Snoopy's right - the game will start up in Parallels or VMware Fusion, but the flashing grass and flashing walls will drive you insane. The reason for this is that they both use a virtualised version of your graphics card, so in VMware Fusion my ATI Radeon HD 5750 becomes "VMware SVGA 3D". The game has no idea what card that is, so can't make sensible decisions about how to handle it.

Possibly with enough fiddling with Video Cards.sgr it could be improved, but Bootcamp will always perform better anyway.

My Bootcamp partition has also been set up to run under VMware Fusion, which enables me to tweak things and organise my Downloads folder from the OS X side. Bodyshop runs, though the graphics are somewhat blockier than under Bootcamp, and SimPe seems to run fine.

Yep, they're pet beds. Very handy for those of us who've never downloaded the toddler blanket. 

It'd never occurred to me to use the info box as a notepad, but it's a great idea. Much more useful than the potted biography that's already out of date by the time you finish a session playing the household.

I play 1-3 days per household, depending on how interesting they're being at the time. I've a small squared notebook which is marked up with the day numbers as displayed on the Lot Sync Timer, with one line per household, which gives me a visual check on who I need to play catch-up on without having to go into a household and check their timer first. Teens get packed off to college at 8am-ish when they have 4 days left as a teen, and return 4 days later. So, if they move to college on day 4 (Friday), they'll move home or to a new place at 8am on day 8 (Tuesday). If I think of it I'll set an event on their family home to remind them/me that their long lost offspring is going to return on that day.

If the returning new adult moves into their own place, the timer then gets used to set the day of week to the correct one to match the rest of the neighbourhood and the Simwardrobe Weather Controller gets used to adjust the season for what it should be on that date.

Try running the scans again, but put a space between "hkcu" and the "-s". The "-s" is the instruction that tells regdelnull to do the scan, and "hkcu" (or "hku") is the part of the registry that it's actually scanning. Without the space, it's looking for something that doesn't exist.

It's probably because of the lousy maid service at the hotels. They never get around to doing the laundry either.

It seems such a waste of a Seasons opportunity. And you could have extended the logic in BV and have sat Sims out under beach umbrellas in summer to tan/burn at half-speed.

Mind you, it'd probably have ended up broken to the point where the umbrella acted as a lightning rod and you'd have ended up with a charred Sim rather than a dry one...

My laptop's DVD burner started playing up round about Christmas last year, at which point it was about 8 months old and hadn't been heavily used. I wrote it off to crappy hardware at the time, but the problems all started at around the time I installed Neverwinter Nights 2. So I've now checked, and yes, there are SecuROM services and registry entries, and the datestamps match up to when I patched NWN2. And I use Nero to burn DVDs, which would also be a factor. So it's taken 9-10 months for me to start wondering whether there could be a connection between me installing a game and the DVD drive playing up.

To be fair, it could still just be crappy device drivers and nothing to do with NWN2's SecuROM. But when I can find time I'll do a complete rebuild of the machine and not put any games back on it. In the meantime I'm trying to keep my desktop machine clean, so that I can at least burn DVDs somewhere.

I do wonder how extensive a range of hardware it's been tested with. I have a SATA DVD burner in my desktop machine, and that's definitely caused me compatibility issues with a couple of pieces of software before they got patched, because they were expecting an IDE drive. It's a Lightscribe drive too; heaven only knows if that confuses the issue.


There have also been other choices for latecomers to the game to buy, other than Deluxe. In the UK we've certainly had a Base Game + Pets bundle, and a "Festive Edition" which bundled the base game and the holiday stuff pack, and I still see them on the shelves from time to time. Deluxe was released 2 months later over here, so only came out 2 months before Bon Voyage. So those regional differences whittle down the numbers who might have got problems from it still further, even before you factor in combining it with later EPs and SPs.

Also, for some people, Bon Voyage displays quite noticeable lag problems just trying to load the game, with stuttering audio/video at the neighbourhood chooser and during the initial neighbourhood load. That's an immediate giveaway clue that there's something slightly wrong; if the earlier games with SecuROM on loaded smoothly their owners would have had no real reason to look deeply into what the game was doing on their PC.

10 tour guides and 5 charlatans here. The patch doesn't come anywhere near my game until I've had a crack at them with Deleted 2 first.

Also, it's been kind of restful watching the game load up without stuttering lag from the point I hit the neighbourhood chooser screen until after the neighbourhood finishes loading, and I don't miss my DVD player doing aircraft engine impersonations either. The no-cd crack seems much less intent on wearing out my PC's moving parts.

The next step is to see if the file actually exists, I guess.

Open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Windows\system32 (or, depending on your version of Windows, it might be C:\WINNT\system32). Look for a file called "CmdLineExt.dll" in that folder. If it doesn't exist, you don't have a problem with it, and can move on to the next step. If it does, check spelling, open a fresh command window, and try "regsvr32 /u cmdlineext.dll" (without the quotes) one more time. You can copy the command from this thread and then do right click -> paste in the command window if you want to be absolutely certain that the command is correct.

Might you perhaps have deleted the file before you tried to unregister it? That would give you a "The specified module could not be found" message.

You can delete the whole SecuROM folder from the registry. That'll take out the Keys, UserData and WL folders and everything underneath them.

That's right. If you'd run both scans and said no to them it would have found a registry key in both places, but they seem to be different views of the same key so when you delete from hkcu the kcu key vanishes as well.

The other SecuROM keys in the registry don't have null characters in them to make them undeletable, so regdelnull won't report them. So yes, you have to delete those manually. Delete the entire SecuROM folder in the registry, and all the subkeys below it will go too.

When you say that you ignored the step because that service (uaservice7.exe) didn't exist, did you still do the rest of the step and unregister cmdlineext.dll?

As I understand it, you only get the uaservice7.exe service installed if you're running Bon Voyage under a limited (non-Adminstrator) account. SecuROM needs that service to give it administrator-like privilege in an account that shouldn't have that, which to me is one of the more worrying low-level activities it gets up to on your computer.

cmdlineext.dll seems to get installed no matter what kind of account you're running the game under, so you need to look for it even if you don't find uaservice7.exe. If it's there in C:\Windows\system32, run "regsvr32 /u cmdlineext.dll" to unregister it, reboot, and then delete the file.

Thanks for starting this thread, Zazazu. It's nice to be able to find the removal information easily. 

By way of thanks I offer up an easier way of deleting the registry keys via regdelnull that doesn't involve typing in that mindbogglingly long computer specific key.

Replace this step from the first post:


with this:

Download regdelnull.exe and place it in C:\
Go to "Run" and type in "cmd", then type the following:

cd C:\
regdelnull hkcu -s
regdelnull hku -s
 
The two regdelnull calls above will scan the whole of HKEY_CURRENT_USER (abbreviated to HKCU) and HKEY_USERS (abbreviated to HKU). It's possible you may find other null registry keys during the scans, since you're not targeting *just* the SecuROM keys doing it this way. regdelnull will prompt you with the full pathname of every key it finds though, which will contain the name "SecuROM" if it's one of the ones you're after, so you can check names and only respond "y" to delete those two.

* goes back to lurking again *


Edit to add: If you're the only user on the machine and log in as administrator, you may find that there's not a key to delete under HKEY_USERS once you've done the delete from HKEY_CURRENT_USERS. The HKEY_CURRENT_USERS subkeys are all built from information in HKEY_USERS at the time you boot the PC, so deleting the key there seems to clobber the other one as well. It's probably as well to run the scan for both just to make sure all traces are gone though.