They released the Super Collection on the Mac App Store which contains the first 6 EPs and the first 3 SPs. I believe that that's all the games that were ever released for Mac. It sucks that it's still 30$, but since I haven't been able to play TS2 since I switched to Mac 3 years ago, I'm really excited.

We didn't get the Ultimate Collection, but at least we got something

It is everything that was ever released for the Mac, and given you can't even install the old version without some work most people won't know about it's a good thing. It may even be a sign Aspyr is getting the porting rights to Sims 4. If I hadn't gone with a pirated version to replace my old install DVDs, I'd probably be buying this. May do it anyway.

(you have to get the Body Shop and Package Installer from Aspyr's web site, possibly because Aspyr couldn't "sandbox" them)

Couldn't you get the Ultimate Collection using Bootcamp on the Mac?

True but not everyone has Bootcamp on the Macs. I know I don't. Little disappointed that it doesn't come with Freetime, Apartment Life or the additional stuff packs but it's better than nothing. Now I won't have to use my mom's laptop to play UC. Debating whether or not I want to shell out $30 plus tax for it, though.

If I play the game with Intel HD Graphics 4000, do you think it will burn my computer? I meet the minimum requirements, but I think playing with integrated graphics is never a good idea..

I play with the integrated graphics on mine, actually Sims 2 looks substantially better on my desktop with the Intel GMA chipset than it does on the laptop with the ATI 7670 dedicated card.. Oddly my desktop has lower specs in other areas like the CPU speed, RAM, and hard drive space and Sims 2 still loads faster ,and works better than it does on the laptop with higher specs

It would mean getting a copy of windows and installing it, then rebooting every time I wanted to play. I have no desire to do that. The various windows emulators also require a copy of windows.

I haven't played TS2 since like 2006 when my brother scratched one of my discs, other than 10 minutes on a friend's computer a few years later. oh my god i'm so excited!
I never had Open for Business, Bon Voyage or the stuff packs (always seemed like a waste of money to me as a kid/teen) and I didn't play have pets for a long time because the disc got lost before I got a new computer at some point along the line so this is an amazing chance to explore things I never got to play.

Sooner or later, playing with integrated graphics willy fry your graphics card. Some people (like Deestar) are lucky and get a long time and good performance out of the integrated graphics. Other people right here on this very site have had things go sour the very first time they boot the game. It's a gamble on how lucky you get with the individual card in your machine. Since losing the gamble means buying a new machine, I don't recommend trying it.

I recently switched to playing in a BootCamp partition on my Mac, so if anyone has questions, I'll be happy to answer them... if you can trust someone who's gone over to the Dark Side.

Okay, just bought the Super Collection, even though it duplicate the original discs still sitting on a shelf 5 feet away. The first bad sign was that no "EA Games>The Sims 2 folder was created on installation and playing. I created them, including the Downloads folder. I added a few dozen of my favorite CC items -and they do not show up in game. Oddly, the CC that was part of a Sim I added does show up in game, but I have not yet been able to determine for sure where it is hiding. Anybody know how to get CC working in this new release?

This is Sim content - skins, makeup - that is not showing up, and yes, I enabled CC and restarted several times.

[QUOTE=Invid Fan]It is everything that was ever released for the Mac, and given you can't even install the old version without some work most people won't know about it's a good thing. It may even be a sign Aspyr is getting the porting rights to Sims 4. If I hadn't gone with a pirated version to replace my old install DVDs, I'd probably be buying this. May do it anyway.

Um, do you have a link to anyplace that offers instructions on how to install the original Sims 2 on Mavericks?

@rhimom You can't install Sims 2 on Mavericks. Sims 2 for Mac is not instantly compatible with anything past Snow Leopard, because that's when they stopped including Rosetta in the OS. (Rosetta was the program that let the newer OS talk to the very old game.) It is possible to force Sims 2 to work on Lion if you're willing to jump through hoops, but it won't work with Mountain Lion or Mavericks. You also can't fool the computer by putting a Snow Leopard partition on a Mountain Lion or higher machine. (That would be why I finally went over to the Dark Side. )

Did the sims 2 Super Collection even come with a folder?

