[MadCat]

Hi everyone!

I recognize many of the names here from other sites, nice to see so many familiar faces :)

I'm trying to help my sister with her Sims 3 game. Unfortunately she has a Mac and I don't, so I don't have the knowledge I need to solve the issue she ran into. A Yahoo! Answers page of all things directed me here for help.

She's been running the game just fine for months on her Snow Leopard system. Earlier this week though she got Showtime and tried to install it, and that's when the problems started. When the game tried to patch it threw an error, telling her there was a problem with Expansion packs 5 and 6. She uninstalled and reinstalled, which allowed the game to patch fine, but now it won't run at all. She gets the launcher, but no game. She clicks on "play" and nothing happens.

We tried manually applying the 1.32 patch as it was the latest one I could find manual files for in Mac format. That didn't help, but the launcher did allow her to try patching back to 1.33. Installation of the 1.33 patch failed with an error again, this time implicating both the pets and showtime .exe files as having problems.

She's spent hours trying to fix this, uninstalling, reinstalling, trying different combinations of expansion packs and patch levels. No luck at all.

I forgot to ask about custom content in general, but she said she runs no mods at all just vanilla game + EPs and SPs

She is getting very frustrated, I hope someone has an idea of how she can fix this and get the game working again.

[Figwit]

Hi Uncle MadCat. I wondered if it was the real you but didn't like to say anything in case it wasn't. http://bearmtncreations4sims3.com/public/style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif

Unfortunately I have not run into this sort of problem myself but I do know that sometimes, when people uninstall, they don't remove the preferences and that can cause havoc with re-installations. BluebellFlora has some great instructions here:
http://bluebellflora...tall-on-a-mac-2
which hopefully will help her.

Good luck.

[Caspin]

If the problems started with Showtime, she might also have encountered some problems depending on how she patched. The bunch of patches released in rapid succession for Showtime seemed to cause some simmers problems. Crinrict has a page on her blog about it:

http://sims3.crinric...-the-issue.html

Unfortunately it is information that has been explored on a PC, so it may not necessarily be exactly the same for Macs, but it might be worth looking at.

I hope she gets it working, it's such a pain when this game goes wrong :(/>

[MadCat]

Thanks Figwit :)

She followed that tutorial last night. There were no files to delete in her preferences at all, so either the uninstaller got them this time around or the computer cleaned them up on its own. She installed the base game and let the launcher patch it up to 1.33. So far the game is launching fine and everything is working properly. Now she's going to slowly add the Expansions, patching and testing after each one. Keep your fingers crossed...

caspin, on 22 March 2012 - 09:58 AM, said:

If the problems started with Showtime, she might also have encountered some problems depending on how she patched. The bunch of patches released in rapid succession for Showtime seemed to cause some simmers problems.

The problems were definitely caused by one of the the patches, of that we are absolutely certain. What I think happened is that the patch process ran into an issue with the .exe files for Pets and Showtime. This issue has been seen elsewhere on both PC and Mac; I ran into reports of it several times while trying to find a solution. The most common fix for this bad .exe issue is to uninstall and reinstall, which seems to let the patch apply properly. She found this information on her own, but didn't realize that the uninstaller was not nuking everything that needed to be nuked. The uninstall was not clean and left debris in her preferences folder which prevented the new installation from running properly.

We're pretty sure we're dealing with a clean slate this time, so hopefully all goes well as she adds expansions back in :drinks:/>

[Figwit]

That's great. I hope the patching goes well for her now. http://bearmtncreations4sims3.com/public/style_emoticons/default/good.gif

[MadCat]

Well, it took a while, but she finally got the game up and running again. She ran into issues again when her computer failed to read two of the EP disks from her optical drive. Installing from a digital download bypassed the issue though so she's a happy simmer again. :yahoo:/>

[Figwit]

This game is not for the faint of heart especially on a Mac. http://bearmtncreations4sims3.com/public/style_emoticons/default/snicker2.gif I am pleased it worked for her MadCat. I hope she has smooth sailing from now on - or at least until the next patch.