The Sims Complete Collection

[Blayer98]

Hi there, not sure where to post this so I’ve posted this in the wine issue section. I’ve noticed that SafeDisc seems to have issues depending on the version. I tried installing The Sims Complete Collection from my physical discs on my Steam Deck through Proton, which worked just fine, but launching the game didn’t, and the DRM doesn’t seem to work for some reason. Oddly, The Sims Creator that comes with Complete Collection works just fine. I noticed in both proton logs for each program I got the following error:

zwloaddriver failed to create driver “\registry\machine\system\currentcontrolset\services\secdrv”: c0000142

I also noticed that SecDrv.SYS from the cd did not get copied to “system32\drivers”, so I copied that file from the CD to the correct place and also altered the registry entry of the ImagePath to “drivers\SECDRV.SYS” (the original ImagePath had double backslashes) and the game then proceeded to launch as normal with the correct CDs in my external disc drive. This worked for both Superstar and Makin’ Magic in my testing, but this oddly has not worked for the Complete Collection…

I also want to say that I have not used any no-cd cracks and my copies of the game are legitimate physical copies.

[Blayer98]

I did notice that The Sims Creator’s log also has the “failed to create driver” message yet it works fine anyway despite that, which I’m confused on…

I noticed that in my Makin Magic install, the loaddll.build_module was able to find SECDRV.SYS and also load it according to the logs, and The Sims Creator was also able to find and load SECDRV.SYS.

For my Complete Collection install, The Sims Creator was able to run successfully, yet it still gave the “failed to create driver” message anyway, while the log for the main game also said that it was unable to create the driver, and also did not boot at all or display the splash screen while the disc is being checked, like how it worked in my Makin Magic install and also The Sims Creator. This is despite that SECDRV.SYS exists in system32/drivers/ in the prefix and also the SecDrv ImagePath in the registry entry was corrected to fix the double backslash issue.

There were also no differences between SecDrv’s entries in the registry entry for both Makin’ Magic and Complete Collection.

[Blayer98]

@kisak-valve Sorry for the tag, I’m positive that there has been a regression from a previous Proton version that has completely broken SafeDisc for The Sims Complete Collection. The Sims Superstar and Makin’ Magic’s SafeDisc versions work just fine on Proton Experimental for me.

I tried Proton Experimental, 9.0-2, 8.0-5, 7.0-6, all of which were not able to launch the game. The splash screen and the error popup simply did not show up whatsoever. However, once I switched to Proton 6.3-8, the splash screen showed up as expected telling me that the disc needed to be in the drive. (this is normal behaviour if you don’t have the disc in the drive which is what I was testing.)

The Sims Creator also works in Proton Experimental just fine, so it’s just the issue with SafeDisc on Complete Collection that has become broken since 6.3-8. Sadly, I don’t know what caused this issue, and I can’t submit a bug on winehq I believe since I’m using a Steam Deck.

Another thing that I noticed is that the SafeDisc for Complete Collection, thinks you’re using a debugger if you set the Windows version to Windows 98, or Windows ME when using Proton Experimental.

[kisak-valve]

Hello @Blayer98, please add PROTON_LOG=1 %command% to the game's launch options, reproduce the regression, and attach the generated $HOME/steam-$APPID.log to this issue report as a file. (Proton logs compress well if needed.) Also, please copy your system information from Steam (Steam -> Help -> System Information) and the contents of Steam Runtime Diagnostics from Steam (Steam -> Help -> Steam Runtime Diagnostics) and put it in a gist, then include a link to the gist in this issue report.

[Blayer98]

Oddly, I’ve noticed that switching to Proton 6.3-8 and then switching back to Proton Experimental fixes the issue with the game not launching on Experimental. But this is still a regression since you shouldn’t need to downgrade your Proton version to fix this sort of thing.

I'm just in the middle of getting Proton logs of both 6.3-8 and Experimental (without switching versions) and I’ll upload them here once I’m done :)

https://gist.github.com/Blayer98/ec74ad1b71335ab17a8c0b48a18ee3d2

SimsCC-Proton.zip

[Blayer98]

Just a quick note that I added the stuff you wanted in case you never saw the updated message. :)