I saw this on the App Store today and I thought it was exciting! I have all EPs and SPs and play it on my Mac through bootcamp, but for Mac users without bootcamp, this is a great option.

I don't understand why EA never released all of the EPs for Mac! Too lazy?? This is why I'm afraid to hold out for a Mac version of TS4 in case they eventually start leaving out EPs for Mac, so I prefer just getting them for PC and playing through bootcamp.

Because it's a Mac App Store application, and has to pass Apple's sandboxing requirements, it has to place its files in a particular location. That includes the user files, I'm afraid. But everything's still there, once you know where to look for it.

In the Finder, select Go, then Go to Folder..., and paste in the following location:

~/library/Containers/com.aspyr.sims2.appstore/Data/Library/Application Support/Aspyr/The Sims 2/

(You might want to go up a level and then drag that "The Sims 2" folder to the favourites bit of your Finder sidebar so you can get back to it easily in future.)

If it doesn't already exist, you'll need to create a Downloads folder. If you then put your custom content in that (and, obviously, enable it in game) it should show up.

You say you've added a Sim already - presumably through the Package Installer that Aspyr have made available on their site? The reason that'll be showing up and not everything else will be because it's already put its content in the right place for this version of the game to find.

Mac and PC programs speak different "languages". EA didn't do the programming for Mac -- they had a deal with Aspyr to port the game over. (Basically, to "translate" from the PC language to the Mac language.) The deal fell through for reasons unknown, which is why the whole set never made it over. For TS3, EA did the translation themselves, and from what I have heard, did a very poor job of it.

My theory is that EA was too cheap to pay to have it done right, which is why the deal with Aspyr fell through and why EA did it in-house for TS3. But that's just a theory.

Can anyone comment on the technical aspects of the App Store game? I'm curious if they made BV patches for it, as there never were any originally.

Can anyone help me. I installed some cc into my game and it won't show up. I enabled cc in the game and put it in the Downloads folder I don't know what i'm doing wrong. The cc i'm trying to install is an outfit and i have the mesh for it, so I have no clue what i'm doing wrong. Please someone help?

Let's try this again To install the original disks, you need to control-click on the install icon on your disks and select "show package contents". For University you would then click on "University.pkg", Seasons would be "Seasons.pkg," etc. This will install everything into your Sims folder, which you should be able to just drag into your applications folder from the Sims 2 disk. Do NOT try and run the game before installing the expansions, despite this being the way you had to do it initially. You can't run the original Sims 2 on an Intel Mac.

I make no guarantees on this working, as I did not try it on my original disks, but there's a good chance it will. Whether you search out a no-cd hack is up to you.

The Mac version was always a few months behind. I assume what happened was that after Apartment Life EA made the choice to do Sims 3 themselves, getting all the money, and since the Mac version of AL would be coming out uncomfortably close to the release of Sims 3 they pulled it away from Aspyr. This is why Aspyr is charging for this collection: they haven't made money from the Sims since then.

That could be, although Pets, Seasons, and Bon Voyage came out within a week of the PC version, and Free Time (which didn't get ported) came out almost a year before TS3. Macs are more expensive than PCs, so Mac users tend to have more money than PC users (not me personally , but in general), and since simmers are such a completist bunch, I've never understood why EA wouldn't want to take the money that Mac users would be lining up to hand them...



That won't work on Mountain Lion (I tried it) and probably won't work on Mavericks either. Also, post-2006 non-Mac Pros (and post-2013 Mac Pros) have integrated graphics chips (not cards), which do not play nicely with TS2 at all.

I hate to be a bummer here, but I spent two weeks researching, trying everything I could find and/or think of, and swearing in six different languages at my reconditioned 2012 Mac Pro running Mountain Lion back in April/May of this year, and TS2 will not install from the original discs on Mountain Lion or higher. I don't know about the new version from the app store; presumably there are instructions for installing that available somewhere. I doubt they'd charge $30 for a known lemon. But the discs? Alas, they will no longer work correctly on a post-Lion machine.

Let me get a few things straight...



