[Pre?Release] Official Sims 1 for Linux aka (Mandrake Gaming Edition)

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Drathian

New Member
A long time ago in gaming history, the first attempt was made to make linux gaming friendly edition using Mandrake Linux (RPM based). A company by the name of Cedega formerly a winex flavor of the winehq project was utilized to make a semi sandbox sims 1 installation for the original game no expansions. AFAIK its pretty rare and hard to get to work on modern linux distributions. The main problem is of course getting winex edition that it came with installed (since it uses old core system libaries that are not supposed to be downgradable). Then the task is an offline activation of the executable (decyrpts it to universal format) and with that stripped exe sims 1 can work on even modern linux, and windows as well I tested it before.

There was an attempt to keep the code changes that allowed this software to work, a development package by the name gametreelinux was made, that had a repository, of all of the winex, cedega, versions, unfortunately no longer works, and I lost my only source copies of it years ago. But I still have the runtime that works the sims 1 and mandrake linux winex etc..... though!

There is more information about the sims 1 for linux this here:
https://www.holarse-linuxgaming.de/wiki/sims_linux

The updates rpms were saved in the above website here (note they are useless without the main files):

http://files.holarse-linuxgaming.de/native/Spiele/The Sims for Linux/

The History was referenced here (sorry none for sale that I know of):
https://www.amazon.com/Pearson-Software-Mandrake-Gaming-Edition/dp/B00005S0HY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedega_(software)

Anyways I was so excited for the sims online to come back I thought this a perfect time to share this relic with the community as it is very hard to find, doubt it will help the development of a sims 1 full modern compatability layer mentioned in these forums as they can't use copyrighted code (they are smart developers). But it will be a nice fun treat, anyhow.

Note, I probably can't share the files here as they are copyrighted code albeit more like way abandonware at this point. Unless metioned otherwise It'll probably be found at that yo yo yo hey, place in the net *wink wink*, or posibly that really bad deviloidish one; All depends on when I have time to re-extract the exe, I need to reinstall my virtual machine software, make a mandrake virtual machine, update it, and update the game and winex, extract the exe and the data and format it in a way that modern day wine can use it. Sad thing is I had this all done, before months ago, but a partition corruption on an raid5 drive made that gone. So give me a few days to a week and I'll repost here when davey jones locker is spotted etc. ;)
 
Cool, I never knew they tried this. I've heard that The Sims 1 still doesn't quite work in standard Wine, and obviously it would be nice to have it working on non-x86 architectures too, so I'll probably author a re-implementation of the TS1 engine based on our current codebase at some point.
 
UPDATE: I was able to circumvent the copy protection of the cd (some weird varient of safedisk) and make an unprotected ISO, extract all the files, set up for a modern install, but. My main problem is getting this working with newever versions of linux. The newest one I tried that worked was Mandriva 2006 and that is quite old so i'm going to keep testing. I fear it is an incompatbility with glibc libraries which are system core libraries but I'm not 100% on that yet. Going to test with Mageia 3 at some point, my tests on Mageia 5 aren't working right now.

For those that are linux unaware:

Linux is an operating system (alternative to windows like macos is) based on an older one called UNIX, in the first few years of linux many companies fought over releasing their own standard, there are a few flavors, red hat linux was the easiest to use for people transitioning from windows, it held archives in runtime packages called RPMs. It eventually morphed into first Mandrake, then Mandriva, now Mageia. Ubuntu and most other debian linuxes including darwin linux codename for MacOSX, use the debian package format. To switch from rpm to deb, or vice version usually extraction is required or use of a program called alien. But the programs should still be usable if the libraries on the system are close enough and the architecture is the same (x86 vs x64, arm, arm64, mips etc)....

Its really still not for novices, its a pain to set up, but once its working its gold compared to windows. Like MacOS there are some gaming features that are behind however (like anything involving directx 9+ or 7-, or 3d/vr hardware.

I attempted to get the sims 2 working in wine (Windows compatability layer thingy insecure sandbox for linux), on the development mailing list I pushed up a patch using git that allowed it to at least launch, they mostly ignored me however saying that they shouldn't have to change to broken code to get something to work or some crap like that (what the hell is wine then anyways haha :p ).
 
I'm not surprised that gaming on Linux never took off, even with Steam making it a bit better place. You can't just build it, ship it and trash it, which I guess was an approach people sometimes took. You mostly can't even run a binary that was built a few years ago on a newer distro. It's not that bad with open source software - which is what most people are using on Linux anyway - since you can have some obscure CPU architecture or whatever and just recompile everything (been there!). But I can't imagine some big names packaging their closed software for all the major distros, also different versions of them cause they're mostly incompatible anyway. That's not something you would do with games, at least back then.
 
I can't seem to get it to run on anything past Mandriva 2006, The only difference between Mandriva 2006 and 2007+ that might be the issue was the change from XFree86 to Xorg display server. As the manual says it requires XFree86, it might be the issue. I'm going to try a few more things then go ahead and share this in a few more days.
 
I always liked this game the best of any of the series. My plan is to build a dedicated machine just to run this game. Can the expansion packs be added to the Linux version?
 
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