those items will work or what effect it will have on the game.

If not, try editing the shortcut to The Sims. To create a shortcut, Right-click on the desktop, choose New, Shortcut, browse to The Sims folder. (Usually C:\program files\maxis\the sims\sims.exe) Choose next and finish the shortcut. Right-click on the new shortcut and choose properties. Go to Shortcut, and the Target Line should be highlighted. Add the following switches to the end of the line: -nodx6 -skip_verify -w

(Ex: ""C:\. \the sims\thesims.exe"" -nodx6 -skip_verify -w )

As a last resort use the -nosound switch to disable the game sound.

...

Customer - 01/31/2003 10:02 AM
When clicking the shortcut for running the game, performs all the usual things, but when switching from loading screen to the house selectscreen (initial screen at startup), the game crashes to desktop. I have installed the latest patch, installed WHQL compatible drivers for both my videocard (Geforce 3 ti200, Driver version 40.72) and my soundcard (Soundblaster 4.1 digital, Driver version 5.12.1.2065). I also tried running the game in safemode, using the -skip_verify switch. I ran the Sim Cop file utility and nothing strange came up. I reinstalled the game (and removed the leftover files with the Sim fileremover utility), but that did not help.



Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts Technical Support.

Karl D.

 

[Jewelzz]

If you sign up there is a message board you can post your problem there. My daughter has used it several times with problems she's had with The Sims. She's always gotten an answer and alwasy been helped.

http://www.ea.com/eagames/main/news/messageboards.jsp?src=11hmenav3mb11textnone

 

[Jewelzz]

Found this over on their site:

I was crashing after the loading screen, about a second after the neighborhood screen would show up, and went nuts trying to find a fix. I did get the game to work, sort of, and here's how. I'm hoping this will be of help to others, and maybe get some word from the Maxis folks as to what significance this has..

First off, I'm running WinXP on a P3 1GHz, 512MB Ram, tons of free HD space on two drives, Sound Blaster Audigy w/latest drivers from Creative's website as of 9/29/02 (I started with a Live!, installing the Audigy made no changes to the Sims situation), and a GeForce 4 Ti4600 running the .3082 drivers.

I had The Sims Deluxe, House Party, and Unleashed installed with no add-ons when this started. As the first troubleshooting step, I removed everything, ran the eraser off the Unleashed disk, and just put in Deluxe. The same thing happened.

Per the Maxis/EA troubleshooting database, I disabled all background apps (and used msconfig to kill startup apps just in case), made sure all my drivers were up to date, made sure sound and video passed DXDiag tests, ran FileCop, and tried a modified command line (-w -nodx6 -skip_verify, I think that was it..). None of those made any difference. Finally, I tried the -nosound option on the command line. This allowed me to play, granted I had no sound, but this was a step forward.

At this point I did everything I could think of to troubleshoot my sound card situation. I work tech for a video game company, so I was pretty confident in my ability, though for the same reason I know it was reasonable to think I could have missed something. I even used it as an excuse to finally pick up the 5.1 compatible Audigy. Nothing I did made any changes to the situation, not even disabling the sound card in windows. Using -nosound was the only thing that allowed me to play, and with no sound.

At this point I dove into the Sims installation directory. The most obvious plan of attack was through the SoundData directory, so that's where I went. First, I removed everything but SoundData.far, just to see what would happen. To my surprise, the game ran! However, I still got no sound, even without the -nosound parameter. I played around a little bit in this directory, and narrowed my problem down to three files: simsound.HIT, simsound.hsm, and simsound.hot.

I openned all of them up in a text editor, and both the .hsm and the .hot were text files, apparently some kind of sound configuration. The .HIT was something else entirely, so I threw it back in SoundData and ran the game. The dang thing worked! And with sound! Well.. Most of the sound..

A little more experimenting and I determined that as long as I don't have simsound.hsm AND simsound.hot in the SoundData directory together, the game runs with sound. These files appear to contain similar information relating to things like TV channels, etc. It is worth noting also that while I was able to play, the TV was mute. There were probably other such sound anomolies that I didn't spot.

Since this discovery, I have been playing with one or the other of those files in the directory, and haven't noticed a difference between the two. The game runs perfectly fine other than those sound anomolies. The addition of Unleashed introduced a few crash bugs, though I'm not sure if they are related to the sound files at all as most of them have to do with Exploring Old Town.


So that's my (incredibly long) story. Hopefully this will be of use to someone, and maybe Maxis can shed some light on the apparently conflicting configuration file situation, or just fix it in the next patch. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

 

[Jewelzz]

An updated post by the same person as above:

I attempted to install the Unleashed patch today from TheSims.com and, after getting the patch complete message (whatever the exact wording was), found that all of the .exe files in the game directory had been completely deleted. I can't play, can't re-patch, etc. I'm going to need to install from scratch.

I really have no idea whether or not this has anything to do with modifying that sound file, but it is a possibility. I am thinking maybe that caused it to fail some kind of authenticity check or something, but I really have no idea. I will eventually try reinstalling and patching BEFORE I make any changes, and I will post with whether or not that fixes anything. If anyone who has tried this fix was able to patch Unleashed without problems, let me

Another follow up:

Just to follow up, I reinstalled Deluxe, House Party and Unleashed, and patched BEFORE modifying anything and was able to patch and play just fine. I still had to make the above changes before I could play, and I still have no idea if the modifications had anything to do with it or if my first patch download was just corrupt or something.

Hope these help you, good luck!

 

[Glaanieboy]

YIPPIEEEEE! I can now play the Sims normally! *hugs Jewelzz and her daughter* I did sign up for the forums, but I couldn't find anything. Can't believe I missed it.
I was already in an e-mail conversation with EA support (those guys are fast, I received a reply in 10 minutes!), I immediately send them an e-mail about this solution. I am waiting his answer right now.

 

[Jewelzz]

Heh, I did a search on "no sound". That was the 1st thing that came up. Glad it worked :happy:
I had to sign up to get it as my daughter doesn't remember her user name and password lol