Okay... first: Running game on an integrated GPU won't "fry" it!! Yes, it's not the best thing to do, and you can't expect a game to run flawlessly with (ultra) high graphics settings on a machine with only integrated graphics but the integrated GPUs have gotten better and better in the last years and even if you play a game with really high graphics on them, the GPU won't be fried and you won't have to buy a new Mac, games just don't run well with high graphics on integrated GPUs.



Second EA originally planed to releas just 8 expansion packs for Sims 2 (University Life, Nightlife, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage, Family Fun and Glamour Accessoires), every single one found in the Sims 2 Super Collection, they made a deal with Aspyr, a company that ports Windows games to the Mac. Aspyr ported Sims 1 to the Mac and they had been hired again to port Sims 2 with all its originally planed expansion packs. So Aspyr had a contracted with EA that covered the porting of The Sims 2, University Life, Nightlife, Open for Business, Pets, Seasons, Bon Voyage, Family Fun Accessoires and Glamour Accessoires. But while developing those games, EA had a few idea for some other expansion packs for Sims 2. But EA never hired Aspyr again to port those new expansion packs to the Mac, why? Nobody really knows why...



And finally... The Sims 3 never was "translated" to the Mac!!! For TS3 EA licensed a technology that is called a "Cider Port". Cider Ports are... well... they are the worst thing every invented in terms of porting games to another platform. A Cider Port takes the EXACT SAME Windows version of a game, puts it in a so called "wrapper" and run it... You could think of it like an emulator... The Windows Version of TS3 runs inside this Cider Port, its not a native Mac App!! Just a slightly modified Windows Version of TS3 that runs inside a wrapper...

So... Why did EA chose to license Cider Ports instead of just hiring Aspyr again?

Well it's way cheaper to just license a Cider Port than hiring Aspyr and paying their developer team to port TS3 and every single expansion pack...

You said Cider is terrible, can you explain why?

Oh sure, as I said, a Cider Port is a Windows version of a game/program, this means the game isn't optimized for the Mac platform... it's doesn't get all benefits that OS X has to offer, it's not programmed to fully use the Hardware of a Mac and it often has a lot of bugs and downsides...
I bet a few of you know that if you install to many mods and CC TS3 won't launch, you just get a black screen and thats it, this is one of ciders downsides and believe me their are a LOT more...

Now.. I hope I could help to get some things straight, and personally speaking... for the Sims 4, I really hope EA has learned that Cider Ports are the wrong way to go! Lets hope Aspyr is used to translate the Sims 4 to Mac again (would explain why EA isn't giving a release date for TS4 on the Mac as of now )

Perhaps that's a bit slangy of a term -- it probably won't actually burst into flames or anything. But integrated chips are not designed for clunky, heavy old games like TS2. This article on the wiki is very good at explaining things, and the Help section is full of people whose integrated chips have worn out. Newer games with fancier graphics sometimes do better than TS2 on an integrated chip (maybe because they are programmed more efficiently? I don't know), but when your integrated chip goes, you can't replace it without replacing your motherboard. (Source) If you have a slot for a graphics card, then you can install a real graphics card and use that, but most Macs now don't have that option.



Well, using a wrapper or an emulator is like clicking the 'translate" button on Google Translate, no? It's a reasonable analogy. And it works about as well as clicking the button on Google Translate, too, unfortunately.



I hope you're right, but given EA's track record, I fear you're wrong.

EDIT: @dvds12 This thread over in the Help section sounds like it has a solution to the same problem you're having.

The Mac App Store version requires Mavericks as a starting point. Which I guess still leaves the Mountain Lion people out in the cold, but does at least make it available for those who can run Mavericks or Yosemite.

It sounds like most of the reworking of the code has gone into a rewrite of the rendering engine. So it supports Retina and the native resolution stuff, and I must say it makes a nice change not to have to go and manually edit Graphics Rules.sgr to get the game to support my screen resolution. They claim improved performance, and it certainly seemed pretty zippy when I was having a look around yesterday. But of course I haven't stuck a ton of custom content and hacks in there yet.

That is awesome news!