Boring Introduction
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The Sims was one of the old web's greatest pop-culture phenomena. From the very first announcement all the way up until release in late 2000, the Net was building hype for the game along with custom content websites. Just like how The Sims 2 Body Shop and The Sims 4 Create-a-Sim preceded the release of their respective games by weeks or months, Maxis put out The Sims HomeCrafter and SimShow several weeks ahead of the game, which allowed fans to create stuff for the game before they could even buy it in a store; HomeCrafter for walls and floors, SimShow for sims. People took these and ran with them, creating fansites with downloads sections. And then, the game was released, and Maxis's official project page turned into a full website, which included story integration with the game's built-in Photo Album feature. While originally intended to take snapshots of sims' lives, somewhat like people do with their own personal cameras, the Photo Album was soon adopted by story writers as a kind of visual novel generator. Of course, you could upload your households to the Story Exchange alongside the story they featured in. Doing this would upload several things to the Maxis servergroup: house, lot position, household data (namely the names, astrosigns, and portraits of everyone in the household, as well as the vital statistics about the house), custom roof textures, custom walls, custom floors, custom head meshes and skins, and custom body meshes and skins. Suddenly, a secondary effect of the Story Exchange emerged: an ad-hoc free custom content site. Of course, the administrators discouraged using the Exchange in this manner, but it truly was the easiest way to pack lots of custom content into a single upload. Not like it was a fast process, as the internet of the time tended to use 56k dialup or the slightly faster cable alternative, but people did it.
That's really what made The Sims stand out from the crowd. Others had attempted virtual dollhouses as far back as the Atari 800, but Will Wright added the ability of users to customise their creations. People were suddenly able to explore parts of their imaginations that they hadn't had an outlet for, even with the best Super NES platforming game and Game Genie code. You could propose to your high-school sweetheart, own the largest house in the gated community, and watch Osama bin Laden burn to death in a kitchen fire. You could make ESPers straight out of manga, be a benevolent god and provide for your children on SimEarth, or just build a replica of your own house and live in it while you were living in it. What Bob Ross said about painting was possible with The Sims.
While The Sims began a franchise that has lasted all the way up to the present day—The Sims 4 For Rent having just been released last week at the time of writing—there was an ineffable quality to the first game that has yet to be recaptured. With each passing generation, the games become more realistic, but realism was never really the point of the game. Perhaps it is the relative obliviousness of the sims, themselves; having no memories, no tastes, no real motivations beyond their 8 basic Needs. The player's own imagination moved a story along that did not exist. While The Sims 2, 3, and 4 all make their own inferences and create a story for the player to either engage with or ignore, The Sims (shall we say, The Sims 1) made no attempt to create a story of its own, being reliant upon the player to supply one.
Another thing happened in the intervening time that no one without a background in business trend analysis could have foreseen: Games as a Service. Suddenly, it was no longer adequate to pay for a game once and use it forever; now the giant corporate videogame publishers could apply arbitrary rules as to who was allowed to play what games and impose conditions for continued use. Artificial obsolescence became the norm as companies began sunsetting support for particular use cases based upon something as insignificant as what model graphics card they had installed. Where it worked yesterday, it no longer works today. The Sims 1 is of particular interest for people who want to spark their imaginations, but are not willing to voluntarily install adware onto their computer in the form of launcher software, insofar as the game was never released ephemerally. GOG? No. Steam? No. EA Desktop? No. Nintendo Switch Online? No. Absolutely nowhere but physical CD-ROM installer discs. While Microsoft tried to limit access to The Sims 1, alongside a veritable used game store's worth of other PC games, by nuking support for the Safedisc copy-protection system, technical specialists have found ways around all the roadblocks that corporate gaming has placed in the way. Not the least of which is releasing a No-CD crack of The Sims Complete Collection. So, let's get started, shall we?
Windows 7/8/10/11
The Sims Complete Collection No-CD crack
dgVoodoo2 (Windows 11 only)
As far as the computer setup necessary to run this? The Sims is a 23-year-old game. Your computer already exceeds the maximum system requirements. However, if the game or any modding tools you want to use throws an error message about some long-lost DLL or OCX, just search that up on DDG. It's likely to be some kind of DirectX or Visual BASIC runtime that Microsoft didn't think Windows needed anymore.
Optional: Getting around the Safedisc nuke
If you're lucky enough to have purchased an actual copy of The Sims Complete Collection at the new Walmart Supercenter on the edge of town one day in 2006, you can still use that instead of the no-CD crack. We just need to take a second to get around the Safedisc nuke. If you're using Windows 10 or 11, or you don't have a physical copy of the game, skip this section; these instructions are only for disc owners with legacy machines.
Windows XP.
Remember that completely unprompted security definition update that Microsoft issued for Windows XP out of the blue one day in 2015, after support for that system ended in 2009? That was Safedisc getting shut off. In this case, you can completely disable the update that made that happen by going into your Windows Update History, locating KB3086255, and uninstalling it. It'll take a while, and it may look like the computer has crashed at certain points in time, but it will permanently remove Microsoft's block and allow you to play The Sims.
Windows 7 & 8.
