Video card drivers can become corrupted. Error messages like this one can be the result of a corrupt video driver. Simply reinstalling the same version of the existing video driver can fix problems like this one.

This isn't so much a Sims 2 problem as it is a DirectX problem. The game is asking DirectX to enumerate the video cards installed in your machine and DirectX is telling the game that there are no installed video cards. DirectX is failing to communicate properly with the video drivers on your computer. I did not think it was possible for a video card driver to become corrupted until it happened on one of my PCs. The computer in question became unable to run games like UT 2004 or Battlefield 1942. The PC ran great, until it had to use DirectX for something. Uninstalling and reinstalling DirectX did nothing. Uninstalling and reinstalling the video driver corrected all of the problems.

Were you using a cheat to select the job you wanted from the newspaper? It's possible that cheat is broken in AL. The action string table would appear to have a missing entry, judging from the error log you posted.

Additional research revealed that the two issues are related. You can only use "Show Item To" on sims that have been greeted by the salesperson you are controlling. This is due to the fact that the greet status is now tracked between all sims present on the community lot on an individual basis. The "Show Item To" social interaction uses the global check trees for social interactions and those have been modified to support the new community lot greeting system.

When a new customer enters the lot, they have no greet status with anyone else on the lot. This means the sim you control can not show them an item or call them over. Maybe I am a tad pushy in my sales techniques, but I often call new arrivals over to my business owners location and then show them an expensive item. With the current community lot greeting rules, this technique is quite impossible.

Things get worse when you have two controllable sims performing sales. Lets say you had a husband and wife or a business owner and manager both performing sales interactions. When a customer enters the lot, he is ungreeted by everyone present. Sales person one will have to greet him before he can show him an expensive item. Sales person one then goes off to help some idiot who can't find the object right next to him. The first customer purchases the item he was looking at and sales person two can now pounce on him. You would think that sales person two could simply use the "show item to" social on him, but no, sales person two hasn't greeted him yet. Maybe this won't effect everyone, but for me all this extra greeting is just a big PITA.

I've come up with several ways to fix this, none of which I like. It will probably be easiest to fix the "show item to" and possibly the "call over" social interactions so that they use private check trees that have been shorn of the new community lot greeting code. One advantage to this approach is that it does not have the potential to screw anything else up beyond the aforementioned social interactions.

I just found out about this post today. That email address is currently out of service until I get the pop account attached to my domain working again.

So if I am understanding this thread correctly, the arcade machines themselves are causing a general protection fault when a sim actually uses them? If that is the case, I would definitely blame the xvid codec. I am uncertain if this is an AMD related issue as all of my test machines have Intel CPUs.

On one of my older machines, I had a bad codec once (not xvid). Whenever I tried to play a video that required that codec, the entire machine would sieze up. The solution was to remove the codec completely and then reinstall it after a reboot. In my case the codec itself had become corrupted somehow.

Arcades in general are hard businesses to gain stars (and business levels) with. One thing that helps is to have the business owner engage the customers in social interactions. It takes about 5 or 6 good social interactions in a row to gain one star. As you have already figured out, having some kind of snack bar helps any entertainment venue gain stars.