More Awesome Than You!

Okay, so I installed seasons, clicked the "launch The Sims 2 Seasons" button at the end of the installation process, and everything came up beautifully.  After a while of playing with Riverblossom Hills I decided to start my new neighborhood, realized I hadn't put back my CAS template replacements, and quit the program.  When I attempted to restart the program, the compy thinks for a while, then asks me to please insert the correct disk into the drive and try again.  I took the CD out, cleaned it (pointlessly, since it's BRAND NEW and SPOTLESS), put it back in - no luck.  Deleted groups.cache and cigen - no luck.  Took it out of my DVD drive and put it in the CD-RW drive to see if the drive was borked - (luckily this time) it still didn't work.
All I can say now is...
AAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why is it suddenly not working?  Help!

Take out your CAS replacement templates and retry?

Nope.  I moved my entire Downloads folder out of the Sims 2 directory.

Has nothing to do with that. This is stupid broken copy protection. You will have to get a proper pirate version to avoid these problems.

Install Daemon Tools and get a "mini fixed image" from gamecopyworld.
Lastly, use a tool like SD4Hide to avoid blacklisting of the aforementioned program.

I use mini images even for DVD-installed games to avoid drive clutter.

So I made like liegenschonheit and walked away for a while.  This afternoon I put all my custom content back in and attempted to run seasons.

It came right up and ran beautifully.

What the fuck. 

LOL.  Copy protection is actually encouraging pirating - it'll be tempting next time to avoid this problem altogether.

My custom templates aren't working, though.  The Maxis fuglies are still showing up in CAS.  Is this something that's been broken in Seasons?

Mine are working fine, so it must be something on your end.

Like I said, stupid copy protection problems. Copy protection essentially encourages pirating because when it doesn't work, people start looking for answers, and end up learning how to actually be pirates to get around the problem. And once they know how to be pirates, it's that much harder to convince them to buy anything.

How many cd's should there be with seasons?  I only have 1 cd, but on many forums i've seen mention of a cd 2.  As far as I know my copy of seasons installed properly, but i'm a bit confused now.

Just like Pets, Seasons comes on 1 DVD-ROM.
I hear that in the US it comes in an alternate format on 2 CD-ROMs as well.

Thank you for clearing up my confusion :)

Totally true.

I had never even heard  of noCD cracks and mounting images and all that stuff, until one of my games started doing the "insert the CD" nonsense and I went looking for a fix.

A little less than a year later, I was downloading off of bittorrent... if you'd asked me before, I would have been right up there with the screaming "Piracy is BAD, BAD, BAD" crowd.

It's their own fault.

Yes, and once you start down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Until your ISP ends access to your favorite sites. Grrr.

Does anonymizer.com still exist, and, if so, can you use it to get to your fave sites? That site used to be one of my faves. It will slow down your browsing experience a great deal, but sometimes it works to get to restricted URLs. That's not what it is intended for, it is supposed to keep sites from cookying and snooping, but it was an added bene back in the day.

I guess I could give the 7-day trial a go... Thanks!

I actually ignored a handful of perfectly good (more or less) torrents and went to the store and bought the game.  Should I schedule a lobotomy in order to excise that part of my brain?  Damn now I feel guilty for getting an attack of honesty.  Gimme my pirate badge back!  Aaaaah. 

Meh, I don't ask my ISP's opinion, I run encrypted proxies anyway. Keeps their prying, spying eyes off.

I'm learning slowly but steadily :D

In the early days of downloading, I got a "Cease that piracy shit!" notice from Comcast. I rightfully ignored it and went right on downloading... just a little more cautiously.

Use private and semi-private trackers when possible, p2p guardian, and proxies. I also used to download tons by stealing my college's connection while at class, but last year they somehow managed to block that.