The least amount of work will need to be done here, since the base driver is still present in the System32 folder. Open an elevated instance of the Command Prompt and simply type some instructions.
sc config secdrv start = demand
sc start secdrv
This will give you control over when SafeDisc is allowed to run. Now that you've gotten SafeDisc turned back on, you can go ahead and install and play the game. When you're finished with it, reopen the elevated Command Prompt and enter...
sc stop secdrv
...to terminate SafeDisc again. If you forget to do this, Windows will do it automatically when you power-cycle your computer. To run The Sims again, repeat the process. If, for whatever reason, these instructions don't work, the Windows XP instructions will work perfectly well instead.
1. Installing the No-CD crack.
Download this RAR file from the Internet Archive and use 7Zip or WinRAR to extract its contents to some location on your computer. Perhaps a folder in your Documents directory called "The Sims 1 install files". Run the file contained in the Setup folder called setup.exe. Don't confuse it with the similarly-named file in the root directory, "start.exe", which is the CD-ROM autoplay and will not do anything useful here. Setup.exe will begin the game's actual installation process. When prompted to input a serial code, enter EQMV-73XB-F8J4-GSLX-4M67. Don't bother to change the install location. By default, it will install to C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\The Sims, which is exactly where we need it to go.
When setup is complete, do not launch the game! The downloaded RAR file contained a folder called "The Sims Crack", which contained a separate "Sims.exe" file. Open the directory the game just installed into, then drag the "Sims.exe" file from The Sims Crack into it. Don't delete the "Sims.exe" that installed into this folder, just overwrite it with the cracked one.
Troubleshooting "Access Denied" errors.
If Windows isn't letting you do this, you're probably not logged in as an administrator, or your user account doesn't have the necessary permissions. Microsoft treats its users like idiots, so to give yourself the correct permissions, do the following...
Step 1: Go back out to Program Files (x86) and right-click on the Maxis folder. Under "Properties", select the "Security" tab.
Step 2: Scroll through the list in the Security tab until you find "Users (computer name)". "(computer name)" obviously being whatever you named your computer during initial setup of Windows; so, in my case, it would be "Users (TVR547-G)". Click on it, then on "Edit".
Step 3: In the new popup, select "Users (computer name)" and check the box next to "Full Control".
2. Installing dgVoodoo2.
If you're installing the No-CD crack onto a legacy machine, you will not need to deal with this step. However, on Windows 11 and certain versions of Windows 10, you will need a program called dgVoodoo2 to make the game compatible with your graphics processor. In the downloaded ZIP file, extract the file called dgVoodooCPL.exe and all DLL files from MS\x86 into The Sims's file directory.
Run dgVoodooCPL.exe. Click the DirectX tab and, under "Videocard", select dgVoodoo Virtual 3D Accelerated Card. Under "Miscellanneous" (sic.), uncheck the box next to dgVoodoo Watermark. That one isn't strictly necessary, but it removes the annoying watermark from the emulated screen.
3. Compatibility Mode.
Right-click Sims.exe and select "Properties". Under the "Compatibility" tab, check the box next to Run this program in compatibility mode for:, then select "Windows XP Service Pack 2" and check the box next to Run this program as an administrator. Also, if you foresee wanting to take screenshots of your game beyond just the JPEGs that the game can generate with the Photo Album, check the box next to Disable desktop composition. This will disable Aero effects on Windows 7 and will cause a delay when switching from The Sims to any other running program, but it will allow you to grab the screen with the PrtSc key. Click OK to save your changes, then launch the game to verify that it works.
Troubleshooting common issues.
Troubleshooting "Catastrophic Error" message.
Oh, Microsoft sure have a flair for the dramatic, don't they? There is a small chance of encountering an error message about a "Catastrophic Error" at this stage, but this is due to a small issue with the InstallShield files. First, in the Folder Options (Open a folder\Tools\Folder Options...), make sure there is a check mark next to Show hidden files, folders, and drives. Then, in Program Files (x86), go to the newly-unhidden InstallShield Installation Information. There may be several folders in here with unhelpful alphanumeric names, but open them all to find the one that says,
AppName=The Sims Complete
...then delete the folder you found it in. Not so catastrophic after all.
Troubleshooting graphics issues.
If, while playing, you encounter graphical glitching or inexplicable low framerates on Fullscreen mode, play the game in Windowed mode. This can be done by appending an instruction to your shortcut target...
-r1024x768 -w
...which sets the resolution to 1024x768 and windows the game screen. If your native screen resolution is only 1366x768, you might prefer setting the game screen resolution to 800x600 instead, since the bottom 30 pixels will be forced offscreen by the window heading.
Troubleshooting The Sims Creator.
Unfortunately, the No-CD crack only extends to the main game, not its most celebrated customisation tool, The Sims Creator. This program will still search for the other half of Safedisc, provided by Disc 1 of the original compilation, when you try to run it. Since it won't find anything, it will throw an error message about inserting Disc 1 into the drive and will quit. Even if you had a Disc 1 ISO mounted to a virtual drive, its anti-piracy function has been forbidden by Microsoft, so there is no way known to me at this time of getting The Sims Creator to run on Windows 10 or 11. If you're interested in skin and head design, you'll have to use SimShow and GIMP like it's 2000 again.
Acknowledgements
This guide was adapted from Corylea's guide on r/thesims and Beyond Sims. Screenshots were taken by me, badgraph1csghost. CC in "Mimi's House" screenshot by SimSisters. CC in "Pool Hall" screenshot also by me.
Special thanks to doomboom93 on the Internet Archive for cracking The Sims Complete Collection when EA won't even give it the time of day anymore.
--15 December 2023--