#codeweavers crossover

After about a year of dithering about this, I reinstalled Sims 3 1.67 from scratch the pirate way, with some tips from @ktarsims.

(I find it darkly amusing that I’m installing an illegally cracked version of software that I own legally but can’t install because EA wiped the pre-Origin digital installers from the Internet. I’m pretty sure that’s not actually piracy. LOL.)

I have a weird setup, though, because I’m a Mac user. I run Windows 10 in a virtual machine using Parallels, and I run Sims 3 from there. I’ve been doing that since about 2011, since the official Mac version of the game never even got a long addresses upgrade. I’m proud of my setup. I use Smooth Patch and frame rate limiting and NRaas -- I have my game running pretty snappy for Sims 3, much faster and more reliably than it did when it was actually in EA’s support window.

The problem is that I’m running a 2019 Macbook Pro, and that’s the absolute last Mac release to have an Intel processor. Parallels now supports a Windows virtual machine for Apple Silicon, but you can’t port over an existing machine built on an Intel device. If I ever want to upgrade my machine, I have to reinstall from scratch, and I *can’t* do that an stay on 1.67. I figured I’d have to just go on to 1.70, which is hardly the end of the world. I just don’t want to do it.

At any rate, as an experiment, I just installed the entire Games4theWorld archive on a “wine bottle” using CodeWeavers Crossover, just to see if it would work.

Hoooooooly crap.

Not only does it work, it runs about 4x faster and completely smoothly!

Even my medieval save with its laundry list of mods and cc!

With the entire store installed!

It doesn’t even have Smooth Patch!

Or the menu sort fix!

(I’m guessing that Crossover might do something with frame rate.)

Moreover, the colors are more vibrant.

I don’t know what to say. OK, maybe I do. I can’t stop talking.

The only stupid downside is that I don’t seem to be able to run windowed mode at 4:3 aspect ratio, which is what I have always done because the size of screenshots everywhere is pretty much determined by their width. The only value I get for screenshotting widescreen is that my pics are smaller. The game is capable of running at that aspect ratio, but Options only offers me the ability to select screen resolutions that match the aspect ratio of my actual monitor, which is 10:6. I wonder if there’s some way to edit options.ini to make it do what I want. Probably. I’ll have to play.

But seriously. I have to PLAY for a while.

Please, Watcher of Watchers, let it be as stable as it looked in my tests. Don’t taunt me and then make everything crash. Pleeeeeease.

I have to guess that there’s something in wine that is not behaving exactly is it should under some really obscure circumstance. Maybe it’s all interaction with store objects.

FWIW, the behavior seems to be the same whether I use the G4tW cracked store stuff or normally-installed Sims3Packs downloaded from the store. I forgot that I’d already installed all that stuff when I was testing out the Original 64-bit game for Mac, so it was just sitting there in my Documents folder to test with. 😆.

My Crossover/wine Sims 3 setup has great performance, yes, but at least when playing my heavily-modded medieval save, it’s just not